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

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

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

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

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

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