>> From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019. Just had Rob Ninkovich from the New England Patriots on the program. And, happy to bring on the program, one of the co-leaders of this VTUG event, Chris Williams. Whose day job is as a cloud architect with GreenPages, but is co-leader here at VTUG, does some user groups, and many other things, and actually a CUBE alum, even. Back four years ago, the first year-- >> That's right. >> -that we did this, we had you on the program, but a few things have changed, you know... You have a little less hair. >> This got a little longer. A little less here. >> More gray hair. Things like that. We were talking, >> Funny how that works out. you know, Rob was, you know, talking about how he's 35, and we were, like, yeah, yeah, 35, I remember 35. >> A child. (laughing) >> Things like that. Just wait til you hit your 40's and stuff starts breaking. >> Oh, so much to look forward to. >> So, Chris, first of all, thank you. We love coming to an event like this. I got to talk to a few users on-air, and I talked to, you know, get a, just, great pulse of what's going on in the industry. Virtualization, cloud computing, and beyond. So, you know, we know these, you know, local events are done, you know, a lot of it is the passion of the people that do it, and therefore we know a lot goes into it. >> I appreciate it, thanks for having me on. >> Alright, so bring people up to speed. What's your life like today? What do you do for work? What do you do for, you know, the passion projects? >> Ah, so the passion projects recently have been a lot of, we're doing a Python for DevOp series on vBrownBag. For the AWS Portsmouth User Group, we're also doing a machine learning and robotics autonomous car driving project, using Python as well. And for VTUG, we're looking at a couple of different tracks, also with the autonomous driving, and some more of the traditional, like, VMware to CAS Cloud Hybrid training kind of things. >> Excellent, so in the near future, the robots will be replacing the users here, and we'll have those running around. >> I have my Skynet t-shirt on underneath here. >> Ah, yes, Skynet. (laughing) You know if you Tweet that out, anything about Skynet, there's bots that respond to you with, like, things from The Terminator movies. >> I built one of them. >> Did you? (laughter) Well, thank you. They always make me laugh, and if there's not a place for snark on Twitter, then, you know, all we have left is kind of horrible politics, so. >> That's true, that's true. >> Great, so, yeah, I mean, Cloud AI, robotics, you know, what's the pulse? When you talk to users here, you know, they started out, you know, virtualization. There's lots of people that are, "I'm rolling out my virtualization, "I'm expanding what use-cases I can use it on, "I might be thinking about how cloud fits into that, "I'm looking at, you know, VmMare and Amazon especially, "or Microsoft, how all those fit together." You know, what are you hearing, what drives some of those passion projects other than, you know, you're interested in 'em? >> So, a lot of what my passion projects are driven, it's kind of a confluence of a couple of different events. I'm passionate about the things that I work on, and when I get into a room with customers, or whatever like that, or with the end users, getting together and talking about, you know, what's the next step? So, we as users, as a user group and as a community, we're here to learn about not just what today is... what's happening today, but, what's going to keep us relevant in the future, what are the new things coming down the pipe. And, a lot of that is bending towards the things that I'm interested in, fortuitously. Learning how to take my infrastructure knowledge and parlay that into a DevOps framework. Learning how to take Python and some of the stuff that I'm learning from the devs on the AWS side, and teaching them the infrastructure stuff. So, it's a bi-directional learning thing, where we all come together to that magical DevOps unicorn in the middle, that doesn't really exist, but... >> Yeah, I tell you, we've had this conversation a few times here, and many times over the last few years especially, is that, there's lots of opportunities to learn. And, you know, >> Too many. >> is your job threatened? And, the only reason your job should be threatened, is if you think you can keep doing, year after year, what you were doing before, because chances are either you will be disrupted in the job, or if not, the people you're working for might be disrupted, because if they're not pushing you along those tracks, and the tools and the communities to be able to learn stuff is, I can learn stuff at a fraction of the cost in faster times. >> Yep. >> Might not learn as much, but I'm saying I can pick up new skills, I can start getting into cloud. You know, it's not $1000 and six months to get the first piece of it. >> Exactly. >> It might be 40 to 60 hours online. >> Yep. >> And, you know, cost you 30 to 100 bucks, so, it's... >> Yeah, the lift in training, is a lot easier because, you're basically swiping your credit card, and with AWS, you have a free tier for 12 months, that you can play with and just, you know, doodle around, and then... And figure things out. You don't have to buy a home lab, you don't have to buy NFR license, or get NFR licenses from Vmware. But, the catch to that is, you do have to do it. There's a... remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? >> Of course. >> Remember the dad was doing the toothpaste tubes, he was the guys screwing the toothpaste tubes onto the machines. At the end of the story, he got, you know, automated out of a job, because they had a machine screwing the toothpaste tubes on. And then, at the end, he was the guy fixing the machine that was screwing the toothpaste tubes on. >> Right. >> So, in our world, that infrastructure guy, who's been deploying manually virtual machines, there's a piece of code, there's an infrastructure code, that will do that for them now. They've got to know how to modify and refactor that piece of code, and get good. And, get good at that. >> Yeah, you know, I've talked to a couple of people, we talk about, you know, there's big, you know, vendor shows, and then there's, you know, regional user groups and meet-up's, and the like. Give us a little insight into, you know, let's start with VTUG specifically, and, you know, what you're doin' up in the Portland area. Would love to hear some of the dynamics now, you know, it feels like there's just been a ground swell for many years now, to drive those, you know, local, and many times, more specialized events, as opposed to bigger, broader events. >> Yeah, it's interesting, because we like the bigger, broader events, because it gets everybody together to talk about, things across a broad spectrum. So, here we have the infrastructure guys, and we have the DevOps guys, and we have a couple of Developers, and stuff like that. And so, getting that group think, that mind share, into one room together, gets everybody's creative juices flowing. So, people are starting to learn from each other, that the Dev's, are getting some ideas about how infrastructure works, the infrastructure guys are getting some ideas about, you know, how to, how to automate a certain piece of their job. To make that, you know, minimize and maximize a thousand times, you know, go away. So, I love... I love the larger groups because of that. The smaller groups are more specialized, more niche. So, like, when you get into a smaller version, then, it's mostly infrastructure guys, or mostly Dev's, or some mixture thereof. So, they both definitely have their place, and that's why I love doing both of them. >> Yeah, and, you know, what can you share, kind of, speeds and feeds of this show here. I know, it's usually over a thousand people >> Yep. >> You know, had, you know, bunch of keynotes going on. You know, we talked about The Patriots, in, you know, quite a number of, you know, technology companies, people that are the, kind of, SI's or VAR's in the mix. >> Yeah, so, we had, I think, 35 sponsers. We had, six different keynotes, or six general sessions. We talked about everything from Azure to AWS, to Vmware. We covered the gamate of the things that the users are interested in. >> You had... don't undersell the general sessions there. (laughing) There was one that was on, like, you know, Blockchain and Quantum computing, I heard. >> Yep, yep. >> There was, an Amazon session, that was just, geekin' out on the database stuff, I think, there. >> Yes, yeah, Graph tier, yep. >> So, I mean, you know, it's not just marketing slideware up there, I saw a bunch of code in many of the sessions. >> Oh yeah, yeah. >> You know, this definitely is, you know, I was talkin' with the Amazon... Randell earlier, here on the program, and said that-- >> The Amazon Randall. (laughing) >> Yeah, yeah, sorry, Randall from Amazon, here. >> He's a very large weber. >> Gettin' at the end of the day, I've done a few of these, but, you know, remember like, four years ago, the first, like, cloud 101 session here? >> Yeah, yep. >> And, I was like, you know, I probably could have given that session, but, everybody here was like, "Oh, my gosh", you know, I just found out about that electricity. >> Right. >> You know, that, this is amazing. And, today, most people, understand a little bit more of... We've gotten the 101, so, you know, I'm getting into more of the pieces of it, but. >> Yeah, it was really gratifiying because, the one that he gave was, all of the service, all of the new services, of which, there were like, more than 100, in 50 minutes or less. And, he talks really, really fast. And, everybody was riveted, we... I mean, people were coming in, even up until the last minute. And, they all got it. It wasn't like, what am I do... what am I going to do with this? It's, this is what I need to know, and this is valuable information. >> Yeah, we were having a lunch conversation, about, like, when you listen to a Podcast, what speed do you listen on? So, I tend to listen at about one and a half speed, normally. >> Me too, yep. >> You know, Frappe was sayin', he listens at 2x, normally. >> Does he really? >> Somebody like, Randall, I think I would, put the video up, and you can actually go into YouTube, and things like that, and adjust the speed settings, I might hit, put him down to 0.75, or something like that, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Because absolutely, you know, otherwise, you can listen to it at full speed, and just like, pause and rewind, and then things like that. But, definitely, someone... I respect that, I'm from New Jersey, originally, I tend to talk a little faster, on camera I try to keep a steady pace, so that, people can keep up with my excitement. >> I do, I speed up too. He actually, does this everyday. He flies to a new city, does it once a day. So, he's, he's gotten... This is like rapid fire now. >> Alright, want to give you the final word, you know, VTUG, you know, I think, people that don't know it, you go to VTUG.com, A Big Winter Warmer, here. There's The Big Summer one, >> The Summer Slam. >> With the world famous, you know, Lobster Bake Fest, there, I've been to that one a few times. I know people that fly from other countries, to come to that one. What else should we know about? >> So, we're about to revamp the website, we've got some new and interesting stuff coming up on there. Now that, we also have our slack channel, everybody communicates on the backhand through that. We're going to start having some user content, for the website. So, people can start posting blog articles, and things of that nature, there. I'm going to start doing, like a little, AW... like learn AWS, on the VTUG blog, so, people can start, you know, ramping up on some of the basics and everything. And, and if, that gains traction, then, we'll maybe get into some more advanced topics, from Azure, and AwS, and Vmware of course, Vmware is always going to be there, that's... Some of the stuff that Cody is doing, Cody Jarklin is doing, over at Vmware, like the CAS stuff, where it's the shim layer, and the management of all the different clouds. That's some really, really cool stuff. So, I'm excited to showcase some of that on the website. >> Alright, wow. Chris Williams, really appreciate you coming. And, as always, appreaciate the partnership with the VTUG, to have us here. >> Thanks for havin' me. >> Alright, and thank you as always for watching. We always love to bring you the best community content, we go out to all the shows, help extract the signal for the noise. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watchin' The CUBE. (energetic music) (energetic music) (energetic music)

>> From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, on the ground, at SAPPHIRE NOW 2018 in the NetApp booth with Keith Townsend for the day. Keith and I are joined by Scott Feldman, the Global Head of SAP HANA and Leonardo Communities. Scott, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, communities, plural. Why are... Tell us about the communities at SAP. Why is there specifically an SAP HANA community, before we get into Leonardo? >> Okay, well it's kinda fun because you saw one community and then they say, "Well, go do another community." So you do one, and it's like, okay do one. Do another one. So we have, at SAP, a global community that runs on the SAP.com platform. That's for everybody. That's for all customers, all partners, all analysts, everybody. That's normally called a SAP community. What we realized back in, around 2012 or 2013, is that we wanted to have a special place where our SAP HANA early adopter customers could go and join and network with each other on an online presence, right, and then have an opportunity to share their knowledge with each other and get more information from SAP. So we created a separate community on SAP HANA. It's actually a pretty easy URL, it's called SAPHANACommunity.com. It's pretty simple to remember. And now, we've doing this for about five, six years. >> So talk to us about what's unique about the HANA community outside of the technology. SAP Communities, in general's already pretty big, very active community. >> Correct. >> But what was the call out or what was the results of creating the HANA community? >> Great, and that's a great question. So what's really interesting about the SAP HANA community is that the topic and coverage of the content is specifically related to SAP HANA, data management, database tools and technologies, analytics, and other surrounding areas that are connected to that HANA platform as an anchor. So we have provided, over the past five years, almost 300, 300 webinars of content on SAP HANA technology. A lot of that content has come from SAP product managers, a lot of it's come from solution experts, partners as well, have provided content. And they're in the form of webinar frameworks as well as whitepapers and other content that's on there. Now, the people that join the community, which is all free by the way for the customers that join, are mainly our SAP customers. Now I'm proud to tell you, here and also SAPPHIRE 2018, we're here, we're over 6,100 or so members, globally, of the SAP HANA community. And what's really great about that is, you know, relative to some of the millions of numbers of people throughout for other communities, it seems like, you know, 6,000 plus is a small number. But you have to keep in mind that it's very targeted, right? So the people that are through the door, and our members of the community on the SAP HANA Jam, we have it on our SAP Jam site which is hosting the SAP cloud platform. These are people that really are interested in that topic. And they really wanna learn about SAP HANA and the technology surrounding SAP HANA. So they're very, very high-qualified, high-quality people. >> Very engaged, it sounds like. >> Absolutely. >> So, speaking of that, so this morning during Bill McDermott's keynote, he mentioned 23,000 HANA customers. >> Yes. >> You mentioned 6,000 actively engaging in your community. >> Yes. >> Collaboration was a big theme of this morning, talking about, this is not grandpa's CRM anymore, what SAP is doing to break that status quo. How influential are those customers engaging in the HANA community to its development and its evolution? >> That's a fantastic question. So what's happened is the community... Think of almost like a pyramid. So the community of the large, vast number of people who have joined the community for interest in topics have mostly consumed information, they are kinda the base line of the pyramid. Some of those customers have some great stories to tell. Okay, so what we did was we started a webinar series in 2013 called Spotlight. And I'll take credit for the name, actually, 'cause we call it the SAP HANA Spotlight. And essentially, what we're doing is, imagine the customer in a spotlight where they're sharing their journey. They're sharing their SAP HANA story and their journey. So we launched that a number of years ago and now we've done almost 80 separate HANA Spotlight webinars with customers that are sharing their stories. Well we even took it one step further beyond that. In 2013, some of the executives from our early adopting customers for SAP HANA, they came over to SAP and they said, "Gee, SAP, we're betting our career "and our company survival "on this new technology called SAP HANA," back in 2013. And they basically came to us and said, "I wanna have a council." So we wanna have a council of influence so that we have an opportunity to get together, share stories, share our journeys with each other, get to know who the other customers are that are also early adopters and are embarking on this journey with us together, and then, more importantly, to answer your question, feed that information back to SAP development so that we could, back at SAP, improve the product and come out with some additional features and functions and make it even better. Well that was 2013. Our very first meeting was up in Canada, in a suburb in Toronto, at one of our customer locations. We had 13 people in that meeting. Today, dial up six years, we're at over 750 members of an executive, so these are C-level VPS, senior IT, and chief architects that are in our community globally. We've done 24 meetings, I'm about to schedule the 25th meeting, and I've globalized that. And the customers, I thought they would've been tired of these kinds of meetings, they love it. They absolutely love it. So again, going back to that analogy, this is kind of the high peak point of the pyramid. We get the executives that are making these decisions and we talk about thought leadership. We don't talk about features and functionality. We do talk about road maps, we talk about investments that they need to make, and we anchor it again on the SAP HANA platform but we're bringing in other technologies and components like analytics or SAP Leonardo, right, or S/4 HANA, right. Now that it's announced, we'll bring in C/4 HANA. So we'll cover other topics as well, and of course the cloud platform. >> So you set it up, rinse and repeat, now we're at Leonardo. >> Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. >> What is, first off, what is Leonardo? Great name, I love the name. But what is it? >> So SAP Leonardo is a methodology. It's an opportunity for our customers to co-design, co-invent, and get engaged in the design thinking process to understand how data, and we talked about this today, how we can, how data and how knowledge can enable an intelligent enterprise. And it's a process. So what people need to understand, and customers work with at SAP and they could go to the SAP Leonardo booth areas at the conferences and see as many testers as they wish. But essentially it's a foundation. It's an understanding of, how do I take where I am today from my own understanding of how I operate my business, and where do I need to go, what is my next gem process? Where do I need to be in five years to be that thought leader and how do I get there? So how do I take data that I know and data that I don't know? We have, I just ran into one of our customers... We run a program out of our team as well called the SAP Innovation Awards. It started off as the HANA Innovation Awards and now we cover all technologies and all topics for customer innovation. So SAP Leonardo, cloud platform solutions, SAP HANA solutions, data management solutions, these are all innovative offerings. We just announced all the winners, we have a actually ceremony tomorrow night where all the winners have been announced and they're gonna be receiving their trophies. We've been doing this for many years. What's interesting about that is all the innovative projects that are coming from the customer programs, projects, innovations. What are they doing? How are they co-innovating? Are they co-innovating with SAP? Are they doing smart farming? We have one winner that's actually doing smart farming, micro-crop planting to understand soil composition. And humidity and moisture composition is different even if you go one meter away on this, one meter, which is nothing. >> You're right. >> For the Americans listening, it's three feet. (everyone laughs) And that's pretty close. And they can actually combine different crop plantings based on soil conditions and compositions and this is all being monitored in the SAP HANA cloud. So this is really phenomenal. >> Yeah, that would be. >> And we love these kinds of stories. And what we're doing now, as you can imagine. You're probably gonna ask me, how do you connect the dots? Well it was pretty easy to connect the dots. We have the customers that are presented these great programs. They've created these great values that they're providing to their industry, right? And they're great wins and successes. And we're leveraging those customers in the community as thought leaders. And we're also doing sessions like that. I'd like to get them on theCUBE. Have them talk about some of the things >> That would be great. >> that they're doing. >> We would have fun. We love customer stories. >> I love it. I think it would be phenomenal. >> So, let's talk bout the dynamics of running a community program that featured around a product. And HANA, very straightforward, is about the tech, a lot of it was speeds and fees transitioned into solutions. >> Right. >> When you start out with something as ambitious as Leonardo framework, are the dynamics different, like what are, what is the community like? >> A little bit 'cause SAP HANA is the foundation. And we saw this today at the keynotes today. And Bill's keynote was phenomenal and we saw that how he was positioning this and it's all about the intelligent enterprise and SAP HANA as a foundation, it's fantastic. And we've been doing this for a lot of years. But what do we do to build upon that? When we established the foundational community for SAP HANA, people started coming in and wanting to understand everything about the HANA community. We did a couple fundamental things. Number one, we connected with the SAP HANA Academy. And I'll give a shout out to my friends at the academy, I love them to death, and we've been partnering with them for five plus years. The SAP HANA Academy is a YouTube site of thousands of videos on how to do anything. It could be data management, it could be data hub, it could be Vora which is the connected to Hadoop. It could be SAP HANA. It could be analytics. And there's thousands, literally thousands of videos on how to just about do anything that you want connected to the community. So the people and the SAP HANA Academy team has presented content, webinars on our community broadcasting at least for the last... This year they did one, they do like two or three every year for the last number of years. What we did with SAP Leonardo was, Leonardo can be thought of as a combination of the technologies. So we have, as you know, with machine learning, IoT, blockchain, right, analytics and a whole bunch of other things, design thinking methodologies that are in Leonardo, so what we did is we took a lot of that and created a series of webinars and content. We just finished something called the SAP Digital Transformation Series featuring SAP Leonardo in conjunction with ASUG, the America User Group, that's our co-conference sponsor here and we love them to death. And what we did was do the 14-part webinar series. We had thousands of people come onto these calls and each call covered, for example, Mala, who's our president, she did what is the overview of Leonardo? How do we do this? We covered analytics with Mike Flannagan. Maricel covered design thinking. And then we went from there. Then we covered the solutions themselves. What is IoT, what is blockchain, what is machine learning? How do you understand what these things do and how they impact your organization? Then we took it one step further. We went into the industry solutions. So the partners are developing industry solutions. The industry accelerates, we talked a little bit earlier, there's a press release that just came out on that, on some of the.. >> The Partner Medallion Initiative. >> The Premiere Medallion Initiative, right. My friend Mike is running, from the Leonardo team. And that is certifying partners for the specific solutions that they're building around the industry, the deliverables that they have around the SAP Leonardo, we feature that as well. So all of that content was in this series and we continue to build upon that. What we really want, though, now is we wanna do what we did this time last year which was, we want the customer stories. So we've done, I've told you, we've done a lot of webinars in the community. So a lot of content going to the members of the community from the experts that understand that content. Next step, second half of the year, is we want those customer stories out there. So those 80 or so webinars that I mentioned that we did with our customer Spotlights, we want those Spotlights now. So we'll focus those... Anybody watching, give me those Spotlights. We want those stories. We want the customers to really articulate their story, their challenges, their successes, their wins, what are they doing to the SAP technology that-- >> You're preaching to the choir about customer marketing persons so that there's no better value-- >> Isn't it great? >> Brand validation, than the voice of the customer. Speaking of brand validation, I heard this morning that Bill McDermott announced that you guys are now 17 on the top 100 global most valuable brands. >> Absolutely. >> He wants to be in the top 10. >> And we're proud of that. I'm part of that team. >> Up four. You're doing this with a tremendous amount of partners is what you mentioned, partners. We're in the NetApp booth. >> Correct. >> Talk to us about what SAP and NetApp are doing in the community to enable this amazing amount of education that you're doing. >> So that's a great find. I mean, SAP wouldn't be where it is today, and I've been with SAP for (chuckles) I don't wanna say the number of years but people watch me and they know I've been at SAP a long time. It's like you can't say Scott Feldman without SAP. So it's been kind of anchored in for a long time. It's sort of the blood, the blue blood runs in the DNA you know. It was just kind of fun. But some of the partners that we've worked with in the communities have taken it to another step. NetApp is one of those. And I love working with NetApp. They're a strategic technology provider and a fantastic global partner with SAP. I know you just heard from RJ who did an interview, we work a lot with him and his team as well, Roland and the rest of the team. And what NetApp has done is they've made another strategic investment with us in the communities, for the HANA community and the Leonardo community such that they're a name-sponsored partner. And what's really nice about that is we have a special spot and if you go to the SAPHANACommunity.com site, or if you're already a member, or the other one is, you can guess, SAPLeonardoCommunity.com, very similar, right? If you go to either one of those sites, you'll find that there's a spot for partners that are specific to that community, that have taken the next step to add additional value. NetApp is there, there's a page. And what we've done is we've created a page with all the NetApp content on, what is NetApp's contribution on SAP HANA and Leonardo? Where is the value proposition? Why NetApp? What are they doing with SAP? Where are the links that we can go for all the content that NetApp has provided to us to post in that community? And not only that, NetApp is also an outstanding member, upstanding member of the SAP HANA CL Council Community 'cause they also run SAP. And, in addition to that, NetApp is a strategic partner that provides webinar content for SAP, for the community. So, about once a quarter, there'll be a webinar that is sponsored by NetApp and now I'm bugging them a little bit to get the customers in front of the webinar so we can have these little-- >> There must be some NetApp-SAP Customer Spotlights just waiting to come into the surface, right? >> Oh, absolutely. And we're doing them in small snippets so what's really great about that, it's kinda like this discussion that we're having, these small chunks. 'Cause I think the new wave of doing things, >> Snackable content. >> And I could certainly tell you're from the generation that's just maybe a little bit younger, is that they don't have time to sit down and watch a webinar for one hour. But they'll take it in 20-minute doses. They'll just like, "Man, give me "all the 20-minute webinars you want." It's like, I'll just give me a chunk and I'll take it and boom. I really want that. So that's been a lot of fun. So NetApp's been a fantastic strategic partner and we'll continue to partner with them moving forward. >> So I'm hearing a lot of collaboration, a lot of participation, energy just radiating, I think off from the main stage-- >> Oh I don't like the community, just do the watch, uncles love it. >> From the main stage to what you're talking about, what with what you guys are doing and I love to hear that the customers are being recognized for their innovation. Not just-- >> They are, yeah. >> Transforming their businesses, new revenue streams, new business models, but leveraging their partners like SAP, like NetApp, to become the intelligent enterprise and change industries. >> Absolutely, Lisa. And they're becoming the thought leaders of their own industry. So if you want to become a leader or a thought leader in your own specific industry, join the SAP HANA Community, make the investments in SAP Leonardo, work with SAP, work with NetApp, and like Bill says, let's get it done. >> Let's get it done. Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Keith and me this morning. >> Thank you for your time, it's been my pleasure. >> And enjoy the rest of the event. >> I look forward to it. >> All right. Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend on theCUBE from the NetApp booth at SAP SAPPHIRE NOW 2018. Thanks for watching. (funky music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering ServiceNow, Knowledge2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at ServiceNow Knowledge18, 2018. Been here for six years. It's amazing. It's like 18,000 people all over the Sands Convention Center. Huge ecosystem and we're excited to be back, as usual. Our next guest, Greg Deitrich. He's a VP of operations in engineering at DXC. Joined by Tim Henderson, director of automation engineering at DXC. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, first off, just kind of impressions of the show. It's amazing. This thing grows like four or five thousand people, I think, every single year. >> Yeah, it's amazing to see 18,000 people here at a ServiceNow conference. I actually attended back in October of 2007 before they had Knowledge. I attended a first user group session in New York where there's about 70 people around... >> You and Fred and a couple other people, right? >> Fred, his brother who ran operations at the time, and a few more. >> That's right. And then, obviously, you guys... We interviewed traditional partners way back into the day. You got mopped by CSC and you guys have rebranded into DXC. So you guys have a long history in really making a bet on the ServiceNow value proposition. >> Yeah, that's right. CSC and now DXC has had a long history of partnership with ServiceNow and, as you said, as evidenced by some of these acquisitions that we did with Fruition and Logicalis, the guys with the green suits around here. >> Jeff: That's right. >> And that continues to be a very strong part of our business. >> Good bet. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what's interesting, and I'm sure back in the day, we used to talk to Fred. He had this great platform but nobody's got a line item budget for a new platform, right? So you have to build the application. Obviously, the story's well-known. He build the service-management application. But he still has that great platform underneath. And now we're seeing all these different kind of applications built on this platform beyond what the original application-- >> I think that what you see is the pivot to more focus on business and less about IT, right? And that's what we're doing with Bionics And Platform DXC. It's taking a completely different angle that we're trying to orchestrate business within an ecosystem which ServiceNow is a key construct of. And it resonates with clients. We've showed what we've done to several major clients and it's really trying to achieve, like John said, business outcomes and less about the IT. But how can you quickly bundle sequence workflows and capability to get efficiency and automation into the workplace. >> Right. So let's dig down a little deeper on that application. What problem did you approach? Why was this the right tool to go after this problem? >> Sure. So the big thing that Tim and I are driving across DXC is our DXC Bionics approach which is really centered on how can we digitally transform our delivery engine, right? So we're applying data and analytics and leaning out people on processes and applying technology automation tools to really drive intelligent automation across everything we do. To get better, faster, cheaper, more automated, scalable, repeatable. In doing that, it was really important that we took a platform approach and ServiceNow's been a cornerstone in that platform. And we call that platform Platform DXC. >> Why are you called Bionics? >> So, Bionics, for us, is that combination of data, people, and technology. It's not just automation as the silver bullet and just the technology. It has to be that combination of the data with the people and the technology and automation coming together to make people work smarter, work more intelligently. >> Jeff: Right. >> And I think some of that, too, is the muscle part of it, right? You think Bionics but, as Greg said, you've really got to understand the business problem or what's occurring. And a lot of people we've seen in the industry are applying just automation without really understanding the underlying problem. And a lot of companies have had IT implemented in a diversified portfolio for 20 years and these disparate systems are very siloed. And there's a lot of waste in the value stream of their company. If you really don't break that apart and look at that, you're really not helping them lead in their marketplace. >> Right. It's just fascinating how we continue to find these big giant buckets of inefficiency. All the way back to the original ERP days and you just keep finding so many giant buckets where things are just not working as smoothly as they could. >> You know, people will look at this somewhat and they'll say, "Well, automation is to get heads out." Well, actually, it's to free up heads, right, Greg? To where you can actually empower these people to go do other value-added things for that company and not sit here in this toil or managing technical data or inefficient waste. It's really liberating but it does take a good champion within a company to go pull that off. >> And clearly the people part's probably the hardest part, right? In the keynote yesterday, John touched on, kind of, best practices and one of them, I think number three, was a commitment to change process. And that's, obviously, a big part of you guys' business, helping people to get through that piece of it. I laugh. I have Alexa and I have a Google Home, and they send me emails on how I should interact with this thing to try to help me change my behavior to take advantage of this new technology. I'm like, "Oh, okay." So it's hard to change people's behavior. >> Yeah, see the people component comes down to a couple of things. One, it comes down to skills, right. And there's been a lot of discussion here this week around getting the right skills, the digital types of skill that are needed in this new economy. But the other piece that's more important, I think, around people is this cultural picot, right? So a big piece of our digital transformation has not been about technology, but is has been about a cultural change. Thinking differently, challenging the status quo. Working differently, right? That agile DevOps. Eliminating that fear of failure. Let's fail fast, let's learn from it in that continual incremental way of driving improvement. >> Right. And something we did when Greg and I experimented with this. We actually didn't know how it was going to work out. To put the platform itself together, we created this concept called a Buildathon. >> Jeff: A Buildathon? >> A Buildathon. >> Jeff: Not a hackathon. >> So we have our team. We have ServiceNow. We have AWS. Microsoft, Dell, other partners in there. And we write code together. It's no Powerpoint. You're doing scrum sessions. And we basically created the platform in 230 days which is phenomenal when you think about it. From inception to briefing Greg and the CTO of our company, Dan Hushon, to saying it's open for business. >> Right. >> And, as Greg said, empowering people, getting them to work. But one thing we're doing is getting our partners to build with us. We call it co-creation. I know it's a little dicey term if you take that the wrong way. But they're having fun with it because, instead of getting all caught up in contractuals and, "What am I going to make on this?", it's like, "Let's go try some things and build together "and then go, oh, well, I made that water glass "and I can go price this in here and everybody "understands what they're going to make in it "as a business." And it's huge. It transforms the workforce. Our partner network loves it. They're lined up to get into the framework. And, like Greg says, it's re-energized our workforce. It's been huge. >> It's interesting, the whole DevOps conversation. So all these terms, Moore's Law, et cetera, have a very specific application. But I think it's much more interesting in the more general application of that method. Whether it's Moore's Law and this presumption that we're just going to keep getting better, faster, cheaper, and driving forward. Or we really do have switches. No, we're not going to do a big old MRD, and we're not going to do a big giant PRD, and spread this thing out, and start our build, and someday down the road, hope to deliver something. It's like, "Let's start delivering now." >> Right. Gone are the days of those big requirements, and then go way, and then the big reveal. And, oh no, we missed all this. Right? It's got to be that more interactive, collaborative module way. >> Right. And the thing about the people... You know, we go to a ton of shows, right? Everyone's automation's going to take. But I've never heard anyone say, "We're overstaffed." That we have more people qualified in these new areas than we need. I mean, there's still such a demand for people across the board. Whether it's truck-driving or it's... >> It's unlocking the power of those people. Just to kind of share an example, when we went through the pilot for this to go get the funding, we took basically a womb-to-tomb situation where we would go do infrastructure to service a platform and have it in a client's hand for business. In the past, that would take us 2100 hours and eight teams and 53 hand-offs. In seven weeks, we've proved we could orchestrate that all the way through the last mile, getting to the client's network in two hours and 14 minutes to where the client could log in. >> Wow, that's a game-changer. >> It is a game-changer. But you free up those resources then to help that customer understand how to leverage that application and change their business versus all this toil of trying to figure out, "Well, did I get the network connected? "Well, who knows how to do the firewalls?" Everything is code. >> Right. >> And that's really, I said it earlier, we're really going towards business code, right? Because that's what John's talking about, is getting business processes code, and then empowering people to have that situational awareness. >> And then, hopefully, opening up their minds to, "Oh, my goodness. "If I can do this that easily, "what else can I do? "What else can I do." So, Tim, you've got an interesting background. Not that ServiceNow is not exciting. But you were involved in a very exciting business for years and years at Cape Canaveral. So what did you do there and what lessons did you learn there that you can apply right now? >> That's a great question. So it was actually an honor to support our country in that way. I was the IT director at Cape Canaveral for 12 years and supported Atlas, Titan, and Delta rocket launches for commercial and military purposes. But what I learned there a lot was two key things: systems engineering... That's almost like DevOps for aerospace and defense. It is people really building a system together and understanding what they have to achieve. The other thing is command and control. And that sounds a little rigid in today's world of agile. But when Greg and I talked about Platform DXC, what we felt is, we need and control system for business. Right? That has a complete loop. And we're going to talk about this Thursday at 1:30? >> 1:30. >> Right. So we took a lot of those constructs and we didn't even select ServiceNow when we put the platform together. We'd been a good partner with them. But then we said, "You know what? "They have a market-leading solution. "They're going to fit into the orchestration "of business." And then, there's an intelligence pillar, and an automation pillar. But we're seeing huge gains. Every client we get in front of is like, "Wow, we didn't think about that." And we also have, our partners are actually wanting to put their IP into our platform so people can just consume it and we could wrap another service wrapper around it. So it kind of turns into an IT marketplace in a way. So we're pretty excited about it. >> I'd love to just kind of drill down on the command and controls. Interesting. I talked to a company a couple of weeks ago and they were in aviation. And the guy's like, "You know, in aviation, "if they want to innovate around ticketing "or AV systems in the planes, "they can innovate all day long. "It doesn't really matter if somebody "can't print their ticket if it doesn't come up "on their phone." But in terms of the safety, it's not to say, in terms of the regs, and the maintenance, of the aircraft. It's super-rigid. You can't take risks. I would imagine at Cape Canaveral, although, some missions have people, some don't, it's still big, expensive missions and you really aren't failing fast... >> We actually move pretty quick, believe it or not. You can build a rocket in six months. They'll fly it in and you can erect it and test it in thirty days and launch, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. And a rocket's a lot of hardware and software, right? What they have is that value stream, through systems engineering and situational awareness. So, for example, they know every time a torque wrench is used, who used it. So if it went out of calibration, they can immediately go back and say it was used on this guidance system, on that rocket. We need to go back and check it before it launches. And it's really a pedigree. You know, who was the tech? Were they assigned? Did they have the right skills? Did they capture the data for the test? And you really have a pedigree. And we've actually built some of that into the Platform DXC. We call it the Digital Thread, which is something we'd worked on with the Air Force. So if you take compliance, right, and you have this thread of everything that's occurred, whether it's the people, an asset, an application, you have a thread. So you look at compliance radically different. So we capture a lot of telemetry, whether it's technical, business, or security. And that's where the intelligence pillar has this whole AI engine and machine learning and things to just start pivoting radically. So it's really a closed-loop system which is what a rocket has. The airplane that probably everybody in this room flew here in, right? It's always sensing itself and adjusting. And if it has a failure potentially coming up, it notifies Boeing before that plane lands that they need something to go look at. That's what we're trying to do here for business. >> It's funny. Another interview, this gal came. She was a lawyer. She was a homicide detective. And we talked to her about chain of possession. What an important concept chain of possession is. And I'm just curious about how cumbersome was that before when you started versus with the tools that we have now in terms of sensors and networks, and basically unlimited networking and unlimited storage? What percentage of it really was chain of command versus actually doing things, and that kind of followed along? >> I think you asked a question, how cumbersome was it? I think it was so difficult that, in many cases, it was not there. Right? So you had these big gaps. And you didn't know what happened and you didn't have the integration of the data. And now, in today's world, with these more real-time cloud-based, integrated systems, you're able to get that at, more and more, a commoditized price. It's no longer as expensive and difficult to get that. It's being commoditized where, in the past, in some cases, you didn't have it because it was too hard or too expensive. >> Right. So you didn't have that closed-loop kind of feedback mechanism to make sure that things go well. >> Tim: You needed people and paper. >> Yeah. >> Alright, so I can't believe we're, like, May 9th. The year's halfway gone. So what's next up in the balance of 2018 on this journey? If we talk a year from now, what are we going to be talking about? >> Yeah, so our strategy for this year ahead of us is really to continue driving Bionics, or intelligent automation across our whole business unit. So DXC, the world's leading largest independent services company across infrastructure, apps, and BPS. So we're transforming how we deliver and deploying that at scale. So intelligent automation at scale across your business. The second key piece for us this year is to work across all of our offerings and our industry solutions to ensure that they're built for operations and built on Platform DXC so all that efficiency, effectiveness, automation is built into the offerings. So that what we have ahead of us for this year. Alright. Should be fun. And it has been so far. We'll watch Elon Musk's car keep going through space because that's very entertaining. >> Tim: It is pretty cool. >> Well, what's cool, too, is that everyone's excited to watch the launches. They're going to get up at six in the morning and count it down and it is very cool. Alright, Tim, Greg, thanks again for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Thank, Jeff. >> Alright, Tim and Greg. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE from ServiceNow Knowledge2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching.

(click and snap) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group here in Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park. Happy to have with me Mike Franco, who's the principal solutions architect with Virtustream. Mike, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. Thanks for having me, and this is a terrific event. It really is. I mean to be here with one of our first channel partners, and by that I mean Winslow Group has been part of Dell for many, many years. They now sell the whole Dell EMC platform with the acquisition last year. And Virtusteam, we opened up a channel partnership just a few months ago, and they were one of the first to join. And here I am in front of hundreds of clients. This is a great opportunity. >> All right, that's great. So we've talked to Scott Winslow, his organization, some of the partners. So, I understand a lot about the Dell relationship. How WTG has been kind of expanding into cloud. Virtustream. Tell us why there's a channel partner now. What that means, and what you look to for somebody like Winslow Group. >> Well, Winslow Group opens up a lot of clients for us, okay? And we need to sell through those partners. Most of these clients are running operations, maybe in the small midsize business, which are really perfect candidates for what we do. Virtustream provides a managed cloud. So unlike the Amazons, the Googles, and the Azures which are great solutions, we're finding clients and saying, "Hey, that was good." But as we start moving to these mission critical applications. The applications that are running my business. We need a managed service. We need performance. We need IO type of critical workloads to be run in a more secure and performance- laden type of cloud. >> Yeah, Jeremy Burton gave the opening remarks. The CMO of Dell. The Dell family really has a large portfolio. I look at kind of the hybrid and multi-cloud world these days, and from a Dell standpoint, you know, VMware has a number of solutions, including VMware on AWS. Dell was working with Microsoft on the Azure (mumbles) solutions. How does Virtustream fit into the overall portfolio? How do you help position, you know, where that fits, okay? Get the mind share and (stutters) the users? >> Great question. I mean, back in May, we announced a connection, okay? So our Cloud Connect, which is vRealized into our stream based clouds. Extreme is our cloud management platform, and a technology that we use to run our off prem clouds. So clients now have the capability through vRealize automation to recognize our cloud into revision, and to modify and manage their workloads through that. We also announced in May, a partnership with our sister company Pivotal. Okay, on their Cloud Foundry. So we now have in Virtustream Enterprise Cloud, the capability to run Cloud Foundry in a managed fashion. Okay, again, Cloud Foundry is a technology that a lot of developers will be using to build applications, but it also runs those applications. And now that those applications are becoming stateful and a critical part of their business, they're looking to somebody to manage that. And now we have the capability. And then we talk about the rest of the EMC portfolio, where Native Hybrid Cloud is a package solution that's built on vRacks or vRails, right? Dell's converged black forms with the Native Hybrid Cloud or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, lay it right on top of it with the tools to be able to manage it. That's sold directly to a client, and we have the capability as Virtustream to manage those. So now the client can have these on-client premise solutions, as well as being able to tether back to our enterprise cloud. Our Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. >> Yep. Mike, we saw in the storage industry, there's lots of different solutions, because there's lots of different needs. I find there is no typical cloud strategy when it comes to most companies. But when you're talking to users, whether it be at this event or you know, out talking to customers, you know, why are they coming to Virtustream? What are the big questions they're asking you? What are the challenges that they see, and how do you help them? >> So, I see most of the time they come to us is because at these types of events, they are clients that are delighted with Dell EMC technologies, right? Dell EMC is a leader in almost every product that they sell, okay? And not only that, but the customer satisfaction, the client care service that Dell EMC provides is second to none. We're an extension of that, okay? We have the ability to manage either on prem, or of prem, and that gray area in between in helping them enable to get to the cloud. So, it really has opened up a lot of doors for Virtustream, and yes the solutions are endless. But we had the capability to manage that for them on their prem, and we've been very successful doing it. >> Great. Mike, we know SAP was one of those solutions that really Virtustream made its name on. Well, I know you continued to work on that. Can you give us, you mentioned Cloud Foundry. What are some of the applications? What are some of the big use cases that your customers are having success with? >> So in June we announced the Virtustream Healthcare Cloud. Okay, so what is that? That's our enterprise cloud, now tailored specifically for the healthcare compliance. So it's HIPAA compliant. And also, we're managing some of the more critical applications. The healthcare environment is not cloud native, okay? It's still based on the platform too, right? They virtualized the client server, the three-tiered architecture database, web and app server type of environments that the systems have reckoned, okay? We're expanding into electronic medical records, EMRs, critical client patient care, some analytics for medication. So we're moving into those other areas that's complimenting the SAP work that we're doing. >> Okay, well Mike, appreciate you giving us the updates on Virtustream. Thanks so much for joining us here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference. (click and snap)

>> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. And we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group and happy to have another user here at the event, Wayne Dunn, who's the SVP and CTO of HarborOne Bank. Wayne's, thanks so much for joining me. >> Happy to be here. >> All right, Wayne, tell us a little bit about HarborOne Bank, your role there, how long you've been there, what you work on. >> Sure, HarborOne Bank is the largest state-chartered cooperative bank in New England. I've been there about ten years in my role as senior vice president and chief technology officer. I'm responsible for all of the on-premise technology, as well as managing our hosted solutions that provide services to our customers. >> Yeah, I think back. I'm not a native New Englander, but when I moved up here, all the banks I belonged to eventually got merged into megabanks and things like that. So talk about yours. >> We actually started as a credit union. We're almost 100 years old, actually. We started as Brockton Credit Union and became HarborOne Credit Union. And then back three years ago, we became a bank. >> Okay. >> And now we're actually publicly traded on the NASDAQ. That happened a couple of years ago. >> Well, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> That's excellent. So the financial industry, undercompliance issues... >> Tremendous. >> Security is a major concern. You've been there ten years. Give us a little look back. What do you think about what you do today versus even five years ago? >> Sure. Going back five years ago, the main mission was really just to deliver those services to our customer. Of course, security was already a big part of what we did in terms of protecting customer information. But given what's happening in the cyber security realm these days, it's become a full-time job just focusing on cyber security, alone, and information security. It's a major part of what we do. >> Yeah, so it's interesting. I've talked to some very large financial institutions and they're like, "We're becoming software companies." And I was at the Amazon Show. There's a very large, well-known bank that gave away the Alexa Dots and they're doing skill sets. What's the role of technology in your company? How does all this digital transformation impact you? >> Really, it's providing a new level of service in the digital domain to customers that aren't traditional go-to-the-branch customers. We do have a large part of our customer base still wants to go into that branch, they have a personal relationship with that banker. But as you can imagine, we have younger customers that, they really just want that same level of service, but they want it provided through mobile banking, online banking. And they expect, as I said, that same level of service. So really the challenge today is to provide that level of service through our mobile application. And one of the nice things about the way technology has evolved is that in the past, only large financial institutions could provide the types of services that you see. Whereas today, because of the way technology's progressed, we've been able to provide that same level of service, those same types of technologies. And again, the examples are mobile banking with mobile deposit, or being able to instant issue a debit card for our customers in any one of our branch locations. >> Yeah, Wayne, can you give us... What's the dynamic between the business and the technology in your organization? >> Before I came to HarborOne Bank, I was in the consulting world in the technology consulting world. And one of the approaches I always took, as many people do in that world, is you need to have the business' stakeholders, they need to have ownership whenever you do any technology project. You can't do technology for technology's sake. It has to serve a business goal, a business mission. And I brought that same approach to HarborOne. So at HarborOne, when we approach technology, it's all of the stakeholders at the table, there's a business purpose for what we do, and the business, as well as the technologists, are driving the implementation, whatever it may be. And again, a good example of that is when we started to introduce our paperless account-opening process. We had people from our operations division, our retail division, as well as my technology division, sitting in a room and really going through what that meant. The interesting thing about the process was it became a process where it wasn't just about online account opening and instant issuing a debit card, it was about, "Hey, now that we look at this technology, we actually can use this technology to do account maintenance. Or we can take the paper processes we used to do, and we can change those over to an electronic process." So it really is always a collaborative effort with the business and with my technology group. >> Yeah Wayne, what brings you to this event? >> Well, first of all, the Winslow Group has been a big partner of HarborOne for many, many years. In fact, we were one of the first organizations that rolled out the Compellent SAN technology with them. One of the things I always try to do, along with my team, is to get out and explore, not only what's happening with technology that we use in terms of the road map, it's also about learning about new technologies and what we might be able to leverage as an organization to improve customer service. Right now, it's about taking a hybrid approach between on-prem and hosted solutions. That's something that we're really exploring in order to become more nimble, in order to be able to provide the support the business needs at any given time without having to ramp up or do a tremendous expenditure in terms of on-premise technology. So really, we're taking a look at how can we blend our solutions with hosted solutions to provide a better level of service. >> Yeah, so Wayne, understand, public cloud sounds like it isn't too much in the picture for you. But the service-provided hosted model, what do you look for? >> Mostly private cloud >> What are the challenges? >> And again, the challenges are really not so much around being able to provide the application or the support that we need. It truly is more around security, information security. As you know, here in Massachusetts, we have the Massachusetts data security laws. And any company that we deal with in terms of being a hosted provider, whether they're in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or somewhere else in the country, they still need to assure us they comply with that same level of security when we deal with them. It's around making sure that they have the same protections, the same level of business continuity and data recovery, things of that nature. So those are the things we have to look for in a cloud provider. >> Yeah Wayne, I'm curious, as a CTO, how do things like, really, the digitization of money impact what you're doing. I think not only things like blockchain, but these days I know I'm using my phone to purchase things more. Cash seems way less in use. So what is that impact? >> And again, we're providing a lot of those technologies that allow you to do that. Our biggest challenge is that a lot of our competitors aren't banks. >> I know. >> They're not regulated the same way we are. So they have more flexibility in terms of, not only how they can market, but how they provide these services. So really it's more, the challenge is really in the competition. And technologies allow that as well, so. >> Alright Wayne, really appreciate you sharing what's happening in your business and how technology is impacting that. Loved digging in with all the practitioners here at the user group where they're learning from their peers. This is a WTG Dell EMC User Group and you're watching theCUBE.

>> I'm Stu Miniman With The Cube. Joined here by Ed Palmer who's the COO of Winslow Technology Group. We're at their Dell EMC User Group. Ed Thanks so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Alright so Ed, we talked to Scott earlier and Scott gave us a lot on the history of the company. You recently joined Winslow Technology Group, >> I did >> but you have history with Scott. So, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you over to WTG. >> Sure, so as Scott may have told you we worked together earlier in our career and I was a System Engineer. He was the Account Exec. We worked very effectively together. And we've reunited later in our careers. >> Alright and tell us a little bit about your role as a COO. You were an SE, I believe that's a part of what you have in your work. >> Yes So, the way we've defined my role. I have responsibility for sales operations, for professional services, solutions architecture, and marketing. >> Alright, so luckily things aren't changin' that much in the industry at all. Wait do you know, do the companies you're working with they haven't open acquired since you came on board right? So what is this, the pace of change and the breadth and depth of what's happening in the industry, how does that impact your organization? >> Great question. So Obviously the industry is changing all the time. It's a very dynamic industry. And obviously that has an impact on our operational effectiveness. So one of the things I'm interested in is how do we streamline operations? How do we work more effectively with our partners? How do we fully maximize the partner programs and fully leverage all of the eccentrics? >> Yeah, gosh, I have to think. We were talking to Jeremy Burton earlier and said you know you don't want to do five year planning. You can maybe do two year planning. And really it needs to be much more on a granular level. Every company they're dealing with they have different financial years. Their incentive plans change all the time. What's kind of the north star for your team? How do they make sure they kind of have a steady push on things but are flexible and can act with the changes that happen? >> Sure. So let me start by saying the Winslow Team has experienced phenomenal growth over the past three to five years. And we're looking to continuing to extend that growth over the next three to five years. What we do is we put together business plans and we put together plans by partner. And to your point, those plans are forward looking, but they're also broken out by quarter. So we're actually quarterly driven and we drive our demand generation activities around those plans. >> Alright Ed, talk about the skill set and how do you keep up with training for the organization? >> That's a great question. So as a Dell EMC Titanium Partner, it is quite a challenge to keep up with all of the training certification requirements. We actually got a jump on it earlier this year and we've defined our entire training plan for the year. In fact, I would say we're about 80% complete with those plans. They do require a lot of time, but they're important to maintaining titanium level. >> Yeah, So, there's the requirements that you have from your partners, but then, Winslow Technology Group usually is pretty early on a lot of technologies. Scott in his opening remarks this morning, talked about Compellent, Hyper-Converged, Hybrid Cloud, being some of the early edges. How does your organization play a part of that and how do you kind of do the communication with the field and the customers to know not only what to jump on but how to get your whole team embracing and pushing those items? >> Sure. So what we like to say is we are not trying to be all things to all customers. And I would say we are differentiated with our approach. So what we look to do is define game-changing technologies. You may have heard Scott talk about that. And what we look to do is provide deep expertise in those technologies. So that drives our training certification plan and we're looking to fully develop our Pre-sales Solution Architects and Post-Sales Professional Services Consultants to be experts in those technologies. >> Alright and I'm curious Ed, What's your hiring plan like? Where do you find good people? How do you maintain and keep some great people? >> Sure. Most of it, quite frankly, is through word of mouth through our employees. And I would say the majority of our employee base are through referrals. So that's typically how we're finding great people. >> Alright. We've talked earlier about how there's no shortage of change going on there. What's exciting you about what's happening in the industry and anything that concerns you about what's happening? >> Well we've talked about the dynamic nature of the industry, the constant change. I think what's really exciting is the whole move to Hyper-Converged. We've seen a lot of interest in Hyper-Converged Solutions. The move to Cloud obviously. We've seen a lot of interest in point technologies like software-defined data center, software-defined networking, and I think what's exciting for us is working with our breadth of partners to really understand how those technologies and solutions address the business needs of our customers. >> Alright, Ed want to give you the final word. What were you hoping to gain and when you come into this event and as you look at the customers, what are you hoping that they take away from this event? >> Sure, for me personally, this is my first Winslow Users Group Event. I think it's phenomenal. And I think for our customers it's an opportunity to be exposed to the technology, to ask questions of our subject matter experts, and I think come away from the event thinking about how the technology can be implemented in their environment to maximize their business. >> Alright, well, Ed Palmer, welcome to your first event. It's our first time here. Thank you so much for having us. We'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group. You're watching The Cube.

(shutter clicking) >> I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group happy to have one of users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this because it's kind of a fun event for us. >> Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? >> It's my third event. I was actually a speaker last year. >> Excellent. >> This year, I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions, and being social with the rest of the people who do business with Winslow. >> Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? >> Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. >> That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So, the good news, Boston University, I think, we don't need to explain what the university is. But what are some of the drivers happening at the university level. Changes happening, changes happening in every industry. But what, specifically, is happening there that kind of impacts your world? >> Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch-up for the last few years. And we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. >> Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit? >> Yeah. >> Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? Obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone. But we know how fast in higher education the fees are going up. And therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. >> Oh we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus and move them up to the cloud and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OP-X. And it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. >> I've talked to lots of, kind of, K through 12 environments. And the students there, obviously, have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit, faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What do they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? >> Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses. So it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tide between what faculty want to do and their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year. And they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. >> Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really the kind of digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? >> Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XD series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students. And that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation where they're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and Ph.D. Students. >> Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs, and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? >> A little bit. BU has about ten MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning, and like every MOOC, it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet, so they're not really worth anything if students take them. But we want to get to that point where that is the case. We see the value. We see that's what the students want. We want to make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. >> Okay, I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list? What would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster, you know, beyond, I'm sure cost is always a concern, but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? >> Ease of manageability. Right now, a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge win for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. >> All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? >> I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future. That's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. >> And when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metrics? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? >> Well for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in. And I was amazed at how quickly my system administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. >> Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing with us >> Thank you. >> the journey that BU and your organization are going through. You're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. (shutter clicking)

(loud click) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this theCUBE and we're here at The Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have with us Rick Gouin, who is the CTO of WTG. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about, as CTO of really a channel partner for a lot of technology vendors, we talked to Scott earlier about the solutions that you help put together, what's your role inside the organization, how long you've been there, what's your background? >> Sure, so I started at the Winslow Technology Group four years ago, at this event, actually. Prior to joining Winslow, I was at Dell, as a Enterprise Technologist. Came to Dell via Compellent, and prior to that, I was on the customer side, a technology director at a large insurance company down in Hartford. >> Okay, so obviously, Winslow Technology Group started very much with Compellent, has gone through the maturations of Compellent into Dell, Dell now into EMC, so, tell us a little bit about your role, what kind of things do you look at to help pick what technologies and expansion that you go into with the organization. >> So, obviously, Dell has a very broad portfolio and there's just not enough technology expertise to know everything about everything, so we have to spend a good amount of time keeping an eye on the market and sort of focusing in our resources on what we want to gain expertise in and what we want to really bring to our customers. So it's a lot about where we feel like these different market spaces are moving and we deal with a relatively specific segment in that our customers fall into a couple of different profiles and we really have that in mind when we're looking at the various technologies. We're really trying to picture this group of people that's here, and what do we think they would get excited about? >> So we're in an interesting state of the industry today. On the one hand, there's no shortage of challenges for storage. Storage is always one of those things that we need expertise, we need to fix things, yet on the other hand, companies want simplicity. They don't want to think about it, I'm deploying hyper-converged or cloud environments where storage is in there, so how do you look at that especially with your background and WTG's background, as it fits in the entire picture? >> Yeah, so coming from Compellent myself, and coming from a strong Compellent reseller, we're obviously a little bit biased when it comes to storage. With that said, as we continue to talk to different customers and they come to these inflection points where they've got to make a decision about refreshing a traditional storage environment versus taking a look at a hyper-converged environment, we're finding more and more customers are willing to take that chance on a hyper-converged environment and like you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to the simplicity. A lot of it comes down to a specific skill set that they see you have to have for a storage environment that you might be able to not worry about anymore when you go to a hyper-converge environment. >> Storage has always been not only complicated at the individual level, but you look at a company like Dell and they've got a portfolio, and it's because no one solution can fit everywhere. There's price points, there's scalability, there's featured functionality. How do you look at where we are in the market today, how do you help simplify that portfolio beyond just kind of HCI? >> Yep, and you've really pinpointed I think a big part of the value we provide to our end customers, cause you see this huge, broad portfolio, lot of different things that do the same thing, and so we really try to guide that decision-making process in a couple of different ways. We think that, like you mentioned, there's a different fit, all of these different technologies have their place, no one is right for everyone, and there's room for all of them. We don't think hyper-converge is going to completely replace midrange storage, we think that there's room for both, different customers are going to want different things. A lot of the decision making comes down to one, where are they in their life cycle of the gear they have? Switching platforms, say, to hyper-converge requires replacing perhaps some storage, perhaps some servers. Where are they in their depreciation cycle? Are those things least assets? All those different things really come into play, so it's not always a purely technical discussion. There's a lot of different things that factor in. But we feel like, every time it makes sense to look at all the options, and a vendor like us, like partnered with Dell, we can provide a solution in the traditional infrastructure, that you're used to using today. We can give you the pricing for it, and what the implementation would look like, and then we can give you the same thing on a hyper-converge infrastructure. Tell you how the implementation would go, let you compare those costs, talk about the pros and the cons, and then you can make a really informed decision. And we feel like, without taking a look at both, and doing some actual metrics-based analysis of the two options, you're not going to be able to make an informed decision. >> Rick, over the last decade or so, virtualization has really been one of those waves that's driven a lot of the technology discussions we have. It feels like, well, of course Vmware and virtualization are by no means going away. The new wave of cloud in all of its forms, there's containerization, all of these new things kind of bringing on this next generation. What's exciting you and what as a CTO do you look at and say, "Oh, boy. Here we go again! "We're going to have to go fix all these problems "like we did last time?" >> So two things you said really jumped out at me. First, I hear from a lot of my customers a push to get everything into the cloud. At the same time, I'm starting to see the other end of that curve with things coming back in. I think a lot of our customers are finding a sweet spot in hybrid cloud solutions, whether we've got an on-prem component coupled with some cloud storage, or some off-prem components. We think that's the sweet spot, and that really allows us to take advantage of the key...really, the key thing for cloud infrastructures is that elasticity, right? It allows us to put our elastic workloads out there, and then once they settle down into a predictable sort of state, we can bring them back on-prem, where we really want them, anyway. So, we think, we see a lot of our customers settling down into a hybrid sort of scenario. Luckily, whether it's Dell Nutanix, VxRail, they've all got great solutions for on-prem coupled with off-prem stuff. The other thing that's really interesting to me is these alternate hypervisors. I love seeing the adoption of options, I think we've seen a marketplace that has been dominated by an 800 pound gorilla for a long time, and it's a great, super powerful portfolio, basically ubiquitous. I love seeing a couple different options that can bring some actual different business value and making customers think about, maybe I don't just go status quo here, here's an opportunity to maybe do something a little different. >> Rick, really appreciate you sharing with us everything going on in your environment and we'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. You're watching theCUBE. (loud click)

>> Hi I'm Stu Miniman with The Cube, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Conference here at the Hotel Commonwealth in Boston. Happy to have with me Mike Berthiaume who is the northeast SE manager with Nutanix. Mike it's great to see ya. >> And I'm happy to be here Stu. Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> So Mike, I've actually known you for a bunch of years. We've been in some of the local user groups, actually moderated a panel you were on a couple of years ago. Talk to us a little bit about Nutanix's channel and of course the relationship with Winslow. >> Excellent, I think Nutanix's channel is very strong. As you know, I think a lot of our viewers know, all of our Nutanix sales are done through the channel. So we are a 100% channel focused company. The Winslow Technology Group has been a tremendous channel partner for us in New England and other parts of the country as well growing their business down in the southeast and the New York Metro area. But they've been fantastic. And what makes them a little bit interesting, you know, they are very focused on Dell EMC, right? So being part of the Dell EMC portfolio opens up quite a few opportunities I think for Nutanix. And it really I think helps Dell EMC complete their portfolio with our technology. >> Sure, Mike absolutely. We're going to be talking to Scott Winslow today. You know, been using Dell, and I think was one of the earliest of the Dell XC customers out there. What is it for the customers that they look for, I guess specifically for Dell XC from a partner like Winslow Technology Group? >> I think from, you know, customers are looking for a partner who has their best interest at heart, right? So the value at a reseller as in specifically Winslow is going to their customers as trusted advisors, as consultants, understanding business challenges, and how to they can solve those with technology. And Nutanix is a natural fit, specifically Dell XC, due to the simplicity, you know, the non disruptive operational procedures that we can bring in. And that's some of the new exciting stuff around our enterprise cloud operating system that we recently talked about at our .NEXT conference. I think the vision that Nutanix holds is in lockstep with what Winslow is trying to do for its customer base here in New England. >> Mike, I want you to talk a little bit about your customers that you're meeting with. What do they care about? What are the drivers there? What are things like converged, hyperconverged, and cloud? Does that mean something to them, or how is it, how do they say it in their business terms? >> Yeah I think when we talk to customers, most customers today, almost all customers, know what converged infrastructure is. Hyperconverged I would say is a little bit less than a converged, but most customers are educated and understand the concepts. I think when we start talking to customers and educate them about the XC platform in Nutanix and open their eyes to this concept of enterprise cloud or enterprise cloud operating system, it changes the discussion. We see, typically I'll see a lot of light bulbs go off and a lot of, "I didn't realize that Nutanix could do that," or "I didn't realize you guys had a native integration with public cloud" or we're focused in the application stack which is again some of the announcements that we made last week, or a few weeks ago now, at .NEXT. >> Yeah, specifically around cloud, what's the, I find there is no typical state out there. Companies are all over the map trying to figure out kind of hybrid or multicloud. Give us a couple examples, probably can't give us customer names, but how are they integrating cloud? How are they building their environments to be more cloud-like, what we at Wikibon call true private cloud? What are you seeing out there in the field? >> It's a great question. So I think there is a sort of a misconception from my view that cloud is purely lift and shift. I'm going to take my applications, and I'm going to move them into public cloud or somebody else's environment. In reality, cloud is a way of doing business, right? It's a way, it's a new way of thinking about IT. We talk about mode one and mode two applications are your legacy and your more stateless applications that probably belong in a public cloud environment. And what Nutanix brings is the ability now to manage an environment in that new way, focusing both on your traditional legacy applications, but helping you move to those mode two applications, partnering with public cloud providers, specifically Google. So that's the conversation we're really having is don't think of cloud as lift and shift. Think of it as a new way of doing business. Let's figure out how cloud is going to benefit your business and align to the business style you're looking to achieve. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the lines we've heard many times is, "Cloud is not a destination. Cloud is really an operating model for many of the users." Last thing, just what's kind of the feeling you get from people in IT today? In the keynote this morning, discussion was, "IT kind of went from a call center to supporting the business and now IT is a driver for the business." Is that what you're seeing? Where is kind of the typical IT mindset? What are they thinking about? What's exciting them, and what's worrying them? >> Yeah I think first and foremost, digital transformation has quickly become kind of the cliche term, right? Maybe one of the most hated terms in IT these days. But it's a reality I think for most folks, and understanding what digital transformation means in the business now understanding that, again IT is actually driving business value in every way. And how can they get to the level where IT's no longer in the way, you know. Long duration projects are a thing of the past. It's a move forward mentality now. Continue to push the boundaries, but yet keep, obviously keep the lights on and ensure that we're not going to disrupt existing business processes that are tried and true. So it's kind of a tough paradigm that we're in right now. And again I think Nutanix really helps because we bring that non disruptive perspective to being able to get to that next level. >> Alright, Mike Berthiaume, really appreciate you joining us here. Nutanix been a great role and working with partners like Winslow Technology Group. You're watching The Cube. We've got lots more coverage here from the WTG User Group Event.