>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by siliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is siliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. It's the 12th year of the event, the fifth year we've actually had theCUBE here. Dave Vellante, my boss, was here the first year. Every other year, I've been kind of manning it solo. Great community here, I talked to a lot of users and really looking at, you know, some of the transitions that are happening in the industry. This event is all about virtualization and Cloud, and to help me put an exclamation point on everything we've been looking at here, and what's happening in the industry, happen to welcome back to the program Rob Strechay who is the SVP of product at Zerto, someone I've known for longer than I even realize, and you know, been on the program many times, But first time since you've been at Zerto. >> Yeah, first time since I was at Hewlett-Packer Enterprise. So, I'm glad to join you guys here, and great event, glad to be able to get down here today. >> You know, Zerto, company we've known for many years. I happen to know one of the earliest investors in the company, and you know, when I look at two of the biggest industry shows, when you talk about Virtualization and Cloud, it's VMworld and it's Amazon's Reinvent show. >> Right. And, I remember like the first or second year we did Amazon Reinvent, the Zerto booth was like right behind us, and so your company that really spans that gammon, helping customers with that, so I want to get your viewpoint, you talked about why people come here, but what are you hearing from the users? What are some of the big challenges they're facing, and how are they looking to manage some of those transitions? >> Yeah, I think it's really critical to have events like this that are, you know, a lot of different vendors that are here because I think when we see a number of companies going out and looking, and I was with a customer down in New York City yesterday, the software for FinTac. And what they were looking at is, how do we leverage multi-cloud? It becomes very important. They're looking at, it's not going to just be Amazon, it's not just going to be Azure, it's not going to be VMC on AWUS, they're looking at how they're going to have a multi-cloud strategy. And I think that when, what we're hearing from customers is there's a lot of confusion in the market, and I think that's why this program and others are really great at cutting through what is real, what's not real, how do you look for the ability to have that data mobility between clouds but with security. Especially today's like Privacy Day, you know, on the 25th, so, you know, you start to look at it and go, hey, security's a big thing, and a big theme from what people were saying here today too. >> Yeah, and one of the user interviews I really loved today talked about one of the biggest challenges he saw, he said, gosh, security, think about the Intel discussion there, what's that going to mean? And he actually said, performance issue actually doesn't fit, isn't a big deal for him from an architectural standpoint. Security? Oh my gosh, he's in healthcare. (laughs) If he's in violation, or if patient information gets out there, you know, this is the kind of things that put companies out of business. >> Absolutely, yeah, and I think that's what we're hearing. I mean, especially yesterday, it was okay, how do you layer encryption on top of your solution? How do you utilize the different types of secure transfers? How do you make sure the data is secure? There's a lot about that resiliency of the data, and making sure you can get it back, and it's immutable for that matter. >> Yeah, one of the things when we talk to customers, it's funny, in the industry we're always arguing as to what's the right terminology? It's like, I still get to have a company that said they had a convergence problem that they were trying to fix, and also it's like, hyper-cloud, multi-cloud, no, they have a Cloud strategy. And yes, they're using sass, yes, they're using public Cloud, and yes, almost everybody's got something in their data center. How do we get our arms around it? How do I have the services that work with me wherever I am, whether that's data protection, security, replications. So where's Zetro fit in that discussion, and how are customers doing at getting their arms around these challenges? >> So I think a lot of when I'm out talking to the CIO's and the VP's of infrastructure and having those conversations, a lot of what we help them understand is here's where you need to go, and here's the choices you need to make. Are you going to use Azure? Do you have an EA with Microsoft? Because you've probably been paying for Azure credits that you're not using, so start there. It's simple, it cost you nothing extra. Get your feet wet, dip your feet in there. We see a lot of customers of ours that use DR's as a service as the first stepping stone to getting into the Cloud. It's a nice, easy way in, they can get their feet wet, they can test out the performance, the security, they can do user acceptance testing without actually having to go there. They can also get a realistic view of the cost. I think that was talked about earlier today too. With some of the Amazon stuff is that really, you have to understand the cost. It's not the same as owning it on Prime. But then again you're not having the on Prime anymore, so if you can get away with that, when we see people taking strategies, a lot of it is data center consolidation, but maybe now I'm down from six data centers to two. And I still need to have that third copy. Where do I put that third copy? Do I put it at another data center? Do I go to a manage service provider, cloud service provider, or do I go to the public cloud? So, what we try to do is offer them a platform, the Zerto platform, that can actually take them to all those different places. We can take them there and bring them back. Yes, people use use for DR, but really that data mobility and the data flexibility really helps them stay away from the vendor lock-in as well. >> What are you hearing from customers when they talk about vendor lock in? There's very few companies out there that do a good job at being, it's like, oh, the VM ware, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, we can actually help you across the board there. >> Rob: Yeah. >> How much is lock-in a concern, and how do you as a software company stay agnostic and still fit into all of those environments? >> Yeah, the staying agnostic is really tough because some people are nicer than others, you know, to work with, and you know you try to not pick your favorites, but a the same time, we let our customers drive us to where they are going. I think that when we started to look at the bigger picture, people start out, you know, Amazon's the 800 pound gorilla in the space, everyone tries Amazon first. Maybe they didn't like or have the experience they thought they would, it was a lot more work than they thought it was going to be, so they start to look at other options. So when we started out, in 2014 we've been shipping our to Amazon, DR to Amazon part of our platform. Now, over the last year, we've added in the go-to and go-back from Azure, and we'll soon release the next iteration of that next month that will take even further among and across those different platforms. And I think to your point, it's a how can we give our customers choice? If you want to use a manage service provider, such as an IBM where they're based on Cloud foundation from VMWare, you can use that. If you want to then go from there to Amazon, our product will actually enable you to do that. And I think that's what we can do is look at our customers, and they've, luckily enough, driven us to this heterogeneous cloud environment. >> I want to get your comment on something. When people talk about compute moving to a more utility model, but it's not the way utility was where if I'm getting energy, as a consumer, from one place or another, I don't care whether it's wind, solar, or coal, nuclear, because I'm just getting it. When I look at Cloud computing, even infrastructure's a service. There's things that need to happen. When I talk to most software companies, it's yes, I'm going to support across the board, but there's special integration. There's things that I can do to make Amazon better, Azure better, Google better, and it's all a little bit different, and even with things like cooper netties, it's not homonogizing IT. The big problem we see out there is IT is a heterogeneous mess. There's never killing anything, it's all add this and add this, and now we've got a bad episode of Hoarders. >> Yes. (laughing) >> Is what we got, so I'm curious from a customer standpoint and from a product standpoint, maybe you know you could talk a little bit about that. >> I think our customers have been very clear to us that's simplicity, and I think that's what you're getting at is that simplicity is job one for us. If we're not being simple about what we do, and we're not really trying to make it all that one platform, we're not doing our job. We're doing a disservice our customers. So our Azure product looks identical to our AWS looks identical to our IBM looks identical to one of my other cloud service provider's products. Looks the same as your on Prime VMWare to VMWare or VMWare to HyperV for that matter. I think that part of it is that we've taken an approach that, exactly that. We got to be heterogeneous, but we've got to make it all look the same and be the same user experience. So, I think what we as an industry can do better is really focusing on user experience and single platform to help across these because like you said, we have a customer, he uses both AWS and Azure. And he was on of our first customers on AWS and one of our first customers using our Azure product. He said that certain Linux systems actually run better on Azure than they did on Amazon, and that surprised him. But he was able to go up and test them out, put them up there, felt them over, and do them in a test bubble, and see how well they ran, and I think to your exact point it's that was a surprise to him, and I think it's that your mileage will vary with the different clouds, and being able to go there and test on them is very important 'cause you're going to find that, like he did, he's a smaller company, it's a refabrics manufacturer, TenCate, they really focused on having that multicloud strategy because for them, they didn't want to have all their eggs in one basket either, but they found that certain applications ran better on Azure, certain ran better on AWS, so they're going to have that multicloud strategy. >> Alright, Rob, help bring us home. What brings Zerto to an event like this, kind of user groups in general, to VTUG specifically? >> Yeah, so the VTUG, we've been a long term supporter of this, I think since pretty much the founding of the founding of the company, so one of the reasons is a lot of out customers come to... So, we want to support them getting more knowledge out there, obviously we get to reach more customers and more potential customers, but at the same time, it's about the community and building that community. We look for more, in fact, we're starting to do even local user groups of our own. We've seen that the user groups have fallen off, and in particular around disaster recovery, in the IT resiliency, there's really no place to go. You had ISACA, you had different organizations for certifications, but really, that community where I can go and understand what are my peers doing, and get that group learning is so important, and that's why we've been a long term supporter of this. >> Alright, well Rob Strechay, really appreciate you helping me wrap up, put an exclamation point on what's going on here at the show as well as in the industry are all the major changes happening, virtualization and Cloud. Make sure to check out TheCUBE.net for all of our coverage. We have a huge line up of 2018 events. Feel free to reach out to the team. As always, I'm really to get on Twitter, I'm just @stu, @-S-T-U, and thank you so much of watching, I'm Stu Miniman, and you've been watching theCUBE. (techno music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: From Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Always love at these user conferences, and we get to talk to a lot of the users, and we've had a bunch. Next user we have on the program is Erik Kurlanska, who's a systems engineer at MMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Erik. >> Thanks. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your background. You're coming down here from Maine. The people that run this event are also from Maine. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a nice event. I've been for the past four years, and I learn something new every year. It's a good time. It's a good networking moment for a bunch of people, and there's always something new on the horizon. That's what I like. >> So you're a systems engineer. >> Tell us a little bit about what you do in your role, the industry you're in, things like that. >> Yeah, I'm in the healthcare industry in Maine and like you said, what I do is basically one of the lead virtualization people in my group and we're just basically every day working on VMware and new products coming in, new applications, building them up and testing and that kind of great stuff. >> Can you give us just thumbnail sketches to kind of location, number of servers, number of people on your team? >> Erik: Sure, yeah. >> How do you manage it as to number of VMs or however? >> On our team right now there's three of us and that's just the virtualization team. We have a couple thousand VMs, probably 110 servers, Blades, all Cisco Blades nowadays. And that's the extent of what we have, and for storage we have many, many petabytes of storage. >> Okay, tell me. You're in healthcare. You've got virtualization. The good thing is, there's nothing changing in your environment, right? >> (laughs) Right. >> There's not new requirements from the business. I'm sure they're throwing tons of money at you, and the government stays completely out of your way. So what are some of the challenges you're facing? >> Exactly. The challenges there are, again, it's money. What can you do for such a small amount of money? Again, we're trying to find very good tools to monitor our everything, networking, servers, virtualization. That's one piece that we've had trouble in the past with a good tool to monitor everything across the board. We're just having a hard time trying to find that, to be honest, so it's a struggle. >> Yeah, tell me what tools have you worked through and what's the gap? I always love to hear, it's like, "Okay, hey vendors. "You're listening. Here's a user that saying you are failing "To meet the requirements that they have." So come on, give them product requirements. >> We've tried a few big ones, and we want a monitor. So for instance, from VMware, we've just stood up vRealize, We have vRealize Business, vRealize Operations, Log Insight, bringing all that in now and personally I think some of that should have been just part of the product to start. So it is what it is. But that's a whole subset of tools that we need just to manage our virtualization environment. We also have another tool called Turbonomic. We've used that for years, and it's done pretty well for us. But again on the networking side, that's a whole different department. So those guys have their own separate tools. They use WhatsUp Gold. They've had challenges with that, and all along the way, every different vendor, like we have Epic for one of our major EMRs, and they have their own sets of monitoring tools for just Epic, so it's tough to get one straight answer from one company. We also have another product called ControlUp. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. For all of them to give us one concise answer, it's nearly impossible. >> Yeah, unfortunately we have this joke that single pane of glass is spelled P-A-I-N. >> Exactly. >> Because that is what IT feels when they're trying to do this these days. If you were to have the magic wand out there, what are you looking for? Obviously it needs to be free and support everything, but what are some of the big gaps that you see? >> Part of it is, integration with the management interface tools. We have Cisco's UCS Manager. That's one interface. You have to go to manage this. You can't get there from here kind of thing. I'm from Maine, so. (Stu chuckles) You can't manage your Cisco stuff right from VMware, and then you have ControlUp that you need to go to another pane. There's just 10 panes of glass. You can spend all day looking at 10 different things and get eight to ten different answers. >> I thought vCenter should be at the center of a lot of things there. Don't most of the vendors kind of integrate well? I would think especially all the VMware products would have a similar look and feel now. >> They should. They should. >> They're just not meeting up to what they need to. >> I think they're trying with like Lifecycle Manager for instance from VMware. They're trying to get there, but it's not there yet. It really isn't. If you start greenfield, I would say, and you start with Lifecycle Manager, and you bring in all those products in one fell swoop, it'll probably work great, but for us, that hasn't been the case. >> Okay. Talk about what brings you to an event here. What have you seen so far? What interests you in the keynotes? When are you going to go to the breakouts? I'm sure the hallway conversations are of use. >> Sure. The hallway conversations are one of the big things for us because you meet people in the industry, a lot of them are doing the same thing, using the same tools, having the same problems, and it's great to talk about them and come up with solutions between ourselves and converse in that fashion. It's a great experience to come to these. You learn a lot from a lot of people. >> Any specific technologies or areas that you're specifically interested in digging into? >> So Hyper-Converged, we're trying to get into that a little bit more, and there's three or four major players, and we're evaluating all of them now. I've spoken to other people at other hospitals locally that have some Hyper-Converged, and they're happy with one product versus another, so I'm just trying to, pros and cons of that, see what we can. >> Let me ask, is there a certain business challenge just to simplify overall going into Hyper-Converged? Is the economics of it, the management of it, what's kind of the business objective to look at that space? >> We have a couple smaller hospitals, and they have a lot of legacy storage, a lot of legacy servers and Blades, and again, Hyper-Converged is a good fit for them because they can just plop everything in one unit and call it good, and so we're trying to do that for a couple smaller hospitals and kind of bring them into the fold that way. >> How does cloud fit in your overall picture, or does it fit into your discussion today? Cloud, the SaaS application, everybody's using some, public cloud regulations might be hurting you. But what is the cloud scenario for you? >> Right now we have just a few apps that are cloud-based. And that's it. Not a lot in the cloud because we're healthcare so far. >> Alright, Erik, anything else from kind of the hallway conversation that you're hearing, some of the big challenges you're seeing, or what people are excited about these days? >> I think right now the big thing is the Spectre/Meltdown thing. Nobody really knows what it's going to do. UCS, we're still waiting for Cisco to come out with firmware for the Blades and kind of to go through that testing. VMware came out with some patches, they pulled them back. So it's kind of a big mess, and it worries us a bit. However, all of our Blades, everything is RAM-bound basically for us. We even have most of our Blades have 768 gigs of RAM, but CPUs at 20%. The memory's 90% used, so that's what it is. >> So just if I hear you right, if all of a sudden they said, "Hey, you're going to get 30% less "performance there," you'd be like, "Yawn. That really didn't impact us." >> Exactly. >> It's more the security gaps that you need fixed now. >> And we can't fix them because the solution isn't there. So, yeah. >> Stu: Hoo, boy. >> It's tough. It's a new challenge every day. >> (laughs) Yeah, just last thing. How do you keep up with everything that's going on? >> Well that's, again, a great question. I think it's hard. It gets harder and harder, and they want you to do more with less every day. I'm not sure how we keep up, really. Get a tool that can do everything. That just doesn't exist yet. >> Erik Kurlanska, really appreciate you sharing with your peers, which is really a main function of a user group like this. We're thrilled to be able to share this with our community. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(lively techno music) >> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer here in 2018. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest and first time company on the program, Dilip Advani, who's the vice president of marketing at Uila. Great to see you. >> Thank you Stu. Great to be here. >> All right, so Dilip, first, tell us a little bit about your background and what brought you to Uila. >> Yeah. So again, my background has been on the analysis side and the protocol analysis side. I have been, in the past, focused on the wireless aspects of the business. I have led teams on product strategies and product marketing in my past history. What I have done is, the reason I came to Uila, is because of the rich history, from the founders who have great experience on the deep packet inspection and the protocol analysis side. And they decided to bring this to the virtualization world and that's what got me very interested in Uila. >> Okay. So Uila itself, we've worked with a number of the team. Fluke Networks? Was that where... >> This was, yeah this was from the original AirMagnet Fluke Networks team as well. So this is the team that actually built the world's first analyzer product, which was Net XRay from Cinco Networks. >> Okay, great, tell us the why of Uila, why today, what's different, what's the big problem it's helping us solve. >> Yeah, so before I talk about what Uila does, and then, what role it plays in the industry, I wanted to address one question that people frequently ask us, "What does Uila actually mean?" The joke around the office is that, because the founders like to go to Hawaii, a lot, >> Stu: (laughs) >> That's why they came up with the Hawaiian name. It actually means "lightning in the cloud" in Hawaiian. But there's a deeper meaning to that. We, actually, we are the power and the guiding light behind some of the challenges that people have with their cloud environment. So what Uila, If you step back and talk about what Uila as a company does, we are a young and dynamic company based out of the Silicon Valley, and what we do is, we do application-centric infrastructure monitoring. We pinpoint the bottlenecks that may exist on your infrastructure, and we also help users on the hybrid cloud workload migration strategy. >> Yeah, I hear "application-centric," and there's been hardware companies that sometimes use that term, and it really more infrastructure-centric, that applications sit on. So, maybe tell us a little bit about where you sit and what you look at and how much is kind of tied to the application versus the infrastructure. >> Absolutely, right. At the end of the day, everything goes back to the application, all the business service. And obviously, the business service is running on the infrastructure. So we target the IT operations team. We want to make sure that they don't end up being the fall guy, or the team to be blamed for anything and everything that goes wrong with the network. Sometimes it is the infrastructure, but at times it could be the application itself, as well. So, that is where Uila plays a role, to help in that full stack monitoring, to avoid the finger-pointing discussion that takes place between the operations team as well as the application teams, or any other teams within the organization. >> I think that's a great point. It's interesting, when the dev ops wave, some people throw out that term "no ops," it's like, operations is real important. I interviewed Solomon Hykes from Docker, and he said, "The reason we did container wasn't to get away from the operator, it was actually to create tools to help the operator, and it enables the developer and the application side, but ops is still pretty critical." >> Absolutely, absolutely. That's where, I think, everything ends. So that's been our focus, to make sure that we provide a solution for that particular team, so that they can help solve any challenges that you may have in your data center. >> Okay, need to understand where this lives, because, today, customers, especially at an event like this, there's virtualization and there's cloud, and there's a huge spectrum of what cloud means to customer. Some of them, cloud is, I'm a small company, maybe it is mostly public cloud. Everybody's doing SaaS. Most companies have some in their on-premises, whatever you want to call that, and heck, there's even the edge stuff, is becoming majorly important, but it's the, everything, whether you call it multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, how do you put that all together? There's lots of challenges there, where do you fit in this overall puzzle? >> Absolutely. In terms of the private cloud, like I mentioned, our main goal is to help you solve the performance bottleneck, whether it's on the application side or the infrastructure side, and help you solve that problem. But what trends we are seeing, is, a majority of the customers, just like the industry in general, is looking towards the hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, or whatever you want to call that. We are seeing a lot of customers move towards that strategy, but again, they are struggling with defining that strategy. They're struggling with how you get going on this particular path of taking their applications or their business services, which, traditionally I've stated in the private data center and moving it to the public cloud as such. So that's where we've seen organizations struggle with understanding what their current scenario looks like, what their current applications look like, how they're dependent on each other. Again, documentation, obviously, as you know, is that last thing on IT people's minds. Or, if they have a document ready, it's outdated as soon as it's created. So that's where we've seen a lot of organizations struggle, with getting that visibility into what exists within their environment, as they plan about taking their applications to the hybrid cloud. >> Okay, so Dilip, I just want to make sure I understand. Things like performance management, do you look at both sides of a hybrid, both the public and the private, or is it primarily in the private? >> We look at both sides, on the private side as well as the public side. And on the private side, like I mentioned, not only do we help on the performance monitoring there, but we also help you define your migration strategy. >> Okay, when I think about all those things you were talking about, I'm surprised I haven't heard some mention of machine learning, artificial intelligence, 'cause things are growing, things are changing so fast, there's no way the administrator can do it themselves, what's the secret sauce, where's the software, where do you fit in, or do you just stay away from those buzzwords? >> No, no, no, again, I think everybody likes to use those buzzwords. >> Stu: (Laughs) >> We do the same as well. I think, when you think about artificial intelligence, or machine learning, at the end of the day, it goes back to the predictive analysis capabilities that organizations must have for their data centers, because at the end of the day, it's about being proactive, not just being reactive, to issues that could be occurring on your network. So, mining the data that's being collected on your current environment and using that, by artificial intelligence, or machine learning, to figure out what are the resources that will be needed as they expand their own capacities within their own environment and such. Or, being able to predict that they need to assign certain resources, or they're going to run into a certain issue, if they don't assign certain resources, or they don't do something, which could impact their business performance. >> Okay, Dilip, want to just step back for a second, give us a snapshot of the company. How many people, what can you share about funding, the state of the product, is it, actually GA? >> Yeah, absolutely. Like I mentioned, we are a young and dynamic company located in Silicon Valley. We are founded three or four years ago, we have a product that's shipping, we have lots of customers. In terms of funding, we have gone through Series A round of funding and such. And we have customers across different verticals. Whether it's healthcare, whether it's retail, and whether it's MSB type of customers as well. >> And you're 100 percent a software company, how do people engage? Is there like a free trial demo type thing, or how do people get started? >> Yeah. Again, we're a pure software company, so if you look at how Uila gets installed, we get installed as a guest VM, on top of the hypervisor. So this could be a Hyper-V environment, or it could be a VMware type of an environment. And then what we do is we do deep packet inspection to get the application and the network information. >> You mentioned VMware and Hyper-V, public clouds, which ones? >> Public clouds, AWS, Google cloud, so we are more agnostic on that side. >> Stu: Great. >> So we do deep packet inspection, to get those details, on the application and network side, and then we also talk to vCenter, to get all of the compute and storage statistics. So again, a pure software solution, we do have trials available, we have a 30-day trial available for our software, so in case anybody is interested, they can obviously go to our website, at Uila.com, and then request a trial. We work with the customer to install it, we train the person who's doing the trial, and then, after the trial, we even do data reviews, and show you what issues that may be existing in your network. So like a true performance assessment of your data center. >> Okay, and who's the typical administrator of this? Is this same person using vCenter admin, or doing their public cloud management? And I'm curious what dynamics you're seeing in the company, when they've got both sides of that, and how that plays? >> Yeah. So typically, we're seeing virtualization engineers, or IT architects, who are using the Uila solution. And the trend we are seeing between the private and the public cloud is that many of the people who had the responsibility on the private side, it's the same group of people who are still responsible for managing the environment on the public cloud side. So it's not only important to make sure the availability of the infrastructure continues, as you go from your private to your public cloud, but also the application and user experience continues, so that's why having the same group of people managing and monitoring is the trend that we are seeing with our customers. >> Okay. Dilip, want to give you the final word. What brings Uila to an event like this? >> Again, this is the first time we've come to VTUG, we have been doing many other community events, in other locations. Uila believes in working with the community, so that's why we've been engaged with the vExperts, as well as the community in general. And we think this is one of the premier events where the right people in the community, in terms of the technical professionals, hang out. So that's why we decided to come to the VTUG event. And I'm pretty sure I will be back for the Summer Slam as well. >> Well, Dilip Advani, really appreciate the updates, and telling our audience a little bit about Uila, it's lightning in the cloud. For some reason we haven't had the CUBE yet in Hawaii, maybe we need to re-change >> Instead of water, we'll have mai tais there. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Lots more coverage here, at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (energetic techno music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by Silicon Angle. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program a regular here at the VTUG, but no longer a local, so Chris Colotti who's currently the Field CTO at Tintri, great to see you Chris. >> You too Stu, it's been a while. >> And love the attire. >> I know, I think every time I come and do a presentation, I have a Patriots jersey on of some kind. >> Absolutely, I mean there's a few things we know you for, so you love your virtualization, you love your Patriots, and there's usually some workout thing, so are we going to get some fitness tips (mumbles)? >> Not today, actually you don't want to know what I did the other day with a buddy of mine, so you'll see me hobbling around because it was not a good leg day (laughs). >> Okay, so we'll be getting, I always like to hear, I just had a user on of what they weren't like in the industry, so you'll give us the what not to do to make sure that you can keep your fitness goals. >> Yeah, don't hook up with a buddy who has a lot of sandbags in his truck that likes to work out with them. >> So Chris, for those of our audience that haven't been to the event, and give us just a little bit about your background, what you're doing these days. >> Yeah, so I mean VTUG's, man this has been around forever, I think. >> 12 years now. >> 12 years the Harneys have been doing this, and I've been, I think I've been a part of it for a better part of the last decade or so. One being a Patriot's fan, two being a virtualization person, and where I kind of grew my career from sort of being a Sys Admin to where I am now, I just think this is one of the better events because it's all technology, right? I mean we run into people that it's not just virtualization, you got AWS now, you got people of all walks of life that comes to this and honestly, I think you can't beat the venue, right? I mean especially, how many times have we been here where they cover the windows? If the windows are covered, it's a good year. That's what we say. >> As a matter fact, this is the fifth year we've had theCube, and every year the Patriots are still in the playoffs, working towards the Super Bowl, and they're one step away again. >> I think the worst year for me, was I actually had the center stage keynote one year, and they told me while I was presenting they were actually on the field practicing, and it was all I could to not just stop talking and say I'll be right back (laughs). >> As you said, better part of a decade you've been here, you were working for VMWare, when this was a VMUG, but you've been involved, tell us just what you're doing these days for work. >> Yeah, so I left VMWare and moved over to Tintri, which is I'll flash the word partner, I came over there, actually I came over as a cloud evangelist kind of person, and that shifted a little bit, and while that was around how to use our APIs and things like that for automation and private cloud, now there's actually three Field CTOs, I'm one of 'em, and I spend most of my time really talking to customers, doing events, doing roadmap presentations, where were going, what we're doing, I still spend my fair share on the road doing the shows and stuff, VMworld. >> You just threw in a bunch of things there, talk cloud, API, storage, what are you hearing from customers these days? What are they getting right? What are they struggling with, and what are they looking for? >> Yeah it's funny, so for a long time I was a cloud guy, right? I mean I did VCloud Air, I launched VCloud Air DR, and I think what I heard coming over to Tintri is good, folks are still struggling with that whole, "What do I put in the cloud? "What don't I put in the cloud? "Do I bring everything back?" We've got a lot of customers that have brought stuff back on premises, I think a lot of customers are just still struggling with that concept, I mean one of the first presentations I did, probably I think, here it was back in 2010, right around that timeframe, when VCloud Air, or VCloud Director was launched, Chris had me, Harney had me come down and do VCloud Director, and it was deer in the headlights, you know? It was so bleeding edge for VMWare at that point to have this cloud product and this automation stuff, and then fast forward to today, you know eight years later, I still think people are struggling with that. They're just not sure how to deal with it, right? And operationally, I think people come and really figure out it's not about cloud so much as automation, we've got to simplify the way we do things, we got to automate more. We've got to take day to day operations and do something different with 'em. >> Yeah, I mean a line we've used often is cloud is not a destination, it's an operations model. >> Yeah, for sure. Unfortunately I think there's a lot of people that still think it's a destination, the old To the Cloud ads, remember those? >> Microsoft, absolutely, there's lots of jokes on that. Yeah, you gave an interesting keynote this morning, I actually had one of the users that came on our program earlier, and she was like, "I really enjoyed that." So Luigi Danakos, a friend of ours and you, tell me a little more about IT in careers, because we know the only thing that is consistent is that things are going to change, so give our audience a little bit of taste of what you talked about. >> So yeah, it was actually interesting, so we came up with the idea because I've come to these and done technical presentations all the time, but inevitably I always get somebody, or a couple people come up to you and say, "How did you get where you are? "How did you evolve?" And people who know my story, what's interesting about mine is I went to school for architectural engineering, I actually have a degree in architectural engineering, drawing blueprints and designing houses, and they always look at me and say, "How did you "get to here? "You were a System Admin, and I'm a Sys Admin, "and how do I grow my career?" So Luigi and figured why don't we sort of take a little bit of that history 'cause now we're kind of, I hate to say we're the old guys on the porch these days, but back in the day, we were younger, we were faster, as you go forward, how do you stay relevant? And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about, so we talk a concept from an author by the name of John C Maxwell and we kind of took one of his books and we kind of cobbled it down to five different aspects and we just talked about what to think about, how to move, not just always knowing the technology, where do you want to go? What do you want to do? And how to get there, not just to sit and say, "Well it's never going to happen for me." You have to make something out of it yourself, and I think the response was pretty good, it was different, it was the first one in the morning, but it wasn't getting hit at 9:00 a.m. with technicals, it was really just us telling our stories around how we got to where we were going, and one of the big parts about Luigi was having just been let go from HP and now he's done some interviews and I thought it was really great 'cause he came right out and said, "Y'know what? "I'm going to just do my own thing. "I've just decided there's never a good time "to start your own company, so why not do it now?" And that was after he went through four or five interviews, so hopefully it resonated with some people. For me, it's always gotten harder to learn. I think as we get older, I made the joke in the session, I lost my phone first thing this morning. Literally, couldn't remember where I put it, dropped it, I called my best friend, Chris Boyd, who's one of the other CTOs and I said have you seen it? Because I'm going to send the, I was going to have him run around the west side with the buzzer going off, the Find my iPhone to go find this, I can't remember what I did yesterday, so learning gets harder. >> Yeah, well learning's harder, the bar's not that high to kind of get into new stuff. When I walk around the show, two things struck me. Number one is the vendors, every single one of them are hiring SEs, and they can't find enough good quality people, and it's more about the people, then it is, you can train them up. And secondly, some of these new spaces, talk about like the cloud space, if you get your Associate's on like AWS? Like people will call you immediately, and there's so much opportunity out there, we both had lots of friends. There's changes in consolidations in the industry, and therefore there's people that hey, it's time for a change, so-- >> Well I never thought I would work for a storage company. Well I worked for VMWare which was acquired EMC years ago, but we still never, as VMWare employees, we didn't work for a storage company. >> VMWare's a software company. >> We were a software company, and I still actually look at Tintri as a software company, yes we sell an appliance, but the crux of what Tintri does really is the software of the OS itself and that's what makes it different. So yeah, and I mean I've had to learn more about storage then I knew before, and I was telling a guy at the show, one of the things that Luigi and I talk to people, always said just learn something new every day, just as small and as silly as it was, and we've told different stories, and a guy asked me, "So what's the last thing "you learned, technology-wise, outside of storage?" I said I actually learned containers because of my home media server environment. I had to go out and learn Docker because I wanted to run some stuff and I didn't want to stand it up, I just wanted to figure out how containers work, so now Tim Gabett and I, we're on the phone back and forth, alright how'd you get that container run? And what'd you do for the storage, and how'd you deal with this? But that to me is what keeps your brain a little bit sharp, I mean I don't do puzzles and things like that, but those stupid side projects we all do because we're technologists I think help. >> Yeah, and you never know when those side projects and passions could turn into an opportunity from careers standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Alright Chris, you've been coming to this event quite a long time, as we said, give us the what's changed and what's stayed the same from your standpoint? >> Aw man, that's a tough one because I think a lot of stuff has essentially stayed the same in the realm of networking and storage, I think there's always a new player, but I look back at the last, I'll probably get myself in trouble here, but what was the last big innovative thing in the IT space when I was a System Admin, and I go back to those easy things, like I remember when I did my first VMotion, and it was like how does that work? And I used to have conversations, and I do that today with engineers, and I say what are we innovating? What are we doing to change the game? And to me, and again this is all my personal opinion, I suppose I'll preface it with that because for most people that know me know I have a pretty strong opinion on stuff, but I think that's the tough part is how do we move forward? How do we evolve to the next, really big, innovative thing that just blows people's minds? And I think AWS definitely did that a little bit when it really started to go mainstream and people realized it was a real thing, it wasn't a book store anymore, they had this other stuff, and we go through these cycles, right? But I think in the standard IT space, I'm still trying to figure out outside of those, what's the next really cool thing that we're going to see from the different vendors? And who's innovating and who's just sort of maintaining? >> Yeah, absolutely, well I can tell you that people here are excited, there's a lot to learn about keynotes this morning, I mean everything from what's happening in the automation space, developers, not a ton of developers at a show like this, but definitely lots of opportunity there, you talked the AWS presentation, he's like, "I'm live-coding and showing you Lambda stuff." Most of the people here aren't quite ready for some serverless world-- >> That was like me doing VCloud Director presentations (laughs). >> And things like that, I remember three years ago, it was like the AWS 101, everybody was like, "Oh my gosh, "this cloud thing sounds really amazing." So it takes some time, we've heard about it. I remember back when I heard about VMotion when it was in development, and still one of those things where you look back at your career and like wow, that was an amazing, it was that magic technology. >> It was almost those conversation, where were you when you did your first VMotion, right (laughs)? >> As a matter of fact, Duncan actually did a blog post about that, "Where you heard about it?" And I pulled in (mumbles) into the thread because I was lucky enough to go to a conference and moderate a session where he explained down to Kernel Zero how it worked, and it was interesting-- >> How he actually did what he did. >> You know what they say, "Any technology that is significantly difficult "to explain might as well be magic." So you're right, interesting stuff to see where innovation's going in the industry, I think most people I know are pretty excited, there's so much going on there, there's no shortage of new things to learn, we just need to reach out and take those opportunities, and I love your advice to keep learning something every day. >> As small as it is, I told these guys this morning that one of my biggest learning experiences was when we moved, I had to learn how to drive a motor home, a house, and deal with stuff that I've never done, right? But it's all learning. I challenged them today to just whether you're going to the sessions or you're just walking around where the vendors are, just understand what those people do and take that away and internalize it and see how you can use it. >> Well Chris, I'm glad to see you're still a true blue Patriots fan there-- >> The tattoo is still real (laughs). >> You haven't picked up the Southern drawl just yet. >> No it's funny, my wife said I pick it up a little bit when I'm around our neighbors, and then when I come back up here, I can really turn on the Boston accent if I tried but (laughs). >> Well, you all come back for lots more coverage here from VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, this is theCube. (exciting electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, in addition to being an Analyst, and the host of this program, I've also been a long-time Patriot's season ticket holder. Real excited to welcome to our program, Logan Mankins, number 70. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah so it's interesting. At this show we're talking tech, and a bunch of the IT Admins, they're people that you'd consider in the trenches. You, you know spend a lot of time in there. I wonder, a couple of your guys like Tedy Bruschi, Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy's here today, making interceptions and things like that, sometimes get a little bit more coverage out there, and they're a little bit more well known. Do you ever feel that you were faceless, you know, paying for the Pats? >> No, those guys, they made all the plays, they got all the recognition but, the linemen, we always knew that without us the offense couldn't go, the team couldn't go so... And most linemen, they don't want to be the face out there anyway. Me personally, I'd rather not be known, but it comes with the job. >> Yeah well, seven-time Pro Bowler. As a matter of fact, I was looking back, and there was this great video from Bill Belichick, and he's like, "There's tough players in the NFL, "but when I think of Logan Mankins, "he's super tough out there." When you look at the game now, Rob Gronkowski took a massive hit in the AFC Championship game. How does toughness and injuries, how did you think about that? Did you think about that when you were playing, versus now being out of the game? >> When I was playing no, you don't really think about it, but fortunately for me, I didn't have hits like that to the head, those big concussion-type hits. The stuff I always played with was just body stuff, and there's always a difference between being hurt and injured. If you're hurt you can still play, and if the injury's not too bad you can still play so, it was just a fine line of figuring out what you could do and what you couldn't. >> Patriots have had a phenomenal run. I mean you played for a great team. Bill Belichick, Tom Brady throughout them all, give us a little perspective of somebody that played for the team for awhile. How did you work through the changes, but yet there were some consistency around the core? >> Yeah, that's the main thing, the core, and they've had an unbelievable run. I don't know what's Bill been there, 18 years or something? And it's been unbelievable to see what those guys have accomplished and, it all starts at the top. You have a good owner and the best coach ever, and the best quarterback ever so, as long as you get the right guys that buy into that system, and follow those two guys, you're going to have a good team. >> Last year Deion Branch shared with us some great stories about Tom Brady, his, hyper-competitive type of guy. Give us a little color. What's it like playing in front of TB 12? >> Aw, it's great you know, you know he's always prepared. You never have to worry about him, he's going to play great the majority of the time and, just the way he competes and works. It rubs off on other guys and, he's just so dependable and can make all the right reads, throws, and he's a great guy to be around on top of that so, he's the ultimate teammate, and ultimate competitor, and that's why he's had so much success. >> You said that you didn't take, you played through some injuries, you had some, you played when you were hurt and, we know you had some rough injuries during your career, but concussions weren't a concern. Is it something that you look back now, or look at the game today, and all those things about CTE and concussions, is that, you know...? >> Oh yeah, the more you learn about it, the more you worry about it, because you're aware of it now. I think when I started playing football no one talked about it. There was no worries about it, and towards the end of my career it really started coming out, and more comes out about it every year so... Of course you worry about it. You hope you're one of the guys it's not going to affect, but there are guys that it's really affecting in bad ways, so at this stage of my life, it's too late to go back so it's, we'll see what happens I guess. >> Yeah, would you recommend young people going into football, knowing what you know now? >> I think so there's... It's a lot safer now. You're not taking those big... Well, every once in awhile a guy's just going to take one, you just saw Rob the other day. But for the most part they're trying to prevent that, and via techniques that they're teaching now with the blocking and the tackling, to not use your head as much, so it's a lot safer and look, at the end of the day, it's up to whoever's making that decision to play, and if they want to play, then they have the right to play. >> So we're obviously, everybody locally is super excited, getting ready for another Super Bowl. How does the team stay focused? You know, two weeks leading up to it, there's a lot going on. It's not New Orleans that they're going to, but how does the team stay focused on their job? >> Well, this team with the Patriots, they've been through it so many times, and they know what, they have a big job ahead of them. But they do a good job with what I was hearing when we went to Super Bowls. Like all the tickets and the hotel rooms for family and all that, they do a great job by getting that out of the way the first two days, and get that taken care of so you don't have to worry about that. And then it's on to the opponent that you're playing, and you just focus in on that, and Bill has, he's great at just, he draws a line, and follows that line so he'll have everyone in that line, and everyone will be ready, there won't be any distractions, and they'll be ready to go. >> Speaking of distractions, there's been a lot of noise in the press lately, as the relationships, everything like that. When you were in the locker room, does that hit your radar? Do you just focus and do your job? How does that impact what's going on? >> Yeah most stories, they don't bother you. They got to find stuff to write about but, the last one I guess with those guys, the story coming out that they're feuding, and this and that. I don't know if they are or they're not but, if they're not, I think that would upset me if they said I was feuding with someone that I wasn't, that has been a colleague, and most likely a friend of yours for that long. >> Well, Logan Makin, really appreciate you joining. Patriots has some phenomenal guards. You know, Hannah, in the Hall of Fame. You're definitely up there as one of the greatest guards in Patriot's history. >> I appreciate that. >> I really appreciate you joining me. >> Alright, thank you. >> Alright, so thanks again to the VTUG for bringing Logan Mankins. Love being here at the Intersection Virtualization Technology, and the Patriots. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (tech music)

(up-tempo electronic music) >> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by siliconANGLE. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Kevin Kotecki, who's the Vice President of Sales at Igneous Systems, Kevin, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Alright, so we've been talking to Igneous since really the early days, we've known some of the founders of the team. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with Igneous, and kind of your day-to-day activities there. >> Yeah, so I've been with Igneous for three years now, so very early stage. Came in pre-product, pre-revenue, been working with our earliest stage prospective customers and our earliest customers from day one. So, I've had the pleasure over the last few months of building out the Sales Organization more broadly, the Marketing Organization growing as well, as we have achieved that product/market fit that every start-up's looking for, and going out and solving those problems at scale across the country and having the feet on the street to help with that. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting, we talk a lot on this program about these user groups. They're great for the users to get education; it's also a great place for hiring. I've helped lots of friends at this specific event, talked to a number of companies that are like, Oh yeah, we're hiring SEs. Everybody is hiring SEs. >> Yes, indeed. >> And I'm sure you're probably doing some interviews >> We are, yeah. While you're here. But, I love to watch the maturing of start-ups. A number of companies I met here at the first time, Igneous has been supportive of this event for a number of years. What brings Igneous, what are some of the key objectives coming to an event like this? >> Yeah, so with VTUG's Winter Warmer, it's an opportunity to see customers first and foremost, and interact with the local Boston companies that are here, that fit the profile and have the problems that we solve. But it's also an opportunity to see our partners and to have visibility in the community and show that support of the local business community as well. >> Alright, so let's talk about Igneous. At the show, it's the changing dynamics of what's happening in the world of virtualization, what's happening in cloud. Igneous sits in those spaces, and how does it differentiate itself from this massive market of cloud and storage and everything that's going out there? >> Yeah, good question. At a high level, what we do is we help organizations manage their unstructured data wherever it may be, when that unstructured data is at scale and begins to break traditional paradigms for doing so. And, the specific problems that we solve start with data protection, day one. It's a great way to help customers get insight into their full suite of unstructured file data and build an index around that that's extensible and powers their other services like archive, like end-user search and restore, and also feeds into our policy engine that helps customers tier data to the public cloud, and specifically to cost-appropriate cloud products, like Amazon Glacier, like Azure Archive. So that intersection that we sit in between cloud and storage and all of that is really around delivering the entire experience as a service and solving, day one, very difficult data protection problems. >> When talking about things like scale, can you quantify for us what's kind of the low bar for your customers? Where does it start and how big is big? >> For us, a minimum starting point would be a few hundred terabytes of file data. >> Okay, which is not that big, right? >> Yeah, in today's world, not so much, but it certainly does bring clarity to the type of customers that we can help. And really, we're not focused on on structured data, right? We believe that there are a lot of great solutions out there for protecting databases and a virtualized infrastructure, and that's not what we do. We partner with those folks. As far as how big is big, our largest customers have approximately 100 petabytes of file data, and so approaching kind of the top end of what customers have still on-premise today. >> Great. Sounds like you can start with, I mean, most customers are going to have that kind of data. Do you find maybe it's because it's unstructured, there's plenty of companies that might not fit in your bucket? And then, you've got plenty of headroom for scale, is what I'm hearing. >> Correct, and architecturally that headroom is built in day one. I think the focus from a customer standpoint around unstructured data is, if we quantify and qualify what that data is and where it comes from, it's really machine-generated data at scale, it's application-generated data at scale, and so the types of industries where we're really doing well are, call it, electronic design and automation, whether that's in the semiconductor space or in engineering use cases, it's in media and entertainment, a traditional place that has large-scale file data. It's in legal services, it's in proprietary trading, it's in all the places where that data exits. But then, it's also in bioinformatics, where genome sequencers and next-generation 3D microscopes are producing those kinds of data sets. And so, not every organization is in that boat today, right, and so we're really working at machine scales as opposed to human scale data creation. >> Yeah, and it really goes back. I think of when object storage was first discussed, you described it really well, people data versus machine data. All the industries that you went through, there's just the growth portfolio that I have to do things, and how do I take that from being, Oh my gosh, this is a challenge, to How do I make an opportunity, how do I leverage that data, how do I use it? >> It's about monetizing the data, right, and if it's just simply data that you're storing, then there's less incentive to invest in platforms that allow the extensibility of that data, to comb through it and be integrated into other applications, other use cases that can be monetized, right. And if we come back to some of the core problems that we really solve and get us to demonstrate the value of the product and of the approach to customers, it does indeed start with data protection, day one. And so, many of our customers today are protecting their data in a traditional paradigm, whether that be NDMP to tape or just working within backup windows where the goal as an IT Organization is to not impact your end users, and their ability to create the type of data that they can then monetize. So whether that's an engineering organization that's writing code or creating designs, whatever it may be, the goal is to be behind the scenes. And so when the scale of data creation, when the density of the file data that is being created creates challenges for those traditional architectures, whether that be around metadata management or some other challenge of scale, that's where we come in and we shine. And so we start day one focusing on customers' hardest problems as it relates to file data at scale and protecting it. And then, once that data's on our system, the power of that platform, the power of the microservices-driven architecture that we've spoken about here on past interviews, the power of the extensible, you know, compute context, if you will, that can then integrate into other applications and be leveraged for also very tangible things, like archive and reducing your spend on primary storage, and also integrating with the cloud. >> Kevin, one of the things that we've looked at is inside an organization, a lot of times, this paradigm shift also goes with, Organizationally, who owns this? When I think about a lot of the applications, it would be application owner that has the problem, but isn't connected necessarily with the storage admin or virtualization admin or cloud architect. How does Igneous, how do you get involved there and how do you help companies work through some of those organizational dynamics? So that's been one of the most satisfying elements over the last year or so of successfully solving customer problems, has been actually seeing the closer marriage of those three entities within organizations. So again, the application owner, the backup or disaster recovery owner, and the storage owner. And so, the most tangible example I can give is, in a world where backups were impacting end users, in this case an engineering organization that would experience latency in their application and then the work they were trying to do, traditionally their first order, or I guess their first solution was to contact the backup team and say, Hey, are you running a backup, and if so, kill it because you're impacting my ability to do my job. And then the storage folks of course were experiencing pain around trying to manage the scale of the infrastructure to support that engineering organization. And so in our approach, we don't impact the end users in any way, and we provide continuous and automated protection, which allows those data protection team members to focus on other things that are higher-order priorities than sitting there managing, actively managing, a backup window or a backup itself. That's something software does for them now, and the end users no longer complain, and therefore their daily interaction with IT as it relates to data protection is less colored by the IT impacting their ability to do their job through the data protection approaches that they're using today. >> When it comes to some high-level data protection secondary storage, there's a lot of players out there, and many of them, it's like, Data Domain? Very different from a rubric or cohesity. Where does Igneous fit in kind of the spectrum of what's going on? What are some of the companies that you're running up against that make sense for you, as opposed to which ones that we're just in the wrong conversation here? >> So the clear line of delineation between us and most of the other new entrants and traditional entrants in the field is that we're only focused on file data. We believe that the growth of unstructured data is unbounded and will continue to be unbounded and will break traditional architectural paradigms. And so that's the problem that we're specifically focused on, is how to help customers manage and protect that. Therefore, we're not focused on protecting structured data, databases, and VMs; that's not our point of entry. What that does do within that space is create a lot of opportunities for partnership, where our architectural approach is unique and is something that is very difficult to pull off if your day-one focus is on protecting virtual machines. It's not easy for you step up to the plate and protect two, three petabytes of file data, right? And so that's an opportunity for best-to-breed solutions where the customer can have the best data protection and two vendors in place for those kinds of use cases. >> Okay, Kevin I want to give you the final word. Maybe do you have a customer story? You talked a little bit about the organizational piece, but what's a customer story that you could relate that people might find interesting? >> Being in Boston, and having Boston be such a hotbed of bioinformatics, one of our recent customers is leveraging new 3D microscope technology to do very important research on the human body and disease and things of that nature, and that produces petabyte-scale data, even once it's been processed. And so what we're helping them do is both protect that and minimize their cost of implementing primary storage, minimize their cost around data protection, and not have to implement, or put IT folks in play, to manage that whole process. It's all very automated in this deployment. But then also, even more importantly, is from a collaborative standpoint they leverage us to tier to the cloud to then move that data and then share that data with their other collaborating investigators, and then also meet grant requirements of publishing their findings in a publicly available, downloadable format. And so, that end-to-end ability to provide a solution for customers that have unique challenges in creating large-scale file data has been really satisfying. >> Well Kevin Kotecki, appreciate all the updates. As we've been saying for the last couple years, data is at the center of it, and needs change from that kind of challenges around data to huge opportunities out there. Congrats on all the success. >> Thanks you, thank you very much, appreciate it. >> Lots more coverage here at the VTUG 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (up-tempo electronic music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG Winter Warmer, 2018. Presented by Silicon Angle. (upbeat music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program Tom Rasmussen, who's an IT director, and an instructor at JATC of Greater Boston. Tom, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> OK, so you wear a couple of hats, like many people in IT. Tell us a little bit about your background and your organization. >> So my background, I come from the electrical engineering, that's my degree, so I used to like the chip-level stuff. And then as time went, I got into computers, networking, and so I kind of, my background is in the server side of it, you know, the Novell, the Microsoft days. And as I became an instructor, because I actually had a service call to the school, and they said, "Oh, you know something "about computers and networking, "would you like to teach here?" And of course, 20-something years later, I'm now the IT director, and part-time instructor. >> Yeah, so I want to dig into both of those. Why don't we start with your IT hat, there? Tell us a little bit about the organization, what kinds of things you deal with, some of kind of the biggest challenges on your plate. >> Yeah, so we're the trade school for the local IBEW in Boston, we've got about 12 to 1,500 apprentices in the school, both electrician and telecommunication. And it's a five-year program, and one of the biggest challenges that kind of brought me on board was just the management of the computer systems. They need someone, you know, they had these computer labs that, as the students did things to them, they no longer worked, and so that machine went off, and that machine, and, you know, they didn't have a full-time IT person, so it was like, OK, this weekend, we're going to re-do everything and so on and so on. Part of me coming on was we implemented a VDI environment, where you might think of it as a cost-type thing, but it was really just a management, where we could manage the desktop, manage the experience. And we're about two years into it, and it's been successful, but it's challenging. >> Yeah, you bring up a real good point, though. When people tend to go in from a cost-savings, a lot of times, they'll be disappointed. There really needs to be some kind of transformational, solving some real business problems, and it sounds like you had that well identified, and while there's always, oh, I've got to fine-tune the performance, oh, the network's got issues, you know, so many devices, and what do I deal with, and churn of what's going on there, it's, you know, changing the paradigm of management, you no longer have, probably, you, running around from all of these places, constantly fiddling with all of these boxes too, I think it would centralize your job a little bit more. >> It did, and one of the kind of benefits was, well, we can't use this lab, because the machines aren't working, or it's not up to date, or we don't have this software, or we don't have the ability to get it up and running, to fighting for the labs now. You know, if a contractor wants to come in, and display, you know, demo a new piece of software, we can put that software on that for the period of time they're there, and then take it away. So we're getting much more utilization out of our systems, which benefits us in production, and it kind of, you know, the students as a whole. >> Yeah, another challenge I hear a lot from education people is, you know, just the wireless infrastructure, how you deal with all the devices, what people get access. Is that running well? You know, challenges, what are you seeing with the abundance of technology that everybody walks in with? >> One of the the things that, we do have a challenge with wireless, we don't have enough, we're not quite sure where we're going with it yet, right now we have a policy that our students aren't allowed to bring wireless devices in, but as we're rolling out new types of products or applications, we're seeing, like, oh, we actually need that tablet, we need you to bring your work, we need that, and so I see this changing very quickly, which is really going to affect us from the wireless management. We had a code update just the past weekend, and they're, again, implementing some type of, you know, OK guys, let's take a quiz. And everyone brings out the phone. Well, they gave out the wireless, and they saturated it, so, we're like, OK, we're going to fix that one too, now. >> Alright, let's flip over and talk about the training that you're working on. What kind of classes are you doing, you know, what skill set, what's kind of the... I know there's never a typical, the typical student look like? >> So, a typical apprentice would be anywhere from someone coming right out of high school, coming out of the military, just deciding to retool. So we could have a 20-something, up to a 40-something. So from an educational standpoint, it is challenging. Some people know things about computers, you know, they know a little bit about network, and it's a range. They know a lot more now than they say, did, five or six years ago, so it's a little easier. From the telcom side, traditional telephone and networking, those apprentices get a full-blown of, you know, this is computers, this is basic networking, this is advanced networking. We're finding that even in the electrical industry, that we need to train our electricians to know about networking, because the lighting system is now in Endpoint, the HVEA system is in Endpoint, the management of the security system, everything is going to be on the internet. So as I say, there's not going to be a lighting switch. You're going to walk in the door, and say, "computer, turn on the lights, mood level five." >> Or even, you have things like Nest, that I don't even have to, a lot of my settings, it's going to learn what's going on. All those IOT devices, does that come into the training today, or is that still kind of a future? >> It's starting to come in, because it has to. Those devices are there. Our heating system in our building went down the other day, and it turned out it was an IP address information, so the joke was, don't let electricians near IP addresses. >> When you said you'd been there 20 years now? >> Tom: Part-time. >> Part-time, but we talk about the rate of change, and there's always change going on, but it definitely feels that things are changing faster. How do you, as a trainer, keep up with it? You want to make sure that when they finish their apprenticeship, they're ready for the new job, how do you manage that? >> The curriculum is constantly changing, it's evolving. We're trying to fit more in, in a shorter period of time. I came out of, I came full time just two years ago, so I was in the thick of things. I'm now focused on VDI and educational resources, which, again, is kind of new to me. What tools, what are all these tools, what are the applications that work in the educational environment, which is kind of above and beyond the traditional IT piece. It is challenging, I read as much as I can, and get involved with places like VTUG, and the other groups, and you can only know so much. I can't be an expert in hardware, or software, or services, or applications, I kind of have to get in the middle, and then hopefully get someone to come and give me a hand. >> Tom, very good point, I think all of us know that there's nobody that can be an expert at everything. You set me up for the last question I have for you. What brings you to an event like the VTUG, what do you get out of it, what would you share to people that didn't come this week? >> I like coming and talking to the vendors, and seeing what's available, but the biggest thing I get is just seeing the other mes out there. Just at lunch today, I met a person that comes from a K to 12 school, and it turns out that we have very similar systems. So, to me, that was probably the best part of the event, there. Because now I have a relationship, because I am the IT guy, I am the IT director, and an instructor, and to have those types of resources is really useful and important to me. Absolutely, which is why, Tom, we appreciate you coming, and sharing with your peers that couldn't come here, what's happening in your environment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer, 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCube! Covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconeANGLE. (energetic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCube's coverage of the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, the 12th year of this user group, fifth year we've had theCube here. I happen to have on the program a first-time guest, Kyle Ruddy, who's a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer with VMware, knows a thing or two about virtualization. >> Maybe a couple of things. >> Stu: Thanks for joining us, Kyle. >> Oh, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> All right, so Kyle, I know you were sitting at home in Florida and saying, "What I'd like to do is come up in the 20s. "It kind of feels like single digits." Why did you leave the warmth of the south to come up here to the frigid New England? >> (chuckles) Yeah, well, it was a great opportunity. I've never been to one of the VTUGs before, so they gave me a chance to talk about something that I'm extremely passionate about which is API usage. Once I got the invite, no-brainer, made the trip. >> Awesome! So definitely, Jonathan Frappier who we asked to be on the program but he said Kyle's going to be way better. (Kyle chuckles) Speak better, you got the better beard. (Kyle laughs) I think we're just going to give Frappier a bunch of grief since he didn't agree to come on. Give us first a little bit about your background, how long you been VMware, what kind of roles have you had there? >> Yeah, absolutely! So I've probably been in IT for over 15 years, a long-time customer. I did that for about 10 to 12 years of the IT span doing everything from help desk working my way up to being on the engineer side. I really fell in love with automation during that time period and then made the jump to the vendor side. I've been at VMware for about two years now where I focus on creating content and being at events like these to talk about our automation strategy for vSphere. >> Before you joined VMware, were you a vExpert? Have you presented at VMUGs? >> Yes, yes, so I've been a vExpert. I think I'm going on seven years now. I've helped run the Indianapolis VMUG for five to six years. I've presented VMUGs all over the country. >> Yeah, one of the things we always emphasize, especially at groups like this, is get involved, participate, it can do great things for your career. >> Yes, absolutely! I certainly wouldn't be here without that kind of input and guidance. >> Indy VMUG's a great one, a real large one here, even though I hear this one here has tended to be a little bit bigger, but a good rivalry going on there. I want to talk about the keynote you talked about, automation and APIs. It's not kind of the virtualization 101, so what excites you so much about it? And let's get in a little bit, talk about what you discussed there. >> Yeah, absolutely! We were talking about using Ansible with the vSphere 6.5 RESTful APIs. That's something that's new, brand new, to vSphere 6.5, and really just being able to, when those were released, allow our users and our customers to make use of those APIs in however way that they wanted to. If you look back at some of our prior APIs and our SDKs, you were a little more constrained. They were SOAP-based so there was a lot of overhead that came with those. There was a large learning curve that also came along with those. So by switching to REST, it's a whole lot more user friendly. You can use it with tools like Ansible which that was just something that Jon knew quite well. I thought that was a perfect opportunity for me to finally do a presentation with Jon. It went quite well. I think the audience learned quite a bit. We even kind of relayed to the audience that this isn't something that's just for vSphere. Ansible is something you can use with anything. >> For somebody out there watching this, how do they get started? What's kind of some of the learning curve that they need to do? What skillsets are they going to build on versus what they need to learn for new? >> Sure. A lot of the ways to really get started with these things, I've created a ton of blog posts that are out there on the VMware {code} blog. The first one is just getting started with the RESTful APIs that we've provided. There's a program that's called Postman, we give a couple of collections that you can automatically import and start using that. Ansible has some really good documentation on getting started with Ansible and whichever environment you're choosing to work or use it with. So they've got a Getting Started with vSphere, they've got a Getting Started with different operating systems as well. Those are really good tools to get started and get that integrated into your normal working environment. Obviously, we're building on automation here. We're building on... At least when I was in admin, I got involved in automation because there was a way for me to automate and get rid of those tasks, those menial tasks that I didn't really enjoy doing. So I could automate that, push that off, and get back to something that I cared about that I enjoyed. >> Yeah, great point there 'cause, yeah, some people, they're a little bit nervous, "Oh, wait, are these tools going to take away my job?" And to repeat what you were just saying, "No, no." There's the stuff that you don't really love doing and that you probably have to do a bunch. Those are the things that are probably, maybe the easiest to be able to move to the automation. How much do people look at this and be like, "Wait, no, once I start automating it, "then I kind of need to care, and feed, and maintain that, "versus just buying something off the shelf "or using some service that I can do." Any feedback on that? >> Well, it's more of a... It's a passion thing. If it's something that you're really get ingrained in, you really enjoy, then you're going to want to care and feed that because it's going to grow. It's going to expand into other areas of your environment. It's going to expand into other technologies that are within your environment. So of course, you can buy something. You could get somebody from... There are professional services organizations involved, so you don't have to do the menial tasks of updating that. Say if you go from one version to a next version, you don't have to deal with that. But if you're passionate about it, you enjoy doing that, and that's where I was. >> The other thing I picked up on is you said some of these things are new only in 6.5. One of the challenges we've always had out there is, "Oh, wait, I need to upgrade. "When can I do it? "What challenges I'm going to have?" What's the upgrade experience like now and anything else that you'd want to point out that said, "Hey, it's time to plan for that upgrade "and here are some of the things that are going to help you"? >> We actually have an End of Availability and End of Support coming up for vSphere 5.5. That's going to be coming up in here later this year in September-October timeframe. So you're not going to be able to open up a support request for that. This is a perfect time to start planning that upgrade to get up to at least 6.0, if not 6.5. And the other thing to keep in mind is that we've announced deprecation for the Windows version of vSphere. Moving forward past our next numbered release, that's going to be all vCenter Server Appliance from that point forward. Now we also have a really great tool that's called the VCSA Migration tool that you can use to help you migrate from Windows to the Appliance. Super simple, very straightforward, gives you a migration assistant to even point out some of those places where you might miss if you did it on your own. So that's a really great tool and really helps to remove that pain out of that process. >> Yeah, it's good, you've got a mix of a little bit of the stick, you got to get off! (Kyle chuckles) I know a lot of people still running 5.5 out there as well as there's the carrot out there. All the good stuff that's going to get you going. All right, hey, Kyle, last thing I want to ask is 2018. Boy, there's a lot of change going on in the industry. One, how do you keep up with everything, and two, what's exciting you about what's happening in the industry right now? >> As far as what excites me right now, Python. That's been something that's been coming up a lot more with the folks that I'm talking to. Even today, just at lunch, I was talking to somebody and they were bringing up Python. I'm like, "Wow!" This is something that keeps coming up more and more often. I'm using a lot more of my time, even my personal time, to start looking at that. And so when you start hearing the passion of people who are using some of these new technologies, that's when I start getting interested because I'm like, "Hey, if you're that interested, "and you're that passionate about it, "I should be too." So that's kind of what drives me to keep learning and to keep up with all of the latest and greatest things that are out there. Plus when you have events like this, you can go talk to some of the sponsors. You can talk and see what they're doing, how to make use of their product, and some of their automation frameworks, and with what programming languages. That kind of comes back to Python on that one because a lot more companies are releasing their automation tools for use with Python. >> Yeah, and you answered the second part of my question probably without even thinking about it. The passion, the excitement, talking to your peers, coming to events like this. All right, Kyle Ruddy, really appreciate you joining us here. We'll be back with more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCube. (energetic music)

from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough Massachusetts it's the cube covering Vita winter warmer 2018 presented by silicon angle hi I'm Stu minimun and we're here at the Vita winter warmer 2018 have with me Chris Harney who's the founder yes and president Vita great to see you Chris great to you so 12th annual one of this event it's gone through a couple of name change it's actually the fifth year we've been doing it I'd been coming for a few years before that but for just for our audience that doesn't know explain kind of the why of the V Tugg you know and what's what's changed you know over the years so so V tug was originally a still founded on the principle that we can get smarter together you know if everyone learns a little piece and teaches everyone because back when it started there was no YouTube there was no Google he had to learn on your own and you know we started out learning how to virtualize machines we learned how the emotion worked well now you're talking serverless applications you're talking crowd or cloud native you talk it's tough going to the cloud is it staying on Prem how do you automate and it's changing I mean Moore's law has gone out the window you know change is happening win weeks rather than years yeah and Chris I always love this it's one of our first events of the year the last few years it's a user group it's good grounding for me to really understand you know the typical people NIT what do they care about what are they struggling you know in what's going on in their world so you know you're going to bring us some of the users that we have on here but from your standpoint you know what are you seeing you know what are you hearing yeah so I'm hearing that users are struggling you know that the old adage 80% of their job is maintaining systems and 20% as upgrades yet 20 of some of the budget is spent on upgrades and 80 so that the dumb numbers are skewed so that having trouble keeping up with technology yeah it you throw out some things you talked about you know server lists type applications you'd key notes this morning we had Microsoft Amazon yet some developer to tracks going on looking at you know orchestration and yet some stalwarts the in the industry you know talking about you know what what's happening from from an IT standpoint where is kind of there is no typical but you know when you look at the range of people that are here um you know are they still I'm doing my virtualization rollout are they you know where are they in the cloud journey have they heard about things like kubernetes and server list yet so this audience may have heard of kubernetes very few people are implementing it I still think you know we matured 10 years ago we haven't kind of made that next leap yet so people are still they've got VMware they've got they're looking at NSX and they're running on what's the next hardware platform hyperconvergence is still a big deal yeah uh and hyper-converged is a big deal I mean we've been watching you for many days as I said this is a good grounding for us because right it's like oh well why is that AWS reinvent I was at cube con and you talk about all this stuff where you know the future is going but you know what what's happening today is super important um I like you you talked about some of the dynamics about like how they spend budget you know we talk a lot today about you know it's got to be a switch from kappa to op X and consumption and you know that that's changing a lot people's roles so training education so super important what are they getting coming to an event like this and what are the resources are you seeing that's and that are important today so at this event I think there's a lot of validation you know we we get inundated with marketing go to the cloud go to cloud and all of these users are coming together hey what are you doing for cloud and they're realizing that everyone is pretty much in the same boat together you know so so that's one thing they get networking they share their problems and what the fixes are and then the vendors they bring their a-game they really do some great training sessions so you know we've got 20 different training sessions going on upstairs and the users will go up there and they'll be able to talk one-on-one with real engineers who are doing this stuff yeah so Chris you know both big Patriots fans we've got you know Tedy Bruschi behind us here the Patriots are actually on the practice field right now getting ready for yet another Super Bowl so yeah it's amazing hopefully bring in ring number six home I think we're good lucky were the cube every time we've done your event the Patriots have still been the hunt so you know we got to keep that going but you know you look at the Patriots you say they've done so well you know other than Belichick and Brady there's been a lot of change you know you're gonna have you know this Patriots alumni is coming and I'm hoping we'll talk to like Logan Mankins and be like you know the game it seen the people change you know the strategies change but you know how do you keep that winning formula and it's a lot of its same an IT I mean so much tech has changed you know in 12 years what's the same and we you know what what's different from your viewpoint so the same you know we all have end users you know we aren't applications delivered without without hesitation or without issues so that's that will always be the same what's changed is how do we deliver that you know we used to put a server in one application and then we had sans you know so we could put the sands in and have smaller servers to virtualization to automation you know people are still looking at clones and making that automation happen faster but I think security is starting to take a 4-4-2 that you know we're seeing what's the Intel some viruses and some weaknesses so I think a lot more people are spending more time remediating possible issues and less time building new stuff yeah great points they are I mean I'm in a first structure guy by background and right you talked we went from server to we went to a VM and even we talk about things like containers and then functions it's that delivery of how do I deliver my application right how do I build modernize applications you know term you know cloud native gets thrown out a lot you know developers you know are involved here and you know it still matters some of those underneath piece even something like serverless eventually somebody is responsible that for for that infrastructure it's just you know we looked at the wiki bond research looked at you know we see a big shift going to platforms whether that be a public cloud or even something like hyper-converged there's less that I need to be worried about building and playing with those geek knobs and more software is going to allow me to handle that as data grows as scale happens I can't have people you know in there having to worry about some of those pieces you know machine learning needs to help you know the the the software itself needs to do it in that that's a shift it's challenging for people to kind of embrace that change understand where they add value and where they need to go and it's events like this that I think help people you know make understand where they need to make those transition points and where they can keep adding value is spot on there and I think people just see a point they need to learn that the more things they can affect the more positive influence they can have on that company and the long longer they'll be there the long they'll want them there if you're just affecting one thing you don't add as much value if you're affecting a thousand things there's a lot more value to you all right well Chris once again it's pleasure having you on the program we really appreciated that we could come you know help share the user activity with our community so thanks so much and you know wishing the past good luck absolutely you up for addiction on the score I hate to do predictions when we're going to be there you know I'm confident the Patriots do well if history has shown us anything it's usually a close game absolutely you know so you know I've seen a couple of Eagles fans here but a lot of Patriots colors so thanks so much and we're gonna be back with lots more coverage here from the V tog winter warmer 2018 I'm stew min Amman and you're watching the cube

>> Narrator: From Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusets, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Presented by SiliconANGLE. (upbeat music) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's fifth year at the VTUG Winter Warmer. 2018 is the 12th year of this event, always love when we get to talk to some of the users at the conference which's why I'm really happy to introduce to our audience Sue Morrow, who is a network manager at United Methodist Homes. Thanks for joining me Sue. >> No problem. >> First, tell me a little bit about yourself and what brings you all the way from Upstate New York to come to the VTUG. >> Well, I like to go to conferences whenever I can continue my education in IT. I grew up with computers in my house in the '80s. My dad was a physics teacher and a scientist so we always had a Commodore 64 or an Amiga in our house, growing up, when most people had Atari, we had computers. >> Totally, so Commodore 64, classic. I myself was a Tandy Radioshack, the TRS-80 Model III. So, in a similar era. >> Yep, I actually took a basic coding class on a TRS-80 when I was around 10, I think. Anyway, grew up with computers and somehow stumbled into IT later in life. So, that's why I'm here. >> United Methodist Homes, tell us just a little bit about what the mission of the company is. >> United Methodist Homes is a longterm care corporation. We have four facilities, two in the Binghamton area and two in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We have all levels of care from nursing homes, skilled care, up to independent living, and everything in between. >> Okay, and as network manager, what's under your purview? >> Well, it's kind of a silly title, actually. In longterm care or in healthcare or nonprofits, as we are, you often wear many hats and so that's, sort of, a weird title for me, but I supervise our help desk which we serve centrally from our corporate office. We serve about 600 actual computer users and, all in total, about 1200 employees who interface with the technology, in some way. So, I supervise the help desk, I make sure our network is running well. IT has changed over the years so that we're now providing more of a service and making sure that everything is up and running, network-wise, for everyone instead of keeping our servers running all the time. >> Yeah, reminds me of the old saying, it was like oh, the network is the computer, things like that, so you've got both ends of it. >> Sue: Yes. >> What kind of things are you looking at from a technology standpoint when you come to event like this? Did you catch some of the keynotes this morning, there was a broad spectrum? >> Yes. >> What are the kind of things that you're digging in to and find interesting? >> Yeah, the keynotes are really interesting. I think the first one that I went to with Luigi and Chris was great just to, kind of, expand your thinking about your own career personally, and where you want to go with your life was really interesting. I also watched Randall do his coding which is completely outside of what I do everyday, but was fascinating. And then the last major keynote was fantastic. I think that from my perspective in my company, we're kind of small and we don't do a whole lot of, we don't run apps and things like that, so the things that we have ritualized is mostly storage, so I'm looking at better ways that we can manage our storage and stuff. Most of the applications that we run now are SAS applications hosted by somebody else and their cloud, or a public cloud, or wherever, so I'm not so much looking at the cloud technologies like more businesses are that are providing an application for their company. >> It sounds like cloud and SAS's being a part of the overall strategy, have you been seeing that dynamic change in your company? How does it impact what you're doing or is it just a separate organization. >> It's definitely been a shift in the last few years, we used to run all of our applications in-house. Longterm care has caught up now, with the hospitals, so we have our electronic medical record which is a hosted application, whereas, up until five years ago, that was an on-premises application that we hosted and had to run and maintain, and update and upgrade, and make sure was available. That is definitely been a shift, that everything is now hosted. So we just make sure that our network is up and running and support our users and all of their issues when they break things, flip their screens, drop something, provide hardware for them all that sorts of stuff. >> The constant pace of innovation change. On the news this week they were saying, okay, medical records on your iPhone is up for debate. Does regulation impact your day to day activities and what are some of the challenges in that area? >> Absolutely. One of the other things we have to do is interface with the providers. We have medical providers that come in from the outside and they need to access our EMR also, so we need to provide access for them on, sometimes, whatever device they bring in, which is not always compatible, so we have a whole other set of challenges there. Where we can manage our computers for our employees by pushing out policies and things that are required for the application. When someone comes in from the outside, it isn't, necessarily, setup right, so we have that other set of challenges, and regulation-wise, yes. The government is always pushing out new and updated regulations for healthcare and we have to keep on top of that too. Of course, we have HIPAA concerns and things like that, which is also comes into play when you're talking about cloud host, and any hosted application. We have to be concerned about HIPAA, as well. >> Yeah, wondering when I look at the space that you're in, the ultimate goal is you want the patients, the people at your company, be able to spend more time, help them, not be caught up in the technology of things. Could you, maybe, talk a little bit about that dynamic? >> Yeah, one of the things that I always say is, we need to give our employees the tools that they need to do their job most efficiently. A nurse needs to be ready to go at the beginning of her shift on her laptop, ready to pass meds, and when they can't remember their password or that computer isn't working, my team needs to work as quickly as we can to get them back to work. We serve our users, really. We're not there being all techy. They want us to fix them and get them back to work, and that's what we do. We put tools in their hands, any device that they need to make them more efficient. I try hard to provide a variety of devices, people have different preferences on how they do their work. Some people prefer a laptop, some people prefer to stand at a wall-mounted touchscreen and document, some people want to carry a tablet with them. I try to provide a range of devices so that they can have whatever suits them and makes them most comfortable to get their job done. >> Love that, it's not, necessarily, about the cool or trendier thing, it's about getting business done, helping, and in you're case, enabling your employees to really help the people that are there. Anything you want to highlight as to things you're excited to look at this show, or just technology in general? >> I'm just kind of here for the general nature of it. I enjoy the networking and getting to talk to people, and keeping current in what's happening in the industry and my career, so that's why I come. >> Alright, well Sue Morrow, really appreciate you coming, sharing with our audience. >> Absolutely. >> User groups like this, all about the users. Happy to have lots of them on the program, so big thanks to the VTUG group for bringing us some great guests. We'll be back with more coverage here. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)