(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, with coverage of SUSECON Digital. Brought to you by SUSE. >> Stu: Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of SUSECON Digital '20. Apeda Welcome to the program Vincente Moranta, who is the Vice President of Offer Management of Enterprise Linux Workloads on Power. Vincente, pleasure to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Vincente: Hey Stu and thank you for having me. >> All right, so we know that SUSE lives on a lot of platforms. We're going to talk a bit about applications specifically, primarily SAP. Give us a little bit, Vincente, about what you're working on, and the relevance to the partnership with SUSE. >> Sure, absolutely. So, the last five years I've been responsible for offering management at IBM. Focused on solutions that live on IBM powered systems. In particular, we started with SAP HANA, and obviously SAP and SUSE, with their fantastic relationship, was a big part of that and continues to be as we have grown the platform for the last five years. >> Excellent. So, SAP of course, critical workload, we've been seeing SAP go through those transformation. So, help us understand what work needs to be done to integrate these things? Make sure that companies can run their business. >> Yeah, I think primarily as clients are making their transition from a traditional type of an ERP, CRM, and even BW type workloads, they're looking for a way to make those transitions. Really get in to the whole digital transformation and all of the spaces of being able to leverage technology in a way that creates value to the client, in almost real time. But they want to do it with technology partners that are going to enable the client to do it with minimal risk, with high flexibility and with partners who are there for them to, in some cases, do things that are not necessarily all too forwarded or ready to go yet. But really giving the customer the ability to adapt to things. And when we started with SAP HANA, as I mentioned, the customers in the market who were doing HANA on X86 platforms were limited to certain set of capabilities, certain set of support statements, and things like that. And a big part of that was bare metal implementations which still to this day remain the most popular way to deploy HANA in an X86 environment. But when we got together with SUSE and with SAP and we started the partnership around HANA, the thing that became very clear was that customers needed flexibility. They needed to be able to adapt to changing environments, very interesting challenges that they were trying to tackle with these HANA projects. But the capabilities of the servers that they were using, were not allowing them to have that flexibility. And then, even if SUSE was trying to do certain things and give some flexibility to those clients, if the infrastructure cannot handle it, or vice verse, it really just is a one-party trick and it doesn't work. So the focus with SUSE, almost from the beginning, has been on tool innovation. And we've been able to accomplish really amazing things together with them and SAP. Things that could not have been possible without that very strong collaboration. And one of them that is very recent, is shared processor pool. Right? In a world where HANA is deployed bare-metal systems, IBM Power is always doing virtualization, and together with SUSE, we were able to come up with a solution. And with SAP, obviously. That allowed customers to share source in a virtual way across many HANA instances. So completely revolutionizing the DCO and the ROI for clients working with HANA. Without trading out any of the resiliency, any of the performance, and everything else. So, that's the balance that a lot of these customers are looking for is flexibility, and better returns, especially now more than ever. Without trading out all of the things that they need for an S/4 HANA project or an ERP or a BW project. >> You talked about the flexibility and the returns that customers get on this. I wonder if you step back for a second, where is this hitting on a CIO's priority list? What has changed in today's Cloud era? Couple weeks ago, IBM Think was going on, heard a lot about customers, how they're going through their journey in the cloud. We know there's a lot of options there so. SAP solutions specifically, there's a lot of ways that we can do this. So how does a CIO figure out what the best solution for their skill-set and the technology partner that they work with. >> Yeah, I think at a high-level where the CIO's are basing nowadays, is kind of, it's a good time to be a CIO, I think, because you get a chance to have a broad range of deployment options. Without having to trade out from the features. I'm sure some CIO's will disagree and will say there's plenty of other challenges that are making their lives complicated. But if we just focus on the fact that you can deploy HANA - you can deploy it in the cloud, you can deploy it in hybrid, you can deploy it on premises. And the largest then, and especially with our capabilities, and together with SUSE, the CIO doesn't have to make a choice on trade out of things that they have to lose if they make one of the other. I think that is what helps them to feel comfortable to go in to SAP and being able to adapt. If a project becomes too large or the data transfer requirements become too complicated or too expensive, it's easy enough to bring it back and to maybe leave dev test in a cloud and move the rest of the production environment to on premise. Through a number of partnerships that we have done over the last few years, there's a number of very large MSP's and CSP's including SAP HANA Enterprise Crowd - HEC - and very soon IBM cloud as well. Who can provide all of these capabilities that SUSE and Empower allow for a HANA deployment to be done in a Cloud. So from our perspective, even though I'm a hardware guy, and some people may think I only care about on premises business, the reality is when a customer says, or a CIO as you were asking. When a CIO is trying to make a decision we don't want that CIO to be thinking they have to make a decision between IBM supporting them only if it's on premises or only if it's on Cloud. We can do both. And they don't have to do, it's not a hard trade off to decide. You can start with one, you can go to the other one. We can have capacity for them like we're doing with SAP HEC today, SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud. They're using Power9 technology. The customers benefit in regardless of which deployment option they choose. Both with SUSE underneath it. I think we're trying to make it simpler for them to make those choices without infrastructure becoming the sticky point. >> Yeah, and you talked about the support that users can get, of course, from IBM. At SUSECON, a lot of the discussion about the community there. >> Absolutely. >> So, what can you tell us about, you've got thousands of customers that are running SAP HANA on Power, how do you help them rally together and be part of (muted). >> Yeah, so, you and I have known each other for a while and I think when we started working together at a prior company it was around communities practice. And the organizational network and social network. A big part of what we have done is just going to that same approach. Of just connecting people with people. Right? Connecting people from SUSE with people from IBM, with clients and trying to foster valuable interaction between those clients. Whether it's TechU, IBM TechU Conferences, SAP TechEd, SUSECON, you name it. We're always kind of looking for ways to bring people together. And I'll put in a plug for a client entity, a client council called the SAP Power Customer Council, which is a group of clients that decided on their own to get together and bring other customers who are doing SAP deployments on AIX, on Linux, obviously with SUSE and HANA, and come together once a year. We also have almost monthly interlock and workshops with them. But that is one way where the SUSE folks, IBM Power, SAP Development, all come together with a whole bunch of clients and they're giving us feedback. But also identifying things for us to work on next. From a support perspective, as you said, we have thousands of clients nowadays, and the really fantastic thing has been very few issues and the issues that we have had, SUSE, SAP and IBM, all three of us together, have been able to resolve them to the customers satisfaction. So it just kind of demonstrates that regardless of where something is invented SUSE with SLES, SAP with HANA, us with our hardware and our hypervisors, when it comes to the clients we all work very closely together for their success. >> Great. Those feedback loops are so critically important to everyone involved. I guess last thing, maybe if you've got a customer example that might highlight the partnership between IBM and SUSE? >> Yeah, there's a number of them and we have, I think it's over 60 public references together with SUSE of clients who are doing an SAP HANA with SUSE Empower. But a couple that come to mind, obviously Robert Bosch is a fantastic client for all of us. A fantastic partner. And they've been with us almost from the very beginning, together with SUSE and together with us. And they helped us to identify early on some things that they would like to be able to see supported. Some capabilities that they expected to be able to have, especially given that Bosch had a strong knowledge of IBM technology, IBM product. And they wanted to be able to apply some of the same capabilities around Live Partition Mobility and large size L-bars for HANA and things like that. And they worked very closely with SUSE and with us, and with SAP, to not just give us the requirement, but really help us to identify okay, how should this work? Right, it's not just creating the technology and adding more and more features but how do we integrate it, how do we integrate it in to Bosch, who had created a fantastic self-provisioning type of a portal for all of their clients, all of their internal entities around the world. That was really cool and it really kind of helped us to highlight how we could integrate into tools, monetary, and reporting, etc that our clients have. Another example if I can, is Richemont. Richemont International is based in Geneva. Luxury brand. And Helga Delterad who was the Director of Idea at the time, kind of came to me and gave me a challenge. He said, "Look, I love HANA Power. I love that we can do all of these things with it. But I really would like be able to share processors across multiple HANA instances. That would really reduce the bill. It would really reduce the cost. And Richemont would be able to achieve a much quicker return on investment than we had anticipated." So, he gave us a challenge. The challenge went to everybody. It went to SUSE, to us and to SAP, we all got together and again with Helga being the executive sponsor on the client side, he really kind of worked with all of us. Brought us together and it was a power of the possible type of situation that now is generally available to all clients. And it's thanks to Helga, thanks to Richemont, who brought us together and gave us that challenge. >> Excellent. Well Vincenta Morante, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for sharing the update on IBM Power and the partnership with SUSE. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, we'll be back with more coverage from SUSECON Digital '20. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live! From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Frank Artale, the Managing partner at Prime Foray, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Frank. >> Glad to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about the energy of this place, you've been to many, many an Ignite, way back before it was even called Ignite. >> Oh yeah! Yes, this is, Ignite is the evolution of something that Microsoft used to call TechEd. So it was like back in, when I was in Microsoft, so even back in the '90s, we had to figure out a way to educate the technical community, and we decided to start this thing, and interestingly enough, the first one ever was here in O\rlando, much smaller venue, I think at The Swan and the Dolphin, but I've been coming to them on and off, you know for the past, 26 years or so. >> So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now at Prime Foray, what is Prime Foray? >> So we're a boutique and advisory consulting company, and we do work with what I call ISVs, so basically someone that makes software, but we engage with folks who are at some point on a journey to cloud, and that means both from a business and technical perspective. Whether they're just getting started, thinking about moving products, that maybe they had it from on premises, onto a cloud platform, or maybe they're well on their way and they're really looking to just like amplify and accelerate that. That's where a team of people that'll have experience from product, business development, sales and marketing, to really get those companies to the place that they want to be, relative to cloud, because as we know, cloud is still the future, and everyone wants to get there. >> All right, so Frank, bring us inside. Without giving away state secrets, dealing with Microsoft today is very different from the company that we grew up with, of Windows and Office. So what's it like working with Microsoft? Give a little bit of you know, where some of the key enablers are. >> Yeah, yeah so in the early days, if you think about it right, Microsoft is always great with evangelizing to an independent software vendor, around building to the platform. So back in the day, so much of the Microsoft actual market cap, was dependent upon the ISVs building to the APIs. And the APIs were the sort of the lock, right, until the ISVs were locked. But there never was a really, let's say a great channel program for someone that was an ISV. The channel programs are largely structured for people that sold stuff. And so what you're really seeing now for the first time, and this is not exclusive to Microsoft, with other cloud partners. But of course since we're at a Microsoft show, we can highlight some of the things that Microsoft is doing here, it really is creating super incentives for ISVs to come to the platform, such that the ISVs feel like they are selling side by side, side by side with Microsoft. There are some great incentives around that, they provide some great access to technology and tools, really great credits to get onto the platform, and so they focus as much on the business, like they always put more on the business now, than on the access to the technology, to the extent that it can work side by side with a company in building their business, well the folks that are the business owners really like that. The tech guys always like bits and bytes wherever they can go. >> So, describe how the partnership works. I mean what is, as you are now holding hands with companies that are going through a digital transformation, and some working closely with Microsoft, some may be just on the fringes of working with Microsoft, describe how the partnership is working. >> Yeah, so well, I would call it, I'd like to say that it's really in someways an evolution of the way Microsoft started working with ISVs, a number of years ago, and so at the core, the way Microsoft thinks about them, thinks about the ISVs is really, you know, an extension of their own product line. Right, so a platform is only as good as the things that, that stand atop it, right? And so, if Azure is a platform, or Business Apps is a platform, or Modern Workplace is a platform, you need applications that sit atop those things. And, one of I think the, one of the key things that Microsoft has done, has really enabled the ISVs to become connected with the Microsoft Sales Organization, without having intermediaries. So when, like in a lot of ways, when you're an ISV and you go work with a larger company that you want to have a partnership with, you have to find somebody that knows somebody that's the Account Manager for some large account. What Microsoft has done is they've automated that, once you've passed through a series of hurdles and certifications, you can actually enter into a program where you're opening leads into Microsoft and you get, and that partner, gets connected with the Microsoft Sales Team on the other side. So whenever I talk to people about things that they're doing, that's what I think the ISVs are most proud of. You'll hear them say things like, well, we are in X amount of accounts together with Microsoft. And, you know we're going, and from a business perspective, why ever enter into a partnership, if you were not going to just, to sell stuff? Again, you can do bits and bytes all day, it's a lot of fun for people like me, but at the end of the day, revenue has to come out the other side. And I think from a partner perspective, they've done a better than good job at that. >> All right. So Frank, when you look back to when you were inside Microsoft, give a little bit about how the roles have been changing as we've gone into this world of cloud and AI. >> Right, how the world has changed? >> And the roles inside of Microsoft, specifically, to, you know, fit the world. >> Right right. So when I was there, you know long ago, obviously it was a much smaller place, and you actually had, you know inside the house, you had product development, and you know, outside the house, you had channel development, and then you had, then you had direct sales, and you also OEM sales which was, which actually is a very very big piece to the puzzle. But, the linkage, right, between sales and channel, wasn't really there back then. And sometimes, like even the role that I had in program management, at times we had to be, we had to be glue for that. I think what, you know, in a sense now with the roles have changed is such a way, that you have, you have people, you know inside the house now that are really responsible for not just ensuring that a partner feels good about what they're doing, but that the partners are actually selling side-by-side with folks in the field. And that would've been, you know, an impossible thing, really impossible thing to do at the time. And so the other thing that's, I think that's really changed, is now that you have, you have an overlay sales organization, called Worldwide Commercial, and also a direct sales organization. So direct sales organization, are people that carry the bag and have quota right on the accounts. But then, you have another organization, that looks after the 500 largest accounts, and there are a lot of specialists in that organization, that by definition work with partners to move both the Microsoft products and the partner's products together in there. And so those are large organizations that plain and simply just didn't exist, and they may have not even made sense at the time, 'cause at the time a lot of what we were doing in the '90s we were still distributed computing, with still really a technical curiosity, and then it became trusted infrastructure. And it's really only in the last few years that cloud computing has moved beyond that, from being a technical curiosity, to trusted infrastructure. And the way it's taken to market, is so much different, because we took finished goods to market, we relied on people to carry boxes of stuff, we relied on people to do inventory. There's no more inventory, I mean it's just there, you turn it on and you go. So I think what you'll see also from again, from where the commerce engines are setup, and the kind of people that are deployed, are really being tooled for that kind of a go to market, which is significantly different. >> So we're really just scratching the surface when it comes to cloud. As you said so many of these companies are only at the beginning of their journeys. What do you think the future holds, in terms of trends in the marketplace and what companies are going to continue to want. And are there any blind spots, that you, as someone who's being at this industry for 36 years, sort of know are there? >> Right, so like today was an interesting one, to see ARC announced. And you know, it shows the natural evolution of the way that we think about a platform. So, if we go back to even like the late 80s right, we had to build servers, right? So you got a network operating system, and there was a set of network adapters, and a set of hardware it worked on, and you had to pay a systems integrator, to go put it all together, and then you kind of hope it worked. Well then we got this stuff call plug-and-play, in the early 90s, and it flattened the playing field, and you can take an operating system like Windows NT the one that I worked on, and as long as it'd adhere to a plug-and-play standard, it generally worked on that platform. But the operating system then grew, to become a collection of services. It was a file server, it was an identity server, eventually, things like transaction processing, networking was always in there. Now if you look at what something like ARC, or any of the services that are available on other clouds, they're really services on which applications are built. So now it's just natural to see that these services like from the cloud vendors, are being taken on to other cloud infrastructures. So today, we are here at Microsoft, you see ARC which is a set of Azure services, which are being made available and useful on other platforms like on-premises, as an example. To me that's no surprise, for Microsoft, they kind of led the way with that, with their IOT technology. How you see Azure services moving onto there. So now, from an opportunity perspective, as someone who's building applications, you can say OK, I can now go look at services that are I know will be available on all clouds. So I have a, let's just say I can, I can snap to that, and now I can go to my customer and also talk about a flexible, you know flexible opportunity about where and why you might want to deploy. So more opportunities around that though, what gets complex, management gets complex, security gets complex, we're sounding like the '90s again right, where whole industries grew up around things like performance and security, you know, and systems management, around that. And so, I think, you know from a, just strictly from an opportunity perspective, you know there'll be companies here that see that, and go take advantage of it to get out in front, and there'll be ones that are already incumbents, and hang on for dear life, saying things have to be different on each cloud, but I think, as you see companies that embrace the notion of sets of services that'll be running across clouds, those are where really the opportunities will be. Just like we saw in the '90s, folks that said hey, I'll run my application on Windows NT, on any piece of hardware, right? They didn't tie themselves to I'll just say like, you know Compaq, or Tandem, folks that don't exist anymore. (Rebecca laughs) Now they've got the folks we have here today. >> All right, so Frank you know you can't get through an interview with theCUBE without getting a question from John Furrier. >> Frank: Okay, is he on? >> So John's been watching, and he wants to know, how's the restaurant scenes doing in Seattle? >> Okay so, the Seattle restaurant scene's second to none. Obviously you need cuisine. Two restaurants that I'm personally involved with, one is downtown Seattle, and a one in, one in Bellevue Washington. Both completely different cuisines, one heavy on steak, one heavy on plants, and we like to say, we're up and to the right on both of those John, so thanks for asking. >> Great, excellent. Frank Artale, always a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. >> Great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Chris Menard, he is the lead storage administrator at Brown University. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Chris. >> Thanks for having me. >> So in your role, you would do storage, backup recovery, and disaster recovery. I mean, I think our viewers, we have a sense of what you would do at a large Fortune 500, But what do you at an Ivy League University? What kinds of things are you working on? >> So from disaster recovery we're doing things to protect all of the data that the university has. So research data, academic data, business data. So we're making sure that if something were to happen in Providence itself, we would be covered and have access to our data, our applications. If our data center were to go away. >> So in a way your constituents are a lot larger because you're also thinking, is it student data as well? So student data, research data? >> Yes, so student data, research data, administrative data, faculty data. Any kind of data that gets generated by pretty much anybody that either works or attends the university. >> Chris, wonder if we step back for a second. We're here at Microsoft Ignite, I know that Microsoft has a strong connection with higher education. But have you been to this show before? What's the relationship between the university and Microsoft that you have interactions with? >> So this is my first time coming to Ignite with Brown. I've been to Ignite when it used to be called TechEd, so a long time ago. But we do have a pretty good relationship with Microsoft. Obviously, we have everything from Windows Operating Systems all the way up to cloud services with Azure. Something that we just kind of started delving into this year. So we're looking at running things like Remote app in the cloud. We have some of our disaster recovery data in the Azure cloud as well. And I'm sure they'll be more to come as we learn more about what we can put there and how that can help us. >> Yeah, Microsoft really sits at the center of this multi-cloud discussion. As you've said, they've got SaaS offerings. They've got public cloud. >> Yep. >> They're in your data center. How does Brown look at, kind of, cloud overall? And you said starting to look at some of the public cloud offerings. So maybe give us a little bit of what you can about this strategy today. >> Right, so, we are doing a lot with secondary backups, secondary data for our backups going to the cloud. So for disaster recovery, hopefully in the future we'll be able to use that data for test and dev or maybe moving workloads from one place to another place. We're looking at putting some actual workloads in Azure, in the cloud for bursting capabilities, things like that. >> Yeah, you look at data in a multi-cloud world, tell us, what are you looking for when you talk about how you manage your data in a multi-cloud world? Even we talk about, some people when they went to SaaS they were like, "Oh, I don't need to worry about things like "security and data protection." Well, those people might have had to learn faster or they'd be out of a job. So what do you look and how do you use? >> Right, so security is definitely one of the main concerns. So, I mean, we have a whole security team that that's all they do is look at these projects and look at what we're trying to do and say, "Wait a second, what's the security around it?" As far as the tools that we're using for security. >> Data protection. >> Data protection we're using Cohesity. We just started using them at the beginning of this year. We switched off, we were a long time Legacy backup infrastructure. So a lot of moving parts. We decided that we wanted to find something that was more streamlined and was looking to the future with the way that they did data protection and disaster recovery. >> And where do you use the Cohesity solutions? Is it in your data center, public cloud, which offerings? >> So we have a Cohesity Appliances in our data center. We protect all of our virtual machines and physical machines using Cohesity. We tier that off into Azure cloud as a secondary copy, so then we have flexibility on what we can do with that data now that it's been virtualized and sent off to the cloud. >> Great, and are you realizing any cost savings? I mean, I know it's still early yet, you've only recently gone to Cohesity. But what's the... >> We have realized a lot of cost savings. Probably about 50% reduction in costs, CapEx style costs. And we also have reduced some of our year-to-year maintenance with licensing. >> All right, maybe talk about the operational side of things too. How many people did you have managing these kind of environment before? What's it look like after? What's that change mean? >> We have the same amount of people still managing the same environment. The only difference is now we're not spending as much time. So we kind of manage it across different teams within our environment. So our systems teams will do recoveries of virtual machines or data, whereas my team will actually manage the backups and adding clients and troubleshooting and things like that. Our team probably saves 10 or 15 hours a week. And the other teams about the same, with not having to troubleshoot things that just weren't working in the old platform compared to the new platform. >> Yeah, it was actually one of the things in the keynote this morning Satya Nadella was talking about business productivity. You always say it's nice if I could shave off an hour here, five hours there. There's always fear in IT, it's like, "Oh, wait, "they're going to put me out of a job." But the reality is you've always got more projects to work on and more things to do. >> There's always something else for us to do, which we're finding there's plenty of work for everyone to do. So we don't have to spend that time doing things that we shouldn't have been doing. >> I'm curious about how you stay on the cutting edge. I mean, typically you think about academia in general as being a little slow to adopt the latest and greatest technologies. And yet, this is where the research gets done, so much of it at these top universities. So what's the balance in your experience, and how do you stay abreast of all the new gizmos? >> We're pretty lucky because we're more of the central IT for the university even though we do work with researchers in different departments. So we are always constantly out there looking for, how can we do what we're doing now better, more efficiently, maybe cheaper, maybe not? But we're constantly looking for, what's the best way we can deliver the service that all of our users need. And it's a pretty broad base of users. Like you said, from students to researchers to just regular admins. They're all very different workloads and different users. >> All right, so, Chris, as you've rolled out Cohesity and you're starting to adopt Azure, what learnings have you had? If you're sitting down with one of your peers, and you hear them said, "I'm looking at this." What was the experience? What can I do to make it a little faster, save the team some heartburn maybe? >> I would say the biggest thing is just to do your homework. Go out and look and see what are your pain points today. And talk to people like Cohesity and say, "Honestly, here's my pain points, what can "you do to help me?" Cohesity's sat with us from the very beginning and they were very open to, "We can help "you with this, this, and this. We can't do that, "but we can get it into the product down the road." And they've done with with a lot of things that we've asked for to help us with whatever our needs might have been. >> Yeah, anything particular that you're asking of Microsoft, Cohesity, or others in the ecosystem that would help you do your job better? >> Not at this exact moment. Since we started with Cohesity, we have put in some requests with them over the first couple of months. And the product has evolved, maybe not because of stuff that we only asked for. I mean, it could have been a whole hundred other customers that asked for the same thing. I'm not sure. But they're very quick to put those things into the system, and they roll out updates very, very quickly and keep it going. >> Yeah, so we talk about education might be slow to adopt things. You've got a storage group, storage is not known as the latest and greatest. How do you manage things like upgrades? I was standing in line waiting and joking, it's like, "We're in a Microsoft event, remember Patch Tuesdays?" Yeah, how do you look at the, kind of, cloud on-demand, always on the latest generation versus balancing to make sure that things are trusted, secured, and tested? >> You're exactly right. In the storage world you might only do an upgrade once or twice a year at most. With Microsoft you're doing them once a month, maybe. With Cohesity, if they tell me there's a new upgrade or a patch, I'm ready to install it on a moment's notice. It's non-disruptive and the support team they have is so very good and quick that even if something were to go wrong, I am very confident they would have it fixed in very short order. So the confidence level with doing upgrades is very high. >> In terms of one of the big buzz words we hear, at this conference as well as at other technology conferences is "digital transformation." What does that mean to Brown University? Or does it mean anything? >> Well, it does. Our CIO had put out in his last year that we were going to start working on digital transformation as one of our big projects. What that exactly means for like my group is just what we have to do to support whatever the other groups are going to do to support moving toward a digital transformation. So if that means buying some new storage, or adding more storage to what we have, or talking to them about what apps are being added and how can we back that up and how can we perform disaster recovery services for those? That's the kind of things that our group would be worried about. More so than, what's the actual digital transformation itself. So it is something that is on our plate, but it's not the actual transformation itself. >> Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a lot of fun talking to you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (upbeat techno music)