>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at San Francisco, at the historic Palace of Fine Arts, it's a beautiful spot, it's redone, they moved Exploratorium out a couple years ago, so now it's in a really nice event space, and we're here for the AT&T Spark Event, and the conversation's all around 5G. But we're excited to have our first guest, and he's working on something that's a little bit tangential to 5G-related, but not absolutely connected, but really important work, it's Chris Sambar, he is the SVP of FirstNet at AT&T, Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Jeff, great to be here, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, so you had a nice Keynote Presentation, talking about FirstNet. So for people I've missed, that aren't familiar, what is AT&T FirstNet? >> Sure, I'll give a quick background. As I was mentioning up there, tomorrow is the 17-year Anniversary of 9/11. So 17 years ago tomorrow, a big problem in New York City. Lots of first responders descended on the area. All of them were trying to communicate with each other, they were trying to use their radios, which they're you know, typically what you see a first responder using, the wireless networks in the area. Unfortunately challenges, it wasn't working. They were having trouble communicating with each other, their existing wireless networks were getting congested, and so the 9/11 Commission came out with a report years later, and they said we need a dedicated communications network, just for First Responders. So they spun all this up and they said, we're going to dedicate some Spectrum, 20 megahertz of D-Class Spectrum, which is really prime Spectrum. Seven billion dollars and we're going to set up this Federal entity, called the FirstNet Authority, and they're going to create a Public Safety Network across America. So FirstNet Authority spent a few years figuring out how to do it, and they landed on what we have today, which was a Public/Private Partnership, between AT&T, and Public Safety throughout America, and we're building them a terrific network across the country. It is literally a separate network so when I, I think of wireless in America, I think of four main commercial carriers, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint. This is the 5th carrier, this is Public Safety's Wireless Network just for them. >> So when you say an extra network, so it's a completely separate, obviously you're leveraging infrastructure, like towers and power and those types of things. But it's a completely separate network, than the existing four that you mentioned. >> Yeah, so if you walk into our data centers throughout the country, you're going to see separate hardware, physical infrastructure that is just for FirstNet, that's the core network just for this network. On the RAN, the Radio Access Network, we've got antennas that have Band 14 on them, that's Public Safety's Band, dedicated just for them when they need it. So yeah, it's literally a physically separate network. The SIM card that goes into a FirstNet device, is a different SIM card than our commercial users would use, because it's separate. >> So one of the really interesting things about 5G, and kind of the evolution of wireless is, is taking some of the load that has been taken by like WiFi, and other options for fast, always on connectivity. I would assume radio, and I don't know that much about radio frequencies that have been around forever with communications in, in First Responders. Is the vision that the 5G will eventually take over that type of communication as well? >> Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the evolution of First Responder, and Public Safety Communications, for many years now they've used radios. Relatively small, narrow Spectrum bands for Narrow Band Voice, right, just voice communications. It really doesn't do data, maybe a little bit, but really not much. Now they're going to expand to this Spectrum, the D-Class, the D-Block Spectrum, excuse me, which is 700 megahertz, it's a low-band Spectrum, that'll provide them with Dedicated Spectrum, and then the next step, as you say, is 5G, so take the load off as Public Safety comes into the, the new Public Safety Communications space, that they've really been wanting for years and years, they'll start to utilize 5G as well on our network. >> So where are you on the development of FirstNet, where are you on the rollout, what's the sequence of events? >> The first thing we did, the award was last year in March 2017. The first thing we did was we built out the core network. When I talked about all that physical infrastructure, that basically took a year to build out, and it was pretty extensive, and about a half a billion dollars so, that was the first thing we did, that completed earlier this year. >> Was that nationwide or major metro cities or how-- >> Nationwide, everywhere in the country. >> Nationwide, okay. >> So now what we're doing is, we are putting the Spectrum that we were given, or I should say we were leased for 25 years, we're putting that Spectrum up across our towers all over the country so, that will take five years, it's a five-year build-out, tens of thousands of towers across America, will get this Public Safety Spectrum, for Public Safety, and for their use. >> Right. Will you target by GEO, by Metro area, I mean, how's it going to actually happen? That's a huge global rollout, five years is a long time. How you kind of prioritize, how are you really going to market with this? >> The Band 14 Spectrum is being rolled out in the major, the major dense areas across the country. I will tell you that by the end of the rollout, five years from now, 99% of the population of America, will have Band 14 Spectrum, so the vast majority of the population. Other areas where we don't roll it out, rural areas for example, all of the features that Public Safety wants, we call them (mumbles) and priority, which is the features to allow them to always have access to the network whenever they need it. Those features will be on our regular commercial Spectrum. So if Band 14 isn't there, the network will function exactly as if it were there for them. >> Right. Then how do you roll it out to the agencies, all the First Responders, the Fire, the Police, the EMTs, et cetera? How do they start to take advantage of this opportunity? >> Sure, so we started that earlier this year. We really started in a March-April timeframe in earnest, signing up agencies, and the uptake's been phenomenal. It's over 2500 Public Safety Agencies across America, over 150,00, and that number grows by thousands every week. That's actually a pretty old number but, they are signing up in droves. In fact, one of the problems we were having initially is, handling the volume of First Responders that wanted to sign up, and the reason is they're seeing that, whether it's a fire out in Oregon, and they need connectivity in the middle of nowhere, in a forest where there's no wireless connectivity at all, we'll bring a vehicle out there, put up an antenna and provide them connectivity. Whether it's a Fourth of July show, or a parade, or an active shooter, wherever large groups of people, combined together and the network gets congested, they're seeing that wow, my device works no matter what. I can always send a text message, I can send a video, it just works. Where it didn't work before. So they love it, and they're really, they're really signing up in droves, it's great. >> It's really interesting because it's, it's interesting that this was triggered, as part of the post 9/11 activity to make things better, and make things safer. But there was a lot of buzz, especially out here in the West with, with First Responders in the news, who were running out of band width. As you said, the Firefighters, the fire's been burning out here, it seems like forever, and really nobody thinking about those, or obviously they're probably roaming on their traditional data plan, and they're probably out there, for weeks and weeks at a time, that wasn't part of their allocation, when they figured out what plan they should be. So the timing is pretty significant, and there's clearly a big demand for this. >> Absolutely. So that example that you sight is a really good one. Two weeks ago, there was a lot in the news about a fire agency in the West, that said they were throttled by their carrier. It was a commercial carrier, and commercial carriers have terms and conditions, that sometimes they need to throttle usage, if you get to a certain level. That's how commercial networks work. >> Right, right. >> FirstNet was built with not only different technology, hardware, software, but with different terms and conditions. Because we understand that, when a First Responder responds to your house, we don't want that to be the minute in time, when their network, their plan got maxed out, and now they're getting throttled. >> Right. >> So we don't have any throttling on the FirstNet Network. So it's not only the hardware, software, technical aspects of the network, but the terms and conditions are different. It's what you would expect that a First Responder would have and want on their device, and that's what we're providing for them. >> Right, and the other cool thing that you mentioned is, we see it all the time, we go to a lot of conferences. A lot of people probably experience it at, at big events right, is that still today, WiFi and traditional LTE, has hard times in super-dense environments, where there's just tons and tons and tons of bodies I imagine, absorbing all that signal, as much as anything else, so to have a separate Spectrum in those type of environments which are usually chaotic when you got First Responders, or some of these mass events that you outlined, is a pretty important feature, to not get just completely wiped out by everybody else happening to be there at the same time. >> Exactly. I'll give you two quick examples, that'll illustrate what you just said. The first one is, on the Fourth of July, in downtown Washington D.C. You can imagine that show. It's an awesome show, but there are hundreds of thousands of people that gather around that Washington Monument, to watch the show. And the expectation is at the peak of the show, when all those people are there, you're not really going to be sending text messages, or calling people, the network's probably just not going to work very well. That's, we've all gotten used to that. >> Right, right. >> This year, I had First Responders, who were there during the event, sending me videos of the fireworks going off. Something that never would've been possible before, and them saying oh my gosh. The actually works the way it's supposed to work, we can use our phones. Then the second example, which is a really sad example. There was a recent school shooting down in Florida. You had Sheriffs, Local Police, Ambulances. You even had some Federal Authorities that showed up. They couldn't communicate with each other, because they were on different radio networks. Imagine if they had that capability of FirstNet, where they could communicate with each other, and the network worked, even though there were thousands of people that were gathering around that scene, to see what was going on. So that's the capability we're bringing to Public Safety, and it's really good for all of us. >> Do you see that this is kind of the, the aggregator of the multi-disparate systems that exist now, as you mentioned in, in your Keynote, and again there's different agencies, they've got different frequencies, they've got Police, Fire, Ambulance, Federal Agencies, that now potentially this, as just kind of a unified First Responder network, becomes the defacto way, that I can get in touch with anyone regardless of of where they come from, or who they're associated with? >> That is exactly the vision of FirstNet. In major cities across America, Police, Fire, Emergency Medical typically, are on three different radio networks, and it's very difficult for them to communicate with each other. They may have a shared frequency or two between them, but it's very challenging for them. Our goal is to sign all of them up, put them on one LTE network, the FirstNet Network, customized for them, so they can all communicate with each other, regardless of how much congestion is on the network. So that's the vision of FirstNet. >> Then that's even before you get into the 5G impacts, which will be the data impacts, whereas I think again, you showed in some of your examples, the enhanced amount of data that they can bring to bear, on solving a problem, whether it's a layout of a building for the Fire Department or drone footage from up above. We talked to Menlo Park Fire, they're using drones more and more to give eyes over the fire to the guys down on the ground. So there's a lot of really interesting applications that you can get more better data, to drive more better applications through that network, to help these guys do their job. >> Yeah, you've got it, the smart city's cameras, don't you want that to be able to stream over the network, and give it to First Responders, so they know what they're going to encounter, when they show up to the scene of whatever issue's going on in the city, of course you do, and you need a really reliable, stable network to provide that on. >> Well Chris, this is not only an interesting work, but very noble, and an important work, so appreciate all of the efforts that you're putting in, and thanks for stopping by. >> I appreciate it Jeff, it's been great talking with you. >> Alright, he's Chris, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts, at AT&T Spark. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's the Cube covering VeeamON 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and you're watching our exclusive coverage of VEEAMON 2018. #VeeamON. My name is Dave Vallante and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman. Stu, great to be working with you again. >> Thanks Dave. Admiral, David G. Simpson is here. He's a former Chief Public Safety and homeland Security Bureau and CEO, currently, of Pelorus, a consultancy that helps organizations think through some of the risk factors that they face. David, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for taking time out. >> It's my pleasure to be here. >> So, as I was saying, we, we missed a big chunk of your keynote this morning cause we had to come back to the cube and do our open, but let's start with your background and kind of why you're here. >> Sure, well, I spent over three decades in the Navy where my responsibilities throughout included the resiliency of the ability to command and control forces in areas around the world not always so nice and often arduous and often at sea. So, that experience really has given me a very good appreciation, not only for how important economy of operations is, but how difficult it can be and how important the details are, so I am a natural fan of what FEMA's doing to make that easier for organizations. After DOD, I was recruited by the chairman of the FCC to lead the Public Safety Homeland Security Bureau for the Federal Communications Commission. And, in that position, I have responsibility for the nation's climate one system, emergency alerting, and the resiliency of over 30,000 telecommunication companies in the domestic market, so both experiences really have given me a very good insight into the need, the consequence of not getting it right, how to prepare to get it right, but also an ability to look at what's coming down the pike with the new telecommunications technologies that will really be game changers for functionality in the new internet of things environment. >> So, three decades of public service. First of all, thank you. >> Thank you. It's quite an accomplishment. And then, we had talked off camera that we, a couple of years ago, had Robert Gates on and we were gettin' detailed into how the experience that someone like you has had in the public sector translated to the private sector. It used to be there was just such a huge gap between, you know, what you did and what a, what a company had to, had to worry about. Do you see that gap closing? And, maybe, you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and in particular, in the cyber arena, you know, cyber, unlike the land, sea, and air domains, is a domain of Man's own making and the constraints around that domain are of our own choosing. And, we're not constrained by physics, we're constrained by the investment decisions we make and the contours of that expanding environment. But, the internet started out as a DOD research and development project, ARPA, so it has not been unusual for DOD to be out in front in some of the development aspects where counterintuitively we would, normally, see industry out in front. The same occurred I believe with cyber when our intelligence community over 10 years ago said, hey, this is a great thing, this internet thing. And, it's super that we're doing more and more communications, that we're talking with devices at the edge around the battle space, but it's vulnerable to attack and we need to organize, so that we are capable in the defense of that great cyber set of functionality that we've built. >> Could you expand? Just, so, you're doing some teaching in the cyber security world too. Maybe you could share a little bit what you're doing and what you see as kind of the state of this today >> Yeah, well, thank you for asking that about a year ago, the dean of the business school of Virginia Tech, asked me if I wouldn't consider building a cyber program for the business school. Tech has always had a strong engineering component to cyber security and it's led by a good friend of mine Dr. Charles Clancy with some superb research going on, but, increasingly, over two thirds of the work roles, in cyber security are not engineering. They really have much more to do with traditional business functions. Yet, most business leaders aren't well prepared to assess that risk environment, let alone appreciate it, and then, drive investments to address risk reduction. So, at Virginia Tech, we've built a series of four courses that in the MBA programs, the Masters of Accounting, the Masters of Business IT, we are now teaching prospective business leaders how to look at the risk environment and organize an investment structure using the NIST, or National Institute of the Standards of Technology, risk management framework, so that can be done in a repeatable way that communicates well with industry. And, companies like Veeam have an important role to play in that space because Veeam really translates much of the engineering complexities into business understandable conditions by which decisions about that data space can really be made. >> I want to share an observation that we had on the Cube last year, one of my favorite interviews was with a gentleman from ICIT, James Scott. He's a security expert, you may know him. And, we asked him what the biggest threat was to United States and his answer surprised me. I thought it was going to be, you know, cyber warfare or risks to critical infrastructure, he said the weaponization of social media was the number one threat, like wow. And, we had a really interesting discussion about that and, you know, I think of, you know, your background, loose lips sink ships, people on social give up there credentials, all of a sudden, you've got some outside bad actors controlling the narrative, controlling the meme and controlling the population without firing a shot. Wow, so what are your thoughts on social media and it's risk to our society and how to deal with it? >> Well, we're seeing in the last year, that he's very prescient, right, in that you can lockdown all the bits and the bytes and get the integrity, the confidentiality, and the availability of your data sets taken care of, but in a world where the public square, if you will, is now a virtual public square, if an adversary can change the perception of reality in that public square, or if they can cause our democracy to lose confidence in that public square, then an adversary can really achieve a kill, if you will, a desired effect in a way that is very negative for the country, so I don't see that though as being completely distinguished from cyber security. I see, in my mind, that we need to expand the universe, to protect the universe of cyber into that cognitive space. And, we need to understand, increasingly, the origin of comment in the social media arena. We need to understand therole algorithms have to play in amplifying a message and suppressing other messages. And, we need to, I think, have a greater accountability for businesses that are in that virtual public square line of business to help consumers and communities continue to have confidence in that public square and we're, we're challenged in that area. 'cause see Mark Zuckerberg's testimony, right >> Sure. >> Illuminated some big challenges there. >> Yeah, I mean, my heart went out to Zuckerberg, it was, I was like the poor guy, he's just trying to build out a social network and now he's getting, you know, attacked by politicians who are saying, wow you mean you use data for political gain, or you allowed somebody to do it. >> He was in a tough spot. >> And politicians themselves, I think, were a bit embarrassed in revealing their lack of tech savvy in a world where we should expect policy makers to be at least aware enough of the parameters around the virtual public square where they can help develop the right policy to ensure that this continues to be a net asset for the United States, for communities, and for consumers. >> Technology kind of got us into this problem, but, technology, in and of itself, is not going to get out of, get us out of this problem >> Right. >> It's others in the organization, the lines of business, the policies, the practices, some of the work that you do in your teachings, may be >> Yeah, absolutely and when I talk to aspiring business leaders, I communicate a couple of things to them. One, they need to get their heads out of being the decider as the CEO. Increasingly, they will be creating decision environments, right, where decision operations occur and are driven by algorithms, by machine learning, and AI, and so they've got to be thinking, about how do they create those environments to deliver the right kind of decision results that they're looking for. The second piece that I talk to them about, that's counterintuitive, is that they need to, as they bring in network functional virtualization and more and more software oriented things that used to be hardware, they've got to understand the risk exposure from that and bring in, they can, a way to address cyber risk as they introduce new functionality in the market. >> Well, it's interesting of an Admiral talking about network function virtualization, I'm very impressed. Admiral Simpson, thanks very much for coming on the Cube. >> Sure. >> Really a pleasure having you and best of luck in your work. >> Well, thank you and it's great to be here with the Veeam professionals that, I think, are really building a command and control layer of an enterprise of data space that will be very important for the future. >> Alright, okay, thanks for watching everybody. We will be right back, Stu Miniman and Dave Vallante from VeeamOn 2018, you're watching the Cube. >> Great thanks. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, we're here in New Orleans in the state of Louisiana, and to help Keith Townsend and myself, Stu Miniman, wrap up we're glad to have one more customer. We have the great state of Louisiana here with us, we have Michael Allison, who's the Chief Technology Officer. We also have Derek Williams, who's the Director of Data Center Operations. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so I think we all know what the state of Louisiana is, hopefully most people can find it on a map, it's a nice easy shape to remember from my kids and the like. But, Michael, why don't we start with you? Talk to us first about kind of the purview of your group, your organization, and some of the kind of biggest challenges you've been facing in recent times. Sure, we are part of the Office of Technology Services, which is a consolidated IT organization for the state of Louisiana. We were organized about four years ago. Actually four years ago this July. And that brought in the 16 Federated IT groups into one large organization. And we have the purview of the executive branch, which includes those typical agencies like Children and Family Services, Motor Vehicles, Public Safety, Health and Hospitals, Labor, etc. >> And Derek, you've got the data center operations, so give us a little bit of a scope. We heard how many organizations in there, but what do you all have to get your arms around? >> Sure, so we had, you know, there's often a joke that we make that if they've ever made it we own one of each. So we had a little bit of every type of technology. So what we've really been getting our arms around is trying to standardize technologies, get a standard stack going, an enterprise level thing. And really what we're trying to do is become a service provider to those customers where we have standard lines of service and set enterprise level platforms that we migrate everybody onto. So do you actually have your own data centers? Your own hosting facilities? What's kind of the real estate look like? >> Absolutely, so we have, the state has two primary data centers that we utilize, and then we also use a number of cloud services as well as some third-party providers for offsite services. >> So obviously just like every other state in the union, you guys have plenty of money. >> Always. >> Way too many employees and just no challenges. Let's talk about what are the challenges? You know, coming together, bringing that many organizations together, there's challenges right off the bat. What are some of the challenges as you guys look to provide services to the great people of Louisiana? >> Well as Derek kind of eluded to, technology debt is deep. We have services that are aging at about 40 years old, that are our tier one services. And they were built in silos many, many years ago. So being able to do the application or actualization, being able to identify those services, then when we actually shift to the cultural side, actually bringing 16 different IT organizations into one, having all those individuals now work together instead of apart. And not in silos. That was probably one of the biggest challenges that we had over the last few years is really breaking down those cultural barriers and really coming together as one organization. >> Yeah I totally agree with that. The cultural aspect has been the biggest piece for us. Really getting in there and saying, you know a lot of small and medium size IT shops could get away without necessarily having the proper governance, structures in place, and a lot of people wore a lot of hats. So now we're about 800 strong in the Office of Technology Services, and that means people are very aligned to what they do operationally. And so that's been a big shift and kind of that cultural shift has really been where we've had to focus on to make that align properly to the business needs. >> Mike, what was the reason that led you down the path towards Nutanix? Maybe set us up with a little bit of the problem statement? We heard some of the heterogeneous nature and standardization which seems to fit into a theme we've heard lots of times with Nutanix. But was there a specific use case or what led you towards that path? Well, about four years ago the Department of Health and Hospitals really had a case where they needed to modernize their Medicaid services, eligibility and enrollment. CMS really challenged them to build an infrastructure that was in line with their MIDAS standards. There was modular, COTS, configuration over customization. Federal government no longer wants to build monolithic systems that don't integrate and are just big silos. So what we did was we gravitated to that project. We went to CMS and said, hey why don't we take what you're asking us to build and build it in a way that we can expand throughout the enterprise to not only affect the Department of Health but also Children of Family Services, and be able to expand it to Department of Corrections, etc. That was our use case, and having an anchor tenent with the Department of Health that has a partner with CMS really became the lynch pin in this journey. That was our first real big win. >> Okay how did you hear first about Nutanix? Was there a bake off you went through? >> It was, yes, very similar. It was the RP process took a year or so and we were actually going down the road of procuring some V blocks, and right before the Christmas vacations our Deputy CIO says hey, why don't you go look to see if there's other solutions that are out there? Challenge Derek, myself, and some others to really expand the horizons. Say, if we're going to kind of do this greenfield, what else is out there? And right before he got on his Christmas cruise he dropped that on our lap and about a month later we were going down the Dell Nutanix route. And to be honest it was very contentious, and it actually took a call from Michael Dell who I sent to voicemail twice before I realized who it was, but you know, those are the kind of decisions and the buy in from Dell executives that really allowed us to comfortably make this decision and move forward. >> So technology doesn't exactly move fast in any government because, you know, people process technology and especially in the government, people and process, as you guys have deployed Nutanix throughout your environment, what are some of the wins and what are some of the challenges? >> That's a funny point because we talk about this a lot. The fact that our choice was really between something like VBlock, which was an established player that had been for a long time, and something a little more bleeding edge. And part of the hesitancy to move to something like Nutanix was the idea that hey, we have a lot of restricted data, CJIS, HIPAA, all those kind of things across the board, RS1075 comes into play, and there was hesitancy to move to something new, but one of the things that we said exactly was we are not as agile as private sector. The procurement process, all the things that we have to do, put us a little further out. So it did come into play that when we look at that timeline the stuff that's bleeding edge now, by the time we have it out there in production it's probably going to be mainstream. So we had to hedge our bets a little. And you know, we really had to do our homework. Nutanix was, you know, kind of head and shoulders above a lot of what we looked at, and I had resiliency to it at first, so credit to the Deputy CIO, he made the right call, we came around on it, it's been awesome ever since you know, one of the driving things for us too was getting out there and really looking at the business case and talking to the customers. One of the huge things we kept hearing over and over was the HA aspect of it. You know, we need the high availability, we need the high availability. The other interesting thing that we have from the cost perspective is we are a cost recovery agency now that we're consolidated. So what you use you get charged for, you get a bill every month just like a commercial provider. You know, use this many servers, this much storage, you get that invoice for it. So we needed a way that we could have an environment that's scaled kind of at a linear cost that we could just kind of add these nodes to without having to go buy a new environment and have this huge kind of CAPX expenditure. And so at the end of the day it lived up to the hype and we went with Nutanix and we haven't regretted it, so. >> How are the vendors doing overall, helping you move to that really OP-X model, you said, love to hear what you're doing with cloud overall. Nutanix is talking about it. Dell's obviously talking about that. How are the vendors doing in general? And we'd love to hear specifically Dell Nutanix. >> We've had the luxury of having exceptionally good business partners. The example I'd like to give is, about four months into this project we realized that we were treated Nutanix as a traditional three-tier architecture. We were sending a lot of traffic more south. When we did the analysis we asked the question, a little cattywampus, it was how do we straighten this out? And so we posed a question on a Tuesday about how do we fix this, how do we drive the network back into the fabric? By Thursday we were on a phone call with VMWare. By the following Monday we had two engineers on site with a local partner with NSX Ninja. And we spent the next two months, with about different iterations of how to re-engineer the solution and really look at the full software-defined data center, not just software-defined storage and compute. It is really how do we then evolve this entire solution building upon Nutanix and then layering upon on top of that the VMWare solutions that kind of took us to that next level. >> Yeah and I think the key term in there is business partner. You know, it sounds a little corny to say, but we don't look at them as just vendors anymore. When we choose a technology or direction or an architecture, that is the direction we go for the entire state for that consolidated IT model. So, we don't just need a vendor. We need someone that has a vested interest in seeing us succeed with the technology, and that's what we've gotten out of Nutanix, out of Dell, and they've been willing to, you know, if there's an issue, they put the experts on site, it's not just we'll get some people on a call. They're going to be there next week, we're going to work with you guys and make it work. And it's been absolutely key in making this whole thing go. >> And as a CTO one of the challenges that we have is, as Derek has executed his cloud vision, is how do we take that and use it as an enabler, an accelerant to how we look at our service design, service architecture, how do we cloud optimize this? So as we're talking about CICD and all these little buzzwords that are out there, is how can we use this infrastructure to be that platform that kind of drives that from kind of a grass root, foundation up, whereas sometimes it's more of a pop down approach, we're taking somewhat of an opposite. And now we're in that position where we can now answer the question of now what, what do we do with it now? >> So sounds like you guys are a mixed VMWare, Nutanix hardware, I mean software, Dell hardware shop, foundation you've built the software-defined data center foundation, something that we've looked at for the past 10 years in IT to try and achieve, which is a precursor, or the foundation, to cloud. Nutanix has made a lot of cloud announcements. How does Nutanix's cloud announcements, your partnership with Dell match with what you guys plan when it comes to cloud? >> That's a perfect lead in for us. So you're absolutely right. We have had an active thought in our head that we need to move toward SDDC, software-defined data center is what we wanted to be at. Now that we've achieved it the next step for us is to say hey, whether it's an AWS or whomever, an Azure type thing, they are essentially an SDDC as well. How do we move workloads seamlessly up and down in a secure fashion? So the way we architected things in our SDDC, we have a lot of customers. We can't have lateral movement. So everything's microsegmentation across the board. What we've been pursuing is a way to move VM workloads essentially seamlessly up to the cloud and back down and have those microsegmentation rules follow whether it goes up or back down. That's kind of the zen state for us. It's been an interesting conference for us, because we've seen some competitors to that model. Some of the things Nutanix is rolling out, we're going to have to go back and take a very serious look at on that roadmap to see how it plays out. But, suddenly multicloud, if we can get to that state we don't care what cloud it's in. We don't have to learn separate stacks for different providers. That is a huge gap for us right now. We have highly available environment between two data centers where we run two setups active active that are load balanced. So the piece we're missing now is really an offsite DR that has that complete integration. So the idea that we could see a hurricane out in the golf, and 36, 48 hours away, and know that we might be having some issues. Being able to shift workloads up to the cloud, that's perfect for us. And you know, then cost comes into play. All that kind of stuff that we might have savings, economy of scale, all plays in perfectly for us. So we are super excited about where that's going and some of the technologies coming up are going to be things we're going to be evaluating very carefully over the next year. >> At the end of the day it's all about our constituents. We have to take data, turn it into information that they can consume at the pace that they want to. Whether it be traditional compute in a desktop or mobile or anywhere in between. It was our job to make sure that these services are available and usable when they need it, especially in the time of a disaster or just in day-to-day life. So that's the challenge that we have when delivering services to our citizens and constituents. >> All right, well Mike and Derek, really appreciate you sharing us the journey you've been on, how you're helping the citizens here in the great state of Louisiana. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching our program. It's been a great two days here. Be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our programming. Thanks Nutanix and the whole crew here, and thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you.