(energetic funk music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm coming to you remote from our Boston-area studio in Marlborough, Massachusetts, and really happy to welcome to the program, actually, from down the road from where I'm sitting, but testing our coast-to-coast live-to-air remote capabilities, of course, everybody is working from home or things like that, Rob Strechay, CUBE alumni and friend of the program. Rob, it's great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on. Really glad to help you guys out and get on here and talk about what's goin' on, 'cause this remote thing is definitely going to be the wave for the next month or two, at least. >> Yeah, so, Rob, you spend a lot of your time talking to companies about strategic planning and the first thing for you is, in the industry, sometimes we talk about these black swan events, the things that, you know, we had our plans in place, a lot of companies either had their 2020 sales kickoffs or were getting ready for them, and all of a sudden, basically, everything that you were planning for, let's stop and re-evaluate, because coronavirus stuff is hitting, economic conditions globally are being impacted. What's the first thing that you tell people when you're advising when something completely unexpected and far-reaching, that we might not have full information on, hits? >> Yeah, I think there is, it's a great way to target and say, "Okay, where can I trim the fat, "but at the same time, where do I not "want to over-rotate or panic?" And I think that's a big piece of it, is that you don't want to go and panic too much and say, "Hey, we have to throw everything out." I think there's an opportunity, and there's definitely opportunities, but if you're looking at the different verticals that are being hit by this, if you look at things like healthcare, we have HIMSS that's supposed to be going on this week that was canceled, and all of the medical professionals and IT professionals at those hospitals are pretty much on lockdown. So if you're selling into that vertical, maybe then it is time to panic a little bit, or find another vertical, or understand how you go cross-vertical, in a way. So you have to evaluate what's going on, but don't panic, don't over-react to these types of events. >> So, Rob, you've worked with a lot of companies that provide disaster recovery. In the IT space, it's, "How do I deal with a failure?" One of the things that I know a lot of companies look at is when things go wrong, when there is some natural disaster or, like what we're having today, is, "Do I jump in and say, 'Hey, we can offer things'?" You see a lot of the companies that are providing remote services, take your Google, Microsoft, Zooms, are, "Hey, here's a free tier that you're able to use," but how much do you jump on this as a marketer, or how much do you just say, "Hey, we're here for you, "if there's anything we can do to help there," but you don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing or trying to profit off of some widespread disasters? >> Yeah, I think that's exactly it. The ambulance chasing part, you have to use a little common sense when you're going into these, and I think that goes a long way. You don't want to be seen as ambulance chasing, and, for instance, some of the small- to medium-size companies I've been watching in the tech and talking to some of their teams, they're putting out information, saying, "Hey, we're still up." If they're shipping hardware, "Hey, we're "still within our lead times. "We've built out enough capacity prior to this "and we'll be able to ship within 14 days of an order." So, reassuring their customers that they can get the kit out to them. At the same time, they're saying, "Hey, here is "what we're seeing from our customers, "that, if you're having trouble even once we do "ship it, you don't have somebody on site "to take it in, so we can offer services "to help you with that. So, helping them do staff augmentation or do things in a different manner, I see that as not the ambulance chasing aspect of it. I think if you're marketing into it, it's a little tough when you say, "Hey, well, "I'm the best remote desktop thing going, "and everybody can work from home," and trying to say, "And by the way, you have to buy into this "particular tier to get your entire company going." I think, again, you can look at, how do you share, maybe, the pain or share a loss leader going in, and look to build that. If you have confidence in your product, you'll get them on board, and they'll continue to do this, and they'll continue to move forward with it, because, like you said, I don't think anybody was necessarily prepared for a quarantine of an entire country, like Italy, or something of that nature. >> Yeah, the remote work is definitely a very hot topic. That doesn't necessarily mean that today is the day to start the 5,000-person virtual desktop project. >> Exactly. >> Because we know how long these things have a lead time. Rob, I want to ask you, actually, when you talk to customers, you've spent a lot of time in your career talking to customers, one of the buzzwords we've had in the industry is digital transformation. One of the big outcomes of digital transformation is to be able to react and move fast and be more agile. So I just wanted to get your take on what you're hearing from customers, where, of course, it's a spectrum, but what they're doing, and is this something that they should they should put on hold, is it something is going to help them prepare for things that they weren't necessarily thinking about? >> I think it's the latter, right? I think you're really, I would push in on digital transformation at this point in time, because you're not going to know what's going to break until you get into these situations, and I would say that we've seen a couple in the financial industry as we've gone through the volatility in the markets where they've pushed in on digital transformation, or there are some startups that have really pushed in on doing things in a new way from the traditional financial services companies, and they've found out, hey, stuff is breaking, and they're going to pay some fines to the SEC. And some of the traditional ones that have their digital transformation projects, they've bumped into this same exact thing, where they were having outages. So it's not just the new startups, it's some of the older, more established players that are finding out that, hey, you don't know until you get into that war, you don't know until you engage that enemy, per se, as that black swan event, what's going to break. So push in, I would almost double down on it, and say, "Listen, this is going to be "the way that helps us smooth these out. "As we can distribute things out, "we don't have, necessarily, one data center "where everybody has to go to, "and now that entire county is locked down, "or there's the National Guard surrounding it "and you can't get to it." >> Yeah, Rob, I'm wondering if you have any commentary on just the general dispersion of the workforce. You've worked for a variety of sizes of company, you've been a remote worker, you've worked for companies where you're far separated from the headquarters. Any kind of tips or recommendations from your background that you'd have for people and today? >> Yeah, I think, again, for the people who haven't done it before, it is an adjustment. You actually find that you work more hours being at home than you would in a natural, an office. I think that also, how do you keep your sanity when you're really distant from people, and how do you keep that connection and that culture? I definitely think that these solutions, like Teams and Slack and what have you, and Zoom and Webex, have come a long way to help connect people, and I think it's really leveraging those tools around you to have that connection. And I think that we've seen some of the announcements of people about putting out guidelines of, "Hey, here's how we have a remote workforce." And I've seen, actually, more, and it's been a trend out on the West Coast for a little while, where their engineering teams, the dev teams, are very diverse and very disparate because you can't find everybody in the Valley anymore. So how, maybe some of the people are in Washington, maybe they're in Oregon, and California, you have some on the East Coast, or even over in the Ukraine, for instance. Trying to create events to bring everybody together, doing more outreach as an executive to the entire company, becomes critical because sharing of that information is what people want to understand. They want to feel connected back into what's going on at what they perceive as corporate. >> Yeah, so some great commentary there, Rob. Yeah, absolutely, we've seen plenty of the software companies out there that have not only tooling, but best practices on how to do this, as well as, through social media, I've seen a lot of blog posts, things on Twitter and the like, yeah, and some things that you don't think about as much. I'm not regularly a remote worker, but, right, make sure you take time to eat, make sure you've blocked out the hours that you're going to have meals with family. And something I always noticed is, "Oh my gosh, I might spend an entire day "like this on conference calls (Rob laughs) "or sitting and working," as opposed to, if you're in the office, you get up, you walk around, you talk to some people, and it's like, you need to make sure you stretch (laughs) a little bit-- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because otherwise, you can end up sitting for eight hours, and that's really not good. >> Rob: (laughs) Yeah, definitely need those mental breaks. >> Yeah, all right, Rob, I want to give you the final word. What's, let's kind of put beyond some of the things that are right in front of us right now, give you kind of an open technology space. What's interesting you out in the market here in the early parts of 2020? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of very interesting things going on with AI, and I think people are finally starting to get past the hype of "AI this, AI that" and trying to look at what the use cases are behind AI, and how that's really going to help reinvent some of the technology that we have used. I kind of always say that everything old is new again. But I think there's going to be some great new tech coming out that will help enable these types of digital transformations, and I see a lot of new companies approaching AI and not just saying, "Hey, I'm an AI company," but, "Here's the use case that I'm really fulfilling." And I think that's showing some of the maturity, I think that's going to help as this artificial intelligence or machine learning really starts to push in and help people become more operationally efficient, so maybe then we can start to realize some more of cloud, and more of this, "Hey, I had this data center, "now I am moving everything to the cloud," versus, "Well, I'm going to move it, "but I'm going to lift and shift, "and I still have the operational legacy." >> Yeah, absolutely. If I can do a little compare and contrast, back in the big-data world, everybody used to always complain that we had the best minds in our business working on how we could optimize people clicking on an ad, (Rob laughs) and when I look at AI, there's a lot of tech for good out there, there's amazing outcomes, there's things that it can really be transformational. All right, Rob, I know that you've been doing a little bit more writing, you're posting on LinkedIn some of your strategy. If people want to learn more and keep an eye on what you're doing, what would you recommend? >> Yeah, I would say go onto my Twitter feed, @RealStrech, and-or go to my LinkedIn. Feel free to connect with me there. It's Rob Strechay, you can find me there pretty easily. There's not many Strechays in the world. So feel free to connect with me and view my articles there, and really, this has been a lot of fun. >> All right, well, always good to get two boys from Parsippany, New Jersey, to get together, talk about technology, and share it with the community. Rob, great to catch up with you. >> Thanks, Stu, take care. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, everybody, and thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (energetic funk music)