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

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group welcome back I'm Stu minimun and this is the cube coverage of wdg transform 2018 I'm happy to welcome back to the program probably an interesting who's come all the way from Boston University he said three blocks away about three blocks why yes all right Brian's the director of College of Arts and Sciences information technology great to see you again thank you all right back so good news is we spoke it was just about a year ago it was August last year it's June this year I'm sure nothing's changed in your environment you know students never change technology never changes there's a little bit of change on your end a little bit a little bit last year we'd spoke of quite a bit about hyperconvergence and what's that's gonna mean in terms of Education and how we deliver that and what the experience could be like for these students and I think at this point we're satisfied with everything that Nutanix has brought to us we've deployed VDI and a couple of large deployments for whole bunch of classes so we decided to reassess and reevaluate work what we're doing this year and now we move on to application development that's great so we get many ways they say you need to modernize your platform and then once you do that we can look at what the long haul 210 which is really at the application side right exactly once we knew what we had what we could possibly do with it we decided to move forward and figure out what else can we change and we had a lot of legacy applications for the business and so this past year we hired a developer who's focusing solely on docker izing our applications so we're deploying docker and a whole bunch of applications within the college and then we're going to be doing kubernetes deployment later this year ok and let's be clear where does this live you know is this on the Nutanix platform is it in you know service riders public clouds where does this span because kubernetes can live in all of those environments in the containerized stuff at Casa and currently it's all contained within a handful of VMs within our Nutanix server environment ok we're planning on looking at calm and use using natural blueprints to deploy kubernetes and docker down the road ok so I've got the Nutanix platform what hypervisor am i using HP ok so using the HP using which of courses Newt annexes comes on on the platform and then you know in the VMS you're using containers we are um have you looked at bare metal um you know because that's one of the discussions is like well if I'm doing containers you know do I just do that on Linux on bare metal or do I do it virtual is a virtualized and there's there's pluses and minuses for each of those we did a few of the pluses that my sis had means really enjoy is when our developer is going to go crazy and do new things we can make snapshot so if he happens to do something to the environment we can restore it in ten minutes and I think as far as my developer is concerned he doesn't want to have to rebuild the environment every time he makes a mistake he's had a few close calls so far and having HP and the ability to snapshot restore it's been awesome for him okay what insight can you give us about what you know what sort of applications are they building and you said Dockers in two minute Kruger burn Eddie's you know are they building their own stack are they leveraging you know how are they getting to that state well we're taking some business apps that were focusing on both student and faculty applications dealing with various components of each and he's pulling them apart to figure out what components go into the docker containers what do we have to still reside in VMs for security and long-term use and try to figure out how to reimagine the application stack to move forward we're starting to look at reusing components that he's developing and I'm hoping that we have a lot of pieces that we can do that with so we have a lot of applications to rewrite okay and just to drill in a little bit because I've got we've got a team of the cube that's gonna be at docker con next week I've been go to the kubernetes show for a while so when you say docker are you using just the free containers which is now called mobi or using the dr. CEO as part of that I actually can't tell you that because that's miss all my developers work I did so they're using docker as you said it's like the Kleenex and do you know from kubernetes standpoint have they just built their own do you have a distribution or a platform that you just do Tanic we just downloaded the distro from kubernetes instead of a small cluster himself we're going to be looking at using calm to do a deployment on their channels natively okay really interesting stuff what what is you know you talked a bit about you know you can give a little bit of stability and recovery and things like that for your developers to be able to play in that sandbox is what gives us a little bit of the roadmap as to you know how long do they play with this and then you know how does this roll out for the university so we're looking at probably a three to six month development cycle on a lot of new applications right now part of my developers job is to try to figure out how this environments going to work my sis admins are deeply engaged with him but since most of doctrine kubernetes is developed with faced he has to do most of the legwork and figure out how it's all gonna work and so we're hoping to leverage Nutanix to have multiple environments all with the same back-end so we have dev tests and production all in the same hardware but different pieces of actually physical clusters that'll be separated so he doesn't mess around the production all too much but set up a baseline that we can use to short that development cycle even further yeah one of the things we always look at is right you've got your developers doing their thing how does that fit with the operation side is it DevOps even I interviewed Solomon hikes last year that was the founder of docker and he said actually it was an operation mindset that I had when I created this container format how are you seeing it's actually great you're all working together you're you're in discussion there do you have a DevOps rollout and what you're doing or you do you keep it separate I still keep them somewhat separate but my administrators are writing a little bit more code and scripting than they used to and I think in general that's going to be the in the entire industry where you can't just look at and have your developer do everything in docker and not understand how it works Brian talk to us about your partners for doing this how involved are the likes of Nutanix and Winslet technology and you know in Dell in this discussion of the containers agent and your developers Nutanix we've been utilizing a lot of documentation and we're gonna be leveraging them a lot when we start to look at com Winslow's we haven't really talked to them about it to be honest we probably should because they might have some ideas and other partners we can talk to Dell in it there's really just a hardware to run everything on that's stable we don't have to worry about it I'm so happy with that yeah that's not in any you know oh I don't need to worry about them there's certain pieces we always look at and I'd love your feedback on this if you know when we virtualized first and now even when we containerize how much don't I need to worry about the infrastructure I mean remember back you know 15 years ago it's like oh I'll virtualized that well have you checked the BIOS because the BIOS might not work and the server could break things the OS could cause problem you know virtualization relatively stable these days how are you finding the container stuff it's really interesting and very very unique to virtualize a virtualized environment even further it's it's kind of mind-blowing just I've been doing this for twenty years and this is much further than I've ever expected the industry to go oh yeah just wait and it's you go even further than kubernetes it's like wait is it on top of underneath or side by side with the technologies you're doing from a Cooper nettie standpoint you said today it's all in the note annex what's the value of kubernetes for you is it just kind of the cluster orchestration of containers or you know are you is its portability a piece even part of the concern that you look at there oh it's it's mostly from portability part of the applications that we're looking at down the road are going to be vertical applications especially some student facing ones and certain times of the year we're gonna have to go from maybe a hundred people logged in to several thousand at the same time so we're hoping to stand up something that we can easily move to a cloud provider and still work the same way that we're expecting it to and so I think kubernetes along with the orchestration internally on-prem it's gonna be a huge benefit for us to know the environment it's gonna be exactly the same when we move it to Amazon or Google or adder all right so so Brian you're still kind of in the thick of it here but from what you've learned so far any any learnings or things that you'd recommend to your peers that oh wait if I could turn back the clock three months I might have adjusted or pointed things in a different direction yes yeah well when our developer started he focused more on getting an application up and running before starting to learn docker I would encourage anybody that's just starting down the road get your developer learning doctor and kubernetes first because they might want to rewrite what they're doing in the application okay well Brian this has been fascinating want to give you the final word is that you look out through the rest of the year so it's a lot you know so far since last time we talked but by the time we come around next year you'll be all serverless and you know deploying things off side the globe I'm assuming but I have no idea if you told me your ago that we're gonna be doing what we're doing now I wouldn't believe you it's it's a fantastic journey it's it's amazing what we learn every day all right well Brian appreciate you sharing some of the learnings as we go it's one of the reasons we come to events like this I know yourself to talk to your peers here what's going out thank you for moving forward with thank you all right plus more coverage here at wtg transform 2018 I'm Stu minimun and thanks for watching the Q

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group hi and welcome to Silicon angle media's production of the cube I'm Stu minimun and we're at wtg transform 2018 14th annual Winslet Technology Group user conference new name happy to be back here at the heart of Boston in the shadows of Fenway Park and welcome back to the program Mike burthew who is now a senior systems engineering manager with mechanics like RIT to see it's a pleasure to be here Stu thanks for having me again really appreciate it I can't believe it's been a year since we last talked it hasn't been quite a year they moved it from August to Gok me makes me feel a little vacation there's more people here yeah gorgeous sunny day and Mike the reason one of the reasons I love doing it I get talked to a lot of users and especially up here in my backyard you talk to them all the time so give me kind of the sentiment of you know what are you hearing from users these days what kind of top of mind what you know bringing them to Winslow technology and Nutanix these days yeah I think top of mind for everybody is cloud right a lot of people are talking about you know what it's going to take to move workloads into the cloud and you know it's it's really understanding that in having conversations the customers to explain to them that that cloud is you know you have a lot of choice and flexibility with cloud today you know it's not about moving applications to your you know Amazon Web Services or Azure or Google although that makes sense for some applications that's truly an operating model right so explain to them that yeah you can still maintain your on-premises infrastructure to maintain the control that you need and also control your costs where it makes sense but there are certain applications that certainly benefit from running you know on prime as well as a public cloud yeah Mike I love that you brought up applications because sometimes you know I've got a lot of infrastructure people here we're talking about servers you're talking about networking and storage and the whole wave of converge and even hyper-converged there was so much focus on well you know let's take that infrastructure let's pack it a little different we of course want to make it simple we want to change the operating model but it's really about those applications what lives where give us what what's the mindset customers have for you know HCI near and dear to tune in hand annexes heart you know it was certain applications that usually drove that initially helped us bring together kind of the infrastructure in the applications in an HDI today I'm sure sure well you know I think many customers were initially drawn to Nutanix for the simplicity that we bring to the data center right eliminating the kind of the three-tier as we call three-tier silos of complexity in with an IT it really is all about the applications and that's becoming more and more apparent you know businesses don't want to spend money you know paying people to configure infrastructure right so but until you know relatively recently there was still certain applications that required more of that legacy infrastructure whereas now you know with with some of the work that Nutanix is done we actually can successfully virtualize or successfully move any application into the simplified infrastructure this this cloud like infrastructure and it can be managed you know in a holistic way and even if we're leveraging public cloud resources we still have that consistent control plane you know across the board yeah Mike absolutely at the Nutanix dot next show when New Orleans was just about a month ago there was still some of the messaging it's about Enterprise Cloud is that operating model that spans between you know my private data center and in the public cloud how are customers viewing cloud these days and I say that you know the journey to cloud reminds me a lot of the journey to virtualization that we've had but there is you know maybe even a little bit more discussion of applications cloud native apps you know am i lifting and shifting am i refactoring how am i doing that so you know here England what was cloud mean to them and how is that yeah and again I think it depends on who you're speaking with some organizations are all in with you know with cloud right and and there is a bit of a region where you know a cloud is again it's an operating model right it's not it's not a destination and we'll continue to say that and that's going to continue to be the case right our view is you know regardless of your applications all those applications belong within that cloud operating model but do they belong in the public cloud and again our perspective is there are certainly applications that do that can be cost effective in the public cloud just as Rick mentioned in his keynote some applications are actually more cost effective but the majority of our legacy traditional applications that are running our businesses today actually a more cost effective to run with you know your on-premises data center and the cloud operating amano really enables you to manage everything in a consistent way where regardless of you know where that application resides whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in your on-premises data center you're going to get that same control experience that same management experience right and then you know if we kind of fast forward things a little bit in terms of where we're going with all this you know some of the announcements we recently had our our doc next show actually really show that the the we're blurring the lines even more right so it's more more about understanding cost of applications so so beam and we'll talk about this and my session a little bit later today beam is actually a product set of Nutanix our it's our first software as a service offering that actually will quantify and look at costs in the public cloud and then the goal of that is to make true comparison as to what it will look like on premises right and be able to make that transition potentially dynamically without any disruption to the actual application yeah absolutely at the end of the day when I talk to customers Mike they you know IT is heterogeneous it's always additive seems like nothing ever dies and therefore in this ever-changing and growing in even more complex world yeah I get my arms around that so you know definitely something we heard Nutanix with beam and the like what other technologies you know what what's interesting you what things that Nutanix is doing that you want to help educate us yeah so we're doing a lot of interesting things and again you know important point I want to make is we're not losing focus on our core you know when we first you know released our platform back in 2011 we built that platform to be scalable and extensible right so what we've really done is we've continued to enhance the platform truly develop the enterprise cloud operating system and what that means is we can manage our in our on-premises resources in much the same way as we can manage those public cloud resources again with that consistent experience and control plan so some of the things that we announced that dot next an including beam which again is all about costing and compliance in your public cloud you know across public clouds and again on-premises in the future we're also we also have another technology called net silk right and that still actually allows us to understand application patterns and behavior regardless of where those applications reside right and in taking all that and being able to kind of create these bubbles of platforms and have mobility of those those platforms across both your on-premises and your in your public cloud infrastructure again regardless of what public cloud provider you're actually using so that's those are two things and then the third big announcement was we call Nutanix era and what errors it's a it's a database is a service that platform it's our first platform as a service offering native offering from Nutanix so database is a service but now having the ability to take enterprise databases that you're running either an oracle or Postgres today sequel and in the near future and being able to deploy those in a very simple way or you know have a repeatable process to be able to deploy them and also have the ability to clone in provision in other locations right so if I have a large production database that I actually want to provision or that my QA department needs to actually do some analysis on ik I can do that very easily with the arab product a lot of excitement a lot of buzz around that and really adding a level of simplicity to databases that's just not existed before yeah database definitely a very hot space we've been covering a lot of the you know modernization and open source database is having on that a lot less thing I want to ask you on that is I was talking to a CEO recently and he said you know if I'm a 5 to 10 year old company it's really easy I'm not choosing one of the old databases or old applications I'm I'm gonna do something more modern I'm gonna you know using all the cool new tools like no hub spot to be able to leverage their um if I'm an older company I've got some of the technical debt it's tougher for me to make changes what are you hearing from customers as they kind of look at their application portfolio yeah you know what moving fast and what is taking a little bit longer I mean I think everybody has digital transformation top of mine and we do need to kind of rewrite those legs or app customers know they need to rewrite their legacy applications well the good news is you know during you know the time it takes to do that we can still offer our customers a good solution so you know I think it's a breath of fresh air knowing that I I don't need you know go all-in with cloud I can kind of start small start where it makes sense and then start to kind of evolve my operation of my infrastructure and I can do that in a cost-effective way the beauty of you know the Nutanix platform is we can run our mode one traditional legacy applications in our mode to applications in the same environment so if I want to leverage you know if I want to start rewriting or re-architecting those applications I can do it on premises where I'm not gonna have to worry about the cost right it's going to be cost effective it's in my own data center and then when it makes sense potentially move those to the public cloud and again do that in a very seamless way all right well Mike barthian pleasure to see you as we as well be sure to check out the cube net where if you on the top hit the search search for Nutanix you'll not only find the hundreds of videos that we've done with Nutanix their customers and the partners all of the events that we've done in the past so make sure to check out all the website material and thanks so much for watching the queue [Music]

from Boston Massachusetts it's the cube covering wtg transform 2018 brought to you by Winslow technology group hi I'm Stu minimun and this is the second year of the cube at what is now wtg transform 2018 and happy to welcome to the program Scott Winslow who is the president and founder of winslet Technology Group Scott always great to see you good afternoon still happy to be with you hey and Scott thank you so much you you not only brought us back a second year we've got a nice table here but I'm not tripping over myself saying that it's the you know 14th anniversary Winslow technology group Dell EMC user conference and lovely Boston Massachusetts in the background it was like ha it's literally wtg transform rolls off the tongue so thank you you were the inspiration for us to you your comments last year precipitated to change our name III know your team just looked at it and felt sorry for me because it didn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as as the new it was a mouthful yeah so Scott you and I did we bump into each other a bunch we'd say we tend to go to many of the shows the Dell show the Nutanix show let's talk about your show first here you said it is the 14th year its users one of the reasons Idol of coming here besides getting to talk to you and Rick and some of your partner's is users I will speak to more users in one day here than I do it some of the big shows I go to yeah I mean it's it's a great opportunity to thank our existing customer base you know we have a fourfold purpose for this event we like to educate our customers we hope that they can pick up some knowledge and maybe an aha moment that they have with they're looking at a hyper-converged solutions or all-flash solutions we've got a new Dell client display here this year that we've never had in the past so we're looking to educate we love to give them an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners to compare notes the feedback I get from them is they really enjoy that piece of it we want to have some fun and you know it's a tradition that we want to keep rolling and they're helping you know to make it very successful so it's been a great it's been a great venue for us and a great event for so over 14 years now and Scott you couldn't have ordered a better day I mean New England you know it might change in an hour but right now temperatures in the low 70s it's mostly clear you know gorgeous backdrop here as you mentioned in the you open you know Sox have their ace pitching tonight and there are still in first place so yeah it doesn't doesn't hurt well you know we're in the customer service business right so you have to think of everything temperature starting pitcher and you know we try to make sure we've got a good agenda and there's a lot of good information for them here there to get customers to come out and spend a day with you like this is why there's a great event has going to be so biggest because year after year after year I feel like we've delivered and then we have kind of a continuous improvement process and we try to improve it every year here we are Scott one talk about your business you know first time we met you know winslet technology was one of the it was it was the Dell Partner of the year so you know been a long time dell partner the dell you know acquisition merger with emc it's been interesting to watch i know you've got some viewpoints but before we get into kind of the dell piece of it talk about your business as you know because we call you a channel partner and they're you know what's driving your business how's growth going how are things up here in new england and Beyond because yeah you're much more than New England yeah I mean well we've certainly evolved our business over the years with acquisitions being a big part of that initially we started out as a compelling partner then Compellent was acquired by Dell and then you know five or six years later after that we've the Delhi you see consolidation so I think we've had to learn to be flexible and and one of the things we've seen with that is we just each time there was an acquisition it allowed us to increase the size of our portfolio with more solutions that we can offer our end-users more services that we can provide you know along the way we've added a lot of other solutions too like the Nutanix solution and the hyper-converged space so our business is going great we're you know the highest employee count we've ever had our revenues were as high as they've ever been last year we had a record q3 record q4 in q1 we grew our Dell business by over 30% that makes Dell very happy and makes us very happy as well so you know as as this whole industry evolves and you know the digital economy progresses there continue to be the need for the services that we provide all right so let's talk about Dallas you said you've come from the compelling piece the the delicacy which the Nutanix OEM is something that I know your team is you know very involved with you know how is Dell and LEM see how they do and for the channel these days I think they're doing very well I think they you know tell likes to save they big ears and they listen well I think that they have proven that they put together a very good channel a partner program under the leadership of John Byrne initially and now Joyce Mullen you know I think that they incent you to work with them they try to incent the salespeople and sent the companies but they also put together very good programs for you to run marketing events like this so an event like this we couldn't do it without the support of Dell technologies and they've been you know very supportive of us you know they're providing speakers like Dave singer you've got all kinds of subject matter experts here we've got lots of hardware and software for folks through you know demo so I think I think overall the partner programs been very good great in Nutanix is this a you you get it through the Dell so I'm curious has it has the move as Nutanix is shifting more to really that software model does that have any impact on on your business or are you isolated from that since you've been using the Dell xcs yeah well I mean first of all we've been involved in Nutanix for you know three plus years now right before Dell acquired EMC our hyper-converged solution was Nutanix we've built together you know a very nice base with customers many of whom you know are here today so as they evolve to a software model I do think they're going to be less concerned about what or where platform it goes on because they're truly creating all their revenues you know from the software side so they're very they're they don't care really what you know what hardware platform is being used so you know we feel like we've got the best two solutions in the hyper-converged marketplace between the portfolio of Dell solutions you know visa and VX rail vce and then Nutanix with the Nutanix solution typically with Nutanix we tend to put that on a Dell server platform that's where we lean we think Dells got the best server technology in the industry that's a nice way for us to bridge that gap between the two companies so a lot of times our customers are putting a new tannic solution on a dell platform you know key themes I heard your talk rick's talk david singers talk this morning and what i hear from customers digital transformation and hybrid cloud are those top of mine with your customers today absolutely yeah I think you know Rick alluded to it in his talk a lot of customers are coming to us saying hey help us with our cloud strategy and so we're going in and saying tell us about your applications you know these are applications that we think belong in the public cloud that makes sense and the public cloud and you know that could be disaster recovery could be backup it could be office 365 and these are other applications that we think might be more well suited for an on-premise solution so that could be active file transfer and so you know we think that leads naturally to a hybrid cloud discussion we've got a customer here today a financial customer from New Hampshire and their CIO called me I had known him previously at a famous sneaker company in town he went to a financial institution and he said hey we wanna we want to move everything to the cloud can you come up and consult with us on that and we ended up putting in a hybrid cloud for him you know featuring a hyper-converged solution that had the cloud integration that he needed so I think that's the kind of activity we're involved in today yeah you use the word conversation that and the customers I've talked to they like they they need advice and they want someone that's not just oh well here's the solution that you're going to buy it no no it's a conversation there's lots of decision points and as you build out that hybrid cloud yes it's going to be made of by definition multiple pieces it's not necessarily going to be one company that's going to do it all but you know your team helps them that journey absolutely I mean you can't go in with a cookie cutter approach at sea you know you've got two years in one mouth we tell other salespeople you got to use them in that portion so you really kind of listen to the customer as I said try to understand what their applications are you got to understand what their biases are if it's a Microsoft shop you know as your might be their choice for you know public cloud or they might be interested in AWS so you got to kind of work through those you know scenarios and then build out a solution that's gonna work for them we and we rely on our solutions architects Brian veenu runs our sa team and he's got a group of five essays that we think are very adept at you know putting those solutions together yeah Brian's actually not not far from I said here you've got the new hands-on lab is one of the new things that you added here and anything from that or from other things at the event that you won't want to highlight as we wrap yeah I think I mean the hands-on lab gives you know customers the opportunity to come in and play with kind of structured and scripted demos and I see a number of customers in there using that so I'll talk to our team after the event and find out how it went we always try to look for you know improvements along the way but you know there's opportunity in there to play with those demos in terms of storage in terms of hyper-converged in terms of Dell OpenManage essentials which is the software that manages your entire server farm so I think that's been a good addition I'd say the other addition is this year is we were planning it we said hey our people are really good we need to get our people up in front instead of relying so much on the OEM and they're great and they provide great resources but I know that our people have so much to offer as well particularly because you know we're out there you know you're putting solutions together for customers and I think that breadth and depth you know comes through so that's been a nice addition this year where it's not just been Rick out on myself but we've utilized a number of members on our team Ed Palmer is the moderator for a customer experience as an outcome session this afternoon that we're really excited about because at the end of the day is a solution provider that's our job is to produce results and outcomes for our customers that's how we're going to be judged that's how we want to be judged so I'm really excited about that session because we've got em privada and Boston Architectural College they're going to present up their respective deployments and they were different of hyper-converged technology so I think the voice of the customer we really want to make sure we're continue to bring that back to this event so well Scott always a pleasure to see you thanks so much for taking the cube back to this event and thank you for all the customers we get access to we always loved to talk to the customers by the way if you're looking to get a customer on the cube that's we were always looking for customers so we look at the events or we do have a Boston area studio and a lovely Palo Alto studio so reach out to the team be happy to talk mom's to minimun thanks so much for watching the Q