>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering WTG Transform 2018, brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. We're excited, we've actually gotten to speak to quite a few end users here at the show which always is one of our favorite things to do on the Cube. Joining me, first time on the program, Todd McIlroy, who's Vice President and Systems Engineering Manager, Eastern Bank, thanks so much for joining me. >> You're welcome, glad to be here. >> All right, so first of all, how many of these shows have you been to. >> This is my first WTG event, but I tend to go to several smaller type conferences per year to keep on top of the technology, network, and with so much rapid innovation these days, you need to get out there and talk to people and learn little tidbits of information each one, do a couple of conferences each year. >> Yeah, you said, technology's changing really fast, which is great, my joke usually is like you're in financial, things don't change fast, there's nothing going on. What is happening in your role these days? >> Eastern Bank is a 200 year old bank, we're celebrating our 200th anniversary this month. >> Hey, congratulations. >> A big celebration next week. A lot of traditional architecture, it's a very large bank, it's a 11 billion dollar bank, but very small community feel as well. Even our team is very tight, and very close together. Even though it's an older bank, we have a lot of innovation and technology going on, in the last few years, especially. >> It's one of those things, if I was going to start a company, or had started a company in the last five or ten years, here's the technology I'd choose, here's the applications I'd roll out. It's a 200 year old bank, walk us through a little bit about the pros and cons of having that legacy if you will. >> We have been around for like I said 200 years and even a lot of the technology we have on premises has a lot of legacy applications. We have to keep supporting that for a long time. We're challenged with keeping those older systems up and running as well as providing new technology to the business so they can innovate and bring new and better products to the market. Both worlds. >> Tell me what's under your purview when it comes to the bank. >> When it comes to the bank, I manage the systems engineering team, I manage the team that does servers and virtualization, storage, we're getting into the cloud as well, this is a big push to start innovating in the cloud as well to allow our developers to use services to help them innovate faster and better. That sort of thing. >> Okay, so in the keynotes this morning, there's the discussion really of hybrid cloud. When you say in the cloud, that tends to make me think of public cloud, maybe some SAAS in there, tell me what cloud means to your organization. >> Well, right now our cloud footprint is primarily software and service type applications, like Office 365. We had a major migration to move our email and Skype and users facing applications to the cloud. But we're also trying to expand our footprint in the cloud so we can enable services to our customers, internal customers, to innovate as well. That's why we're looking at technology like Nutanix, the innovation that they're bringing to market to allow our developers to be more self-sufficient, provide the platform for them, allow them to innovate and develop on a platform, both on premises to keep it secure as well as in the cloud to keep it secure as well. >> Okay, it's interesting. I was actually talking to some of the Nutanix team here and been talking to customers that are doing development, playing with the containers, things like that, a couple years ago, if you talking about developers, you'd say, oh, okay, they're building something in the public cloud. >> Right. >> Because that's where it is. Help us understand how you decide, what do I start playing with in the cloud, where does the Nutanix fit into that discussion? >> We're a relatively new Nutanix customer, within the last year or two. We started with a small concept to give some of our workloads for the developers to work on, but now we've expanded upon that it's now become our primary production platform. It's going to take a lot of our older Hypervisor virtualization technology and move it to Nutanix so we're trying to grow that footprint because the amount of innovation that they're bringing with Calm and Flow and all those sorts of new services is going to enable us to build a platform that they can develop on a lot better. >> Great, what virtualization are you using on this? >> For? >> For the Nutanix, like are you using VMware, >> No, we're HV, Native HV. >> Using all HV? >> All HV, yup. >> Okay, were you VMware before? >> Not at Eastern, no. We have a small VMware footprint for specialized application, but the rest of our virtualization platform is Hyper-V. >> Okay, and you said you're running in production, does Nutanix run all of your on-premises applications? >> No it doesn't, we have a lot of still physical infrastructure as well, but anything that new is going towards Nutanix. We have some older hardware that we're aging out, as those age out and we have to expand the new hardware, we're going to go with Nutanix platform. >> You've got some I-series sitting in the back, I'm sure, the old AS/400, most banks have, things like that. >> Exactly, exactly, yeah. >> Great, tell us a little more from a cloud standpoint, how did you determine what goes where? >> We haven't really determined that yet, we're really in the early stages of our own adoption to the cloud. We're really taking the first steps and making sure we are governing it properly, and we're finding the right use case for it. Really we're trying to find the right use case for our developers. We had some meetings recently and we outlined a few things that we could target. So we're really taking our first steps, getting our own competencies up with our own engineers and our developers and making sure we, learning from the people that already done it, and maybe learning from some mistakes they've made and using partners like Winslow to help us get there. >> Great, can you speak a little about from an operational standpoint? You've talked about developers, you've got public cloud, you've got your infrastructure, how do those all play together? >> Well today I mean systems engineering and my department is really the go to department when they request a service, or request a new server, request a new application be built. We interface with a lot of different teams at the bank so we're really the go to team that is going to help them innovate. They know what applications they need to run, they need, they make requests for services. We're trying to reduce the time to fulfillment, allowing them to have a platform where they can build on, innovate and be more self-sufficient. >> Yeah, you bring up a really interesting thing. How long people think it will take from when I ask for something to where I get it. Used to be I put in a support ticket, 24, 48 hours that was great. Some things it's like ah, heck, we're going to have to buy a server, or allocate different pieces. Today it's come on, it's instantaneous. >> Yeah, everybody's ready to go. >> Talk to that, the good and the bad of that from your standpoint. >> That's what we want to be in the business of allowing them to self-sufficient, build the platform for them, we don't want to be managing building VMs over and over again. We want to templatize things and allow them to be on their own timeline, to be able to develop, deploy, break down, so we're really trying to innovate in that way. I think that's our job as an engineering team to provide that to the business so they can innovate more quickly. >> Love the idea of self-service. The concern always is sprawl. Used to be I stuck a server in the corner and then I forgot about it. Now VMs pop up and I forget about them all the time, doesn't the CFO ever come say, hey, am I really using all this stuff? >> That's the big driving factor is cost, making sure you don't going to drive over a huge cost in the cloud. I think governance and managing that and using tools and using some of the use cases and some of the knowledge others have been before to help you build that framework so you're not breaking the budget, or what not, you find the right use case, whether it's on premises cloud or in the public cloud. >> Great, last thing, Todd, as you look forward through the rest of 2018, any interesting new technologies you're looking at or other things coming down the pike other than celebrating the big 200th anniversary. >> Well I mean, I'm really excited about the bank has really made a commitment to move towards innovation and using cloud technology so I'm really excited to be part of the team that's going to help innovate and drive the business forward in that regard. >> Todd McIlroy, I really appreciate the updates here, Eastern Bank a 200 year old company driving innovation forward. This has been our live coverage here from WTG Transform 2018. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the shows we're going to be at, all the replays that we've been at before. Stu Miniman, once again thank you so much to Winslow Technology Group, their partners and of course all the customers, thanks so much, for the viewers also for watching, thank you. (techno music)