from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group I'm Stu minimun and you're watching the Q's coverage of wtg transform 2018 happy to welcome to the program got a CIO in the house Russ Roderick who is the with chin bro that's correct how you doing to be here excellent so third year for yourself at the show first first impressions at the show what brings you back yeah third year I've really enjoyed it each of previous years I skipped a year last year travel related issue but I think the layout I like the naming convention change I like everything about it I think this is an excellent program that technology excellent they felt pity on me when they did the name change if you heard because saying the whole user group Dell EMC winslet Technology Group was a bit of a tongue twister but that's you know first world problems so Russ wrote for people that don't know tell us a little bit about chin bro yeah so Tim bro is a construction company headquartered in Pittsfield Maine we're nationwide where we do our projects we're in numerous markets from building infrastructure oil gas chemical industrial manufacturing we have a lot of projects done every year in the hundreds range and we were a little under a billion dollars got about 2,500 team members across the country okay and is the CIO you know how BIG's your team how many locations do you manage and you know tell us yeah let's go there for sure yes so I have 30 person team we have everything from application development to help desk to data analytics business intelligence teams I have infrastructure organization I have field support business analysts and we're a full-service organization all right so restless first start with with chin bro would you know what are some of the biggest challenges you're facing into business what does that term digital transformation resonate with with with your world it does the construction industry is very interesting it's a low margin industry right and so as a result of that we're always always looking to save money we're always looking to be lean we have a major initiative in the company around lean transformation some of that is digital related you know getting off of paper moving into paper forms into electronic forms and then not having to touch the data too many times so we have been moving too for quite a few years now so it's not new to the organization but it is a big challenge okay so absolutely we see that a lot what is the role of IT to the business these days so we have gone from being the elevator music as I like to call it like we're in the background you know we're kind of there to a strategic partner and I've reported from finance and I've moved to into the up to the CFO from CFO excuse me into the CEO role and it's been a great challenge there's some other organizational changes that we're looking at but we're no longer that background music we're very strategic in what we do we actually run several committees for the company looking at project prioritization workflow prioritizations and helping the organization to build an application roadmap new strategy yeah I love that I mean when you talk to us organizationally it says a lot you know under the CFO your call center we are moving under the CEO your strategic to the business right all right you talked about application so let's go there first because that's you know that application modernization is big challenge when I talk about modernization I always say you know application is a long pole in the tabs so what what does that mean to you what what kind of transformations are you going through inside yeah again our industry is dealing with a lot of fragmented software and it's a it's a problem a lot of industries face but ours I feel is we're on the very tail end of the industries that have moved to digital that have moved to modernization of our apps a lot of our products are on-premise our ERP system we've been on for 20 years for example and they've they've modernized we're getting it to mobile our imaging and workflow systems are starting to get more modernized but they're their legacy products and it's difficult when you have to deal with infrastructure that we have in the construction world we don't always have connectivity so we have to have a lot of offline we do all work with Citrix and it can be very problematic yeah you've been doing with the issues that we talked about with edge computing and IOT is you know something you've been living with for years right absolutely so IOT is one of those transformational pieces for us as well you know we have a lot of equipment that's one of the parts of our business you know 25,000 pieces of gear and heavy iron and we don't have a really good solution in place today that we're monitor all of the the meters and the performance and the of those devices so we're looking to IOT to help us get a better picture of that at an aggregate data level okay so I love we started up the stack with the applications let's come down a little bit tell us about your infrastructure what what are you using today how long you been using it for Winslow's in in the mix there's o windows absolutely in the next Dave we've moved from the traditional data center I had a lot of servers and racks and and moved to a V block and the X block with the X rail and our disaster recovery center out in Chicago and we did that because we had you know all the traditional problems of maintenance and and patching and licensing and everything and we never really had to deal with any of the power and heat and energy problems were up in Maine so we don't we're not an issue with cooling but that was a challenge for us having to manage all that stuff so we worked with Winslow and Dell EMC to figure out how do we get into the hyper converge to move away from all those server for administration and management and we did that project a little over a year ago implemented a little year ago and we've seen tremendous opportunities and for how we how we provision equipment and how we manage that need for the applications you know standing up new environments virtualizations really helped us do yeah so did you roll up the VX block and the VX rail together or the were those two sever they were slightly delayed so we did the X block first and then a few months later we did the the VX ray okay so the V block and the VX block after it been around for a number of years that you know 8 10 years at this point VX rails a little bit newer there's some people out there that are like oh wait HCI takes over the whole market tell us why each of those solutions and you know what was it an application price thing what what how did that go yeah we looked at it wasn't necessarily that we were in you know any position where you had to have this massive return on our investment right we built our business case around disaster recovery we our data center our primary or secondary were in the same town you know so we had all those elements of disaster recovery that were a problem for us so when we looked at the solution we wanted to be able to replicate our data more effectively get away from the traditional tape backup models and really help provision the equipment as quickly as we could in the event of you know a disaster and get ourselves recovered business continuity wise so it was a financial decision obviously that we had that we had thing had to pay for itself in which it did but we didn't spend a lot of time really kind of honing in on it has to be an ROI and a payback it was it was really about performance and disaster so is the VIX Bach in the primary and the BX rail and the secondary correct okay really cool on any you know what would you sell your peers is you after you've rolled us out any learnings that you had or the things that you'd go back and you know adjuster tweak no actually we had a really incredible experience working with with Winslow they were able to help us work through all of our any of our production issues very quickly we did replication through zurdo so that's moving our data very efficiently and my my IT team feels very confident that should and we're doing a test later this year but should we have a production incident we'd be able to recover lessons learned you know I think it's it's more about planning your work you know making sure that you've got your activities planned and that you're looking at the operational performance of the applications great all right Russ last question I have for you as a CIO how things been changing yeah you've been in the role for seven years you've moved inside the organization what are some of the things that are changing and some of the things that aren't yeah so the CIO role I believe personally is really kind of gearing towards more of a strategic element you know being part of that business making sure that we're not just providing those generic services of you know ping power and pipe right we're there for the business to understand what their business processes are all about and how they run their workflows and use their applications on a daily basis most of my conversations with my vice-president peers and and business leaders isn't around the technology that's being used yeah they're interested in iPhones and tablet devices but they're really geared at how do I help them solve their business problems and that's where IT is really evolving and the CIO role is doing a lot of that it wraps around that you know the teams you have around you and the strategic elements of the organization and just to follow up on that to do the SAS applications that your business using following under you is there any public cloud in there - what we do we have we have a hybrid cloud solution so we do a lot of on-premise solutions but we have several cloud and they're they're growing as needed but we have a business model that basically says let's look at our infrastructure internally first as a as an employee-owned private company we tend to gravitate towards keeping in-house but we have several business solutions that are in the cloud that are providing value all right well rust pleasure to meet you take so much for you to us and Congrats on everything that Kimbrough is done thank you very much back with lots more coverage here at wtt transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun and thanks so much for watching the Q [Music]