(gentle music) >> Hello and welcome today's session theCUBE presentation of AWS Startup Showcase powered by theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, for your host of theCUBE. This is a session on breaking through with DevOps data analytics tools, cloud management tools with MontyCloud and cloud management migration, I'm your host. Thanks for joining me, I've got two great guests. Venkat Krishnamachari who's the co-founder and CEO of MontyCloud and Shruthi Sreenivasa Murthy, solution architect research computing group St. Louis University. Thanks for coming on to talk about transforming IT, day one day two operations. Venkat, great to see you. >> Great to see you again, John. So in this session, I really want to get into this cloud powerhouse theme you guys were talking about before on our previous Cube Conversations and what it means for customers, because there is a real market shift happening here. And I want to get your thoughts on what solution to the problem is basically, that you guys are targeting. >> Yeah, John, cloud migration is happening rapidly. Not an option. It is the current and the immediate future of many IT departments and any type of computing workloads. And applications and services these days are better served by cloud adoption. This rapid acceleration is where we are seeing a lot of challenges and we've been helping customers with our platform so they can go focus on their business. So happy to talk more about this. >> Yeah and Shruthi if you can just explain your relationship with these guys, because you're a cloud architect, you can try to put this together. MontyCloud is your customer, talk about your solution. >> Yeah I work at the St. Louis University as the solutions architect for the office of Vice President of Research. We can address St. Louis University as SLU, just to keep it easy. SLU is a 200-year-old university with more focus on research. And our goal at the Research Computing Group is to help researchers by providing the right infrastructure and computing capabilities that help them to advance their research. So here in SLU research portfolio, it's quite diverse, right? So we do research on vaccines, economics, geospatial intelligence, and many other really interesting areas, and you know, it involves really large data sets. So one of the research computing groups' ambitious plan is to move as many high-end computation applications from on-prem to the AWS. And I lead all the cloud initiatives for the St. Louis university. >> Yeah Venkat and I, we've been talking, many times on theCUBE, previous interviews about, you know, the rapid agility that's happening with serverless and functions, and, you know, microservices start to see massive acceleration of how fast cloud apps are being built. It's put a lot of pressure on companies to hang on and manage all this. And whether you're a security group was trying to lock down something, or it's just, it's so fast, the cloud development scene is really fun and you're implementing it at a large scale. What's it like these days from a development standpoint? You've got all this greatness in the cloud. What's the DevOps mindset right now? >> SLU is slowly evolving itself as the AWS Center of Excellence here in St. Louis. And most of the workflows that we are trying to implement on AWS and DevOps and, you know, CICD Pipelines. And basically we want it ready and updated for the researchers where they can use it and not have to wait on any of the resources. So it has a lot of importance. >> Research as code, it's like the internet, infrastructure as code is DevOps' ethos. Venkat, let's get into where this all leads to because you're seeing a culture shift in companies as they start to realize if they don't move fast, and the blockers that get in the way of the innovation, you really can't get your arms around this growth as an opportunity to operationalize all the new technology, could you talk about the transformation goals that are going on with your customer base. What's going on in the market? Can you explain and unpack the high level market around what you guys are doing? >> Sure thing, John. Let's bring up the slide one. So they have some content that Act-On tabs. John, every legal application, commercial application, even internal IT departments, they're all transforming fast. Speed has never been more important in the era we are today. For example, COVID research, you know, analyzing massive data sets to come up with some recommendations. They don't demand a lot from the IT departments so that researchers and developers can move fast. And I need departments that are not only moving current workloads to the cloud they're also ensuring the cloud is being consumed the right way. So researchers can focus on what they do best, what we win, learning and working closely with customers and gathering is that there are three steps or three major, you know, milestone that we like to achieve. I would start the outcome, right? That the important milestone IT departments are trying to get to is transforming such that they're directly tied to the key business objectives. Everything they do has to be connected to the business objective, which means the time and you know, budget and everything's aligned towards what they want to deliver. IT departments we talk with have one common goal. They want to be experts in cloud operations. They want to deliver cloud operations excellence so that researchers and developers can move fast. But they're almost always under the, you know, they're time poor, right? And there is budget gaps and that is talent and tooling gap. A lot of that is what's causing the, you know, challenges on their path to journey. And we have taken a methodical and deliberate position in helping them get there. >> Shruthi hows your reaction to that? Because, I mean, you want it faster, cheaper, better than before. You don't want to have all the operational management hassles. You mentioned that you guys want to do this turnkey. Is that the use case that you're going after? Just research kind of being researchers having the access at their fingertips, all these resources? What's the mindset there, what's your expectation? >> Well, one of the main expectations is to be able to deliver it to the researchers as demand and need and, you know, moving from a traditional on-prem HBC to cloud would definitely help because, you know, we are able to give the right resources to the researchers and able to deliver projects in a timely manner, and, you know, with some additional help from MontyCloud data platform, we are able to do it even better. >> Yeah I like the onboarding thing and to get an easy and you get value quickly, that's the cloud business model. Let's unpack the platform, let's go into the hood. Venkat let's, if you can take us through the, some of the moving parts under the platform, then as you guys have it's up at the high level, the market's obvious for everyone out there watching Cloud ops, speed, stablism. But let's go look at the platform. Let's unpack that, do you mind pick up on slide two and let's go look at the what's going on in the platform. >> Sure. Let's talk about what comes out of the platform, right? They are directly tied to what the customers would like to have, right? Customers would like to fast track their day one activities. Solution architects, such as Shruthi, their role is to try and help get out of the way of the researchers, but we ubiquitous around delegating cloud solutions, right? Our platform acts like a seasoned cloud architect. It's as if you've instantly turned on a cloud solution architect that should, they can bring online and say, Hey, I want help here to go faster. Our lab then has capabilities that help customers provision a set of governance contracts, drive consumption in the right way. One of the key things about driving consumption the right way is to ensure that we prevent a security cost or compliance issues from happening in the first place, which means you're shifting a lot of the operational burden to left and make sure that when provisioning happens, you have a guard rails in place, we help with that, the platform solves a problem without writing code. And an important takeaway here, John is that a was built for architects and administrators who want to move fast without having to write a ton of code. And it is also a platform that they can bring online, autonomous bots that can solve problems. For example, when it comes to post provisioning, everybody is in the business of ensuring security because it's a shared model. Everybody has to keep an eye on compliance, that is also a shared responsibility, so is cost optimization. So we thought wouldn't it be awesome to have architects such as Shruthi turn on a compliance bot on the platform that gives them the peace of mind that somebody else and an autonomous bot is watching our 24 by 7 and make sure that these day two operations don't throw curve balls at them, right? That's important for agility. So platform solves that problem with an automation approach. Going forward on an ongoing basis, right, the operation burden is what gets IT departments. We've seen that happen repeatedly. Like IT department, you know, you know this, John, maybe you have some thoughts on this. You know, you know, if you have some comments on how IT can face this, then maybe that's better to hear from you. >> No, well first I want to unpack that platform because I think one of the advantages I see here and that people are talking about in the industry is not only is the technology's collision colliding between the security postures and rapid cloud development, because DevOps and cloud, folks, are moving super fast. They want things done at the point of coding and CICB pipeline, as well as any kind of changes, they want it fast, not weeks. They don't want to have someone blocking it like a security team, so automation with the compliance is beautiful because now the security teams can provide policies. Those policies can then go right into your platform. And then everyone's got the rules of the road and then anything that comes up gets managed through the policy. So I think this is a big trend that nobody's talking about because this allows the cloud to go faster. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? >> No, precisely right. I'll let Shurthi jump on that, yeah. >> Yeah, you know, I just wanted to bring up one of the case studies that we read on cloud and use their compliance bot. So REDCap, the Research Electronic Data Capture also known as REDCap is a web application. It's a HIPAA web application. And while the flagship projects for the research group at SLU. REDCap was running on traditional on-prem infrastructure, so maintaining the servers and updating the application to its latest version was definitely a challenge. And also granting access to the researchers had long lead times because of the rules and security protocols in place. So we wanted to be able to build a secure and reliable enrollment on the cloud where we could just provision on demand and in turn ease the job of updating the application to its latest version without disturbing the production environment. Because this is a really important application, most of the doctors and researchers at St. Louis University and the School of Medicine and St. Louis University Hospital users. So given this challenge, we wanted to bring in MontyCloud's cloud ops and, you know, security expertise to simplify the provisioning. And that's when we implemented this compliance bot. Once it is implemented, it's pretty easy to understand, you know, what is compliant, what is noncompliant with the HIPAA standards and where it needs an remediation efforts and what we need to do. And again, that can also be automated. It's nice and simple, and you don't need a lot of cloud expertise to go through the compliance bot and come up with your remediation plan. >> What's the change in the outcome in terms of the speed turnaround time, the before and after? So before you're dealing with obviously provisioning stuff and lead time, but just a compliance closed loop, just to ask a question, do we have, you know, just, I mean, there's a lot of manual and also some, maybe some workflows in there, but not as not as cool as an instant bot that solve yes or no decision. And after MontyCloud, what are some of the times, can you share any data there just doing an order of magnitude. >> Yeah, definitely. So the provisioning was never simpler, I mean, we are able to provision with just one or two clicks, and then we have a better governance guardrail, like Venkat says, and I think, you know, to give you a specific data, it, the compliance bot does about more than 160 checks and it's all automated, so when it comes to security, definitely we have been able to save a lot of effort on that. And I can tell you that our researchers are able to be 40% more productive with the infrastructure. And our research computing group is able to kind of save the time and, you know, the security measures and the remediation efforts, because we get customized alerts and notifications and you just need to go in and, you know. >> So people are happier, right? People are getting along at the office or virtually, you know, no one is yelling at each other on Slack, hey, where's? Cause that's really the harmony here then, okay. This is like a, I'm joking aside. This is a real cultural issue between speed of innovation and the, what could be viewed as a block, or just the time that say security teams or other teams might want to get back to you, make sure things are compliant. So that could slow things down, that tension is real and there's some disconnects within companies. >> Yeah John, that's spot on, and that means we have to do a better job, not only solving the traditional problems and make them simple, but for the modern work culture of integrations. You know, it's not uncommon like you cut out for researchers and architects to talk in a Slack channel often. You say, Hey, I need this resource, or I want to reconfigure this. How do we make that collaboration better? How do you make the platform intelligent so that the platform can take off some of the burden off of people so that the platform can monitor, react, notify in a Slack channel, or if you should, the administrator say, Hey, next time, this happens automatically go create a ticket for me. If it happens next time in this environment automatically go run a playbook, that remediates it. That gives a lot of time back that puts a peace of mind and the process that an operating model that you have inherited and you're trying to deliver excellence and has more help, particularly because it is very dynamic footprint. >> Yeah, I think this whole guard rail thing is a really big deal, I think it's like a feature, but it's a super important outcome because if you can have policies that map into these bots that can check rules really fast, then developers will have the freedom to drive as fast as they want, and literally go hard and then shift left and do the coding and do all their stuff on the hygiene side from the day, one on security is really a big deal. Can we go back to this slide again for the other project? There's another project on that slide. You talked about RED, was it REDCap, was that one? >> Yeah. Yeah, so REDCap, what's the other project. >> So SCAER, the Sinfield Center for Applied Economic Research at SLU is also known as SCAER. They're pretty data intensive, and they're into some really sophisticated research. The Center gets daily dumps of sensitive geo data sensitive de-identified geo data from various sources, and it's a terabyte so every day, becomes petabytes. So you know, we don't get the data in workable formats for the researchers to analyze. So the first process is to convert this data into a workable format and keep an analysis ready and doing this at a large scale has many challenges. So we had to make this data available to a group of users too, and some external collaborators with ads, you know, more challenges again, because we also have to do this without compromising on the security. So to handle these large size data, we had to deploy compute heavy instances, such as, you know, R5, 12xLarge, multiple 12xLarge instances, and optimizing the cost and the resources deployed on the cloud again was a huge challenge. So that's when we had to take MontyCloud help in automating the whole process of ingesting the data into the infrastructure and then converting them into a workable format. And this was all automated. And after automating most of the efforts, we were able to bring down the data processing time from two weeks or more to three days, which really helped the researchers. So MontyCloud's data platform also helped us with automating the risk, you know, the resource optimization process and that in turn helped bring the costs down, so it's been pretty helpful then. >> That's impressive weeks to days, I mean, this is the theme Venkat speed, speed, speed, hybrid, hybrid. A lot of stuff happening. I mean, this is the new normal, this is going to make companies more productive if they can get the apps built faster. What do you see as the CEO and founder of the company you're out there, you know, you're forging new ground with this great product. What do you see as the blockers from customers? Is it cultural, is it lack of awareness? Why aren't people jumping all over this? >> Only people aren't, right. They go at it in so many different ways that, you know, ultimately be the one person IT team or massively well-funded IT team. Everybody wants to Excel at what they're delivering in cloud operations, the path to that as what, the challenging part, right? What are you seeing as customers are trying to build their own operating model and they're writing custom code, then that's a lot of need for provisioning, governance, security, compliance, and monitoring. So they start integrating point tools, then suddenly IT department is now having a, what they call a tax, right? They have to maintain the technical debt while cloud service moving fast. It's not uncommon for one of the developers or one of the projects to suddenly consume a brand new resource. And as you know, AWS throws up a lot more services every month, right? So suddenly you're not keeping up with that service. So what we've been able to look at this from a point of view of how do we get customers to focus on what they want to do and automate things that we can help them with? >> Let me, let me rephrase the question if you don't mind. Cause I I didn't want to give the impression that you guys aren't, you guys have a great solution, but I think when I see enterprises, you know, they're transforming, right? So it's not so much the cloud innovators, like you guys, it's really that it's like the mainstream enterprise, so I have to ask you from a customer standpoint, what's some of the cultural things are technical reasons why they're not going faster? Cause everyone's, maybe it's the pandemic's forcing projects to be double down on, or some are going to be cut, this common theme of making things available faster, cheaper, stronger, more secure is what cloud does. What are some of the enterprise challenges that they have? >> Yeah, you know, it might be money for right, there's some cultural challenges like Andy Jassy or sometimes it's leadership, right? You want top down leadership that takes a deterministic step towards transformation, then adequately funding the team with the right skills and the tools, a lot of that plays into it. And there's inertia typically in an existing process. And when you go to cloud, you can do 10X better, people see that it doesn't always percolate down to how you get there. So those challenges are compounded and digital transformation leaders have to, you know, make that deliberate back there, be more KPI-driven. One of the things we are seeing in companies that do well is that the leadership decides that here are our top business objectives and KPIs. Now if we want the software and the services and the cloud division to support those objectives when they take that approach, transformation happens. But that is a lot more easier said than done. >> Well you're making it really easy with your solution. And we've done multiple interviews. I've got to say you're really onto something really with this provisioning and the compliance bots. That's really strong, that the only goes stronger from there, with the trends with security being built in. Shruthi, got to ask you since you're the customer, what's it like working with MontyCloud? It sounds so awesome, you're customer, you're using it. What's your review, what's your- What's your, what's your take on them? >> Yeah they are doing a pretty good job in helping us automate most of our workflows. And when it comes to keeping a tab on the resources, the utilization of the resources, so we can keep a tab on the cost in turn, you know, their compliance bots, their cost optimization tab. It's pretty helpful. >> Yeah well you're knocking projects down from three weeks to days, looking good, I mean, looking real strong. Venkat this is the track record you want to see with successful projects. Take a minute to explain what else is going on with MontyCloud. Other use cases that you see that are really primed for MontyCloud's platform. >> Yeah, John, quick minute there. Autonomous cloud operations is the goal. It's never done, right? It there's always some work that you hands-on do. But if you set a goal such that customers need to have a solution that automates most of the routine operations, then they can focus on the business. So we are going to relentlessly focused on the fact that autonomous operations will have the digital transformation happen faster, and we can create a lot more value for customers if they deliver to their KPIs and objectives. So our investments in the platform are going more towards that. Today we already have a fully automated compliance bot, a security bot, a cost optimization recommendation engine, a provisioning and governance engine, where we're going is we are enhancing all of this and providing customers lot more fluidity in how they can use our platform Click to perform your routine operations, Click to set up rules based automatic escalation or remediation. Cut down the number of hops a particular process will take and foster collaboration. All of this is what our platform is going and enhancing more and more. We intend to learn more from our customers and deliver better for them as we move forward. >> That's a good business model, make things easier, reduce the steps it takes to do something, and save money. And you're doing all those things with the cloud and awesome stuff. It's really great to hear your success stories and the work you're doing over there. Great to see resources getting and doing their job faster. And it's good and tons of data. You've got petabytes of that's coming in. It's it's pretty impressive, thanks for sharing your story. >> Sounds good, and you know, one quick call out is customers can go to MontyCloud.com today. Within 10 minutes, they can get an account. They get a very actionable and valuable recommendations on where they can save costs, what is the security compliance issues they can fix. There's a ton of out-of-the-box reports. One click to find out whether you are having some data that is not encrypted, or if any of your servers are open to the world. A lot of value that customers can get in under 10 minutes. And we believe in that model, give the value to customers. They know what to do with that, right? So customers can go sign up for a free trial at MontyCloud.com today and get the value. >> Congratulations on your success and great innovation. A startup showcase here with theCUBE coverage of AWS Startup Showcase breakthrough in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management with MontyCloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.