 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2017. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Hi everyone, I'm Sam Cahane with Wikibon Senior Analyst and CUBE host. We're here at the VTUG over at Gillette Stadium home with the New England Patriots. We've had an awesome day. We just had Dion Branch come on theCUBE. 39th Super Bowl MVP, that was pretty awesome, huh? Yeah, I mean, Sam, as I've said, I'm a Patriots season ticket holder, been going to the game since I moved up to here to New England when I got out of college. Love the Patriots is one of my favorite places to come to an event, so give me a day of geeking out on technology and end it with a Super Bowl MVP from the Patriots who had some fun stories about Tom Brady and what he's learned and everything. I mean, what a day, I mean, there's beer waiting for us when we're done. No complaints on my end. No complaints, so to start, I want to just quickly get a Tom Brady story and then we're going to wrap up the event for you, tell you everything you need to know about the VTUG. So one Dion Branch story about Tom Brady to start us off. Yeah, so it was great. He's like, hey, Tom, don't get mad at me, but people in New England know Tom Brady is super competitive. I mean, he practices hard, everything else, but he's like, I played a ping pong game with him. I beat him. Next person's wait, no, no, play again. Third time after three times playing, everybody's waiting around. Tom broke every ping pong paddle in there. So it's like, all right, we're done for the day onto something else. So, you know, we expect Tom Brady to come out this weekend on Sunday, that competitive fire, take the team to there. You know, it would be his seventh Super Bowl appearance because he wants that fifth ring, Tom. You know, one more. All five, come on, Tom, let's do it. So, you know, this is a user event. Let's talk about the users. What's new with the users here? Yeah, so what I really like about this event is it's pretty broad in scope. So as customers are getting ready for things like virtualization, you know, adoption, cloud, containers, you know, developers, everything that's going on there, you know, they're learning all these new technologies and understanding how they work. So what's changing? You know, let's start with storage. What's changing with storage? So, you know, storage, we talked to a number of people in storage. You've got, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure. You know, SimpliVity just got bought by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. You and I did a video about that yesterday, Sam. Yes, we did. You know, Nutanix is here with there. You've got the kind of secondary storage. Kind of looks like hyper-converged, like Cohesity. A lot of, you know, these new waves coming in. You know, flash, of course, you know, very, you know, important wave in storage. And then, you know, where are, you know, things like machine learning and IoT fitting in, interviewed Igneous on the program to talk about that because, you know, object has gone through a rebirth as to, you know, some new sources of data, massive amounts of data. So, you know, lots of change in the storage industry. Some of it really changing. It's not about the storing of data. It's about leveraging data. It's about, you know, weaving it into clouds and new applications. So, you know, kind of that, you know, death of the old storage, but long live, you know, storage, you know, the importance of data. The importance of data. So that's storage. And then what's changed with, you know, cloud containers? Could you touch on that as well? Yeah, so, you know, many of the customers in an event like this are still trying to figure out how cloud fits for them. And I talk to most customers, they're all doing SaaS. I mean, you know, everything from, you know, Salesforce, you know, Workday, you know, ServiceNow, many, you know, SaaS applications that they're using, the important Microsoft, the huge push with Office 365 over the last couple of years. So, I don't think there's any company that says, oh wait, I don't trust, you know, software as a service. It would be like people now saying, I don't trust the internet. You know, it's just the way that a lot of people do business. But, you know, where do I put my applications? Where do I put my data? Kind of extending that storage discussion. So, you know, there was a good discussion of AWS. I interviewed a consultant that helped with, you know, large-scale deployments of AWS, you know, lots of mobile interactions. Talked to Docker about how getting closer to the application and being able to have flexibility as to where I put that. So, whether it's on-premises, you know, using OpenStack or, you know, putting it in public clouds, Docker works across multiple components. You know, another thing we talked about, Red Hat about that, that options and choices is something that many of the technology are giving me, especially, talk about things like open source and cloud. You know, some of that portability is something they want to look at more. So, for the people watching who want, you know, a couple sentences of takeaway from this event, what is the big takeaway here? Yeah, so, I mean, the biggest takeaway for me is, you know, we talk about the practitioners and the users. There's no, I think it was Dewey that said, you know, Dewey Sasser, who was the consultant I talked about from AWS. He said, basically, if you're an IT, you need to stay curious, you need to keep learning because we've been saying this for years, you know, what you're doing today, five years from now, it's going to be totally different. If you're still thinking you can keep doing things the same way, you're going to be out of a job, you're going to be out of business because you're competition moving. And this is a little bit scary for a lot of people because it's easier to just kind of, you know, do what you know, but, you know, there's lots of, your peers out there doing it, lots of places like this user group where I can learn more. So, you know, that's really important as we head into 2017, you know, what goals are you going to set for yourself? You know, am I going to, you know, take new courses, do new certifications, or just, you know, look at some areas outside of my comfort zone because absolutely things are going to change. So, great event, we've got a big weekend for the Patriots coming up. Where else are you going after this? Where, what events do you have on the horizon? Yeah, so Sam, you know, I actually, it's funny, like half the guests that we have on, it's like, oh, hey, we're going to be at that show. So, we've got a couple of shows coming to the Boston area this year. Red Hat Summit comes here every other year. It's at the Boston Convention Center this year, the new Convention Center on the Seaport. Open SAC Summit is going to be at the Hines. That's great. We've got tons of events on the West Coast. We've got, I don't go to our big data event that we have, but Big Data SV is a big one. Same week as Stratoconf. I'm expecting to go down to DockerCon, which is going to be April and Austin. I'm heading to a Google Cloud event, you know, in March in San Francisco. So, you know, I hit the West Coast a bunch. I try to minimize how many times I go to Vegas. I think I was there six or seven times last year. I think I might be one or two less this year, which will be nice. A few events down in Austin, all the open source events seem to be down there. I'm really easy to get in touch with. You see on the lower third, you know, my Twitter handle stew, just stewitsiliconangle.com's, my email, you know, hit me up. You can look at our website as to what events we're going to be at. We're actually going to launch a new wikibon.com website soon where we're going to have events listed. So, you want to know where I'm at and what webinars I'm doing and things like that. We're going to make it really easy. So, that's something we are looking forward to in 2017 and lots more events too, Sam. Great. So, as you said, I think the beer is waiting for us. So, any last words or should we wrap up? No, just look, you know, as always, thank you to our audience. You know, really appreciate this. This is an event we give back to the community. You know, we love to participate in this. So, if there's anything, you know, we can help with feel free to reach out. Love to be at more events and, you know, love to help talk about all of these cool things going on in the industry. Thank you. So, as Stu said, you know, reach out to us. How we're grateful to be here. It's been a great event. So, thank you for watching. All the interviews are at siliconangle.com. Thanks again for watching theCUBE.