 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're at WTG Transform 2019 here in Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program the CTO of Winslow Technology Group. Rick Gallin spoke to the customers this morning, threw out a bunch of data points, got us all thinking about where we are today and where we're going tomorrow in the cloud. Rick, thanks so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, so Rick, you and I, we've known each other for a few years now, we have these great debates as to kind of, you know, where we are and where we're going. I attended a Nutanix event a couple of years ago and Naseeb Talib, who is the author of a number of books including Black Swan and Anti-Fragile, he worked on Wall Street and he said, look, we all try to make these predictions, but we think it's going to be a line or maybe there'll be slow adoption, but the Black Swan that he said is something, you know, just a quick thing is, if you've never seen a Black Swan, you think that all swans are white. And once you've seen a Black Swan, you're like, oh my God, everything that I thought I knew, I have to think into questions. So predicting the future, especially in a never changing world where we don't have all the facts and we can't predict is really challenging. So understanding whether cloud will take, you know, 80% of the market or 30% of the market in the next five years is a little bit of a complex thing. It's like trying to predict the weather here in New England, you know, where we're watching the clouds and the rain roll in and roll out. So start with us as to, you know, Winslow technology, your customers, where they are with cloud and how that conversation goes with them today. Yeah, yeah, so I think, you know, you make a great point about these statistics, these assertions, these predictions. We're getting bombarded with them without context. And I think that it leaves a lot of our customers feeling like they're behind the curve a little bit because you're bandy about the, you know, you'll hear 80% of cloud, companies have a cloud strategy and, you know, there's never the follow up to see, did it change two weeks later? Was it actually implemented? And so, you know, I think that what we can all agree on is that one, all of these technologies are going to continue to grow right there adoption is going to continue to grow. We're going to continue to figure out different ways to extract value from those services. But the other part of this, and I think it's really where Winslow fits in, is that we want to help our customers position themselves to take advantage of that. So I want to help our customers transform what they're doing today. If we look out, you know, at that three, at that five year mark, we know that we're going to have a lot of workloads out there. I don't know what the percentage is going to be. I'm not going to throw a fake number out there, but we know that it's going to be bigger than the one today. And we also, I would assert that there are things we can help you do in your on-prem environment today that will help make you better prepared for that transition and allow you to attack that, hopefully in a more strategic and well considered way. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Rick, I am very sure 87% of all statistics lie. And beyond that, I would poke and prod at any numbers that I see there because look, numbers are numbers. And as you said, right, I think things do change all the time. Context. You know, when I look at some of the tailwinds that have been driving your business the last few years, hyper-converged infrastructure, some of the services wrapping around to help customers with their security journey, with their cloud journey. You've got a number of partners that are there. The bombardment that your customers get, it doesn't stop. You know, if they open up, you know, they open up the news today. It's like, oh, AWS just unleashed, you know, their latest on outposts and VMware is partnering with all the clouds and therefore, you know, you better be ready for it. So the thing, I'll poke a little bit at, I don't mind that customers think they're a little bit far behind because what they need to be doing is being that change mindset because the worst thing they can do is just say, well, I've got it the way I want it and I'm not going to change. And I think that that's something that you would agree with and that Winslow's helping them to try to keep up because nobody can keep up by themselves so they've got to be able to turn to partners like yourself to keep up. Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that was telling that I touched on earlier today a little bit was the number three reason that we heard from our customers for why they weren't leveraging the public cloud was because they didn't know how. And I think that that's telling, I think that, you know, sort of responds to the whole notion that they're feeling behind the curve. But I also feel like you mentioned Hyperconverged, you mentioned some of these other partners we work with. These guys all have some great stories that will allow our customers to take a first step, right? What we're not talking about is saying, hey customers, you've got to re-platform everything. You've got to rewrite everything to leverage all these different cloud services and cloud platforms. You know, that's a big lift for a lot of our customers. But what might not be such a huge lift is leveraging some of those, you know, cloud services, cloud connectivity capabilities that are built into those platforms from those partners like Nutanix, like VMware, you know, like Dell EMC. Yeah, so Rick, I really liked your line there that most customers, you know, many customers end up hybrid by accident. And unfortunately, I think that's where we are. When, you know, you go talk to them, they might not understand hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. There's like, oh, that's vendor terminology, but do you have SaaS? Oh, absolutely. They've all got 0365 at Salesforce and a whole host of other ones, three which probably IPO today. And, you know, are they using a public cloud? They definitely are, you know, most of them at least understand they're using it as opposed to five years ago, it was like, oh wait, we actually checked all the IPs and we had three groups that we didn't realize that were doing the old stealth IT. So what is the advice, you know, how do we make sure we get everybody talking and, you know, what are some steps to move forward on that strategy to actually have a coherent cloud offering, not just the pieces that I put together because that's what different groups did. Sure, yeah, I mean, I think the hybrid by accident scenario is one that we're seeing more and more often from our customers and also just, you know, from other folks in the industry. And I guess just to kind of expound on that a little bit, what we're talking about there is when somebody that we're working with, perhaps goes into a project, goes into a cycle with the notion that they're gonna be all of one or all of the other, right? I'm gonna put everything in the cloud and, or I'm going to put nothing in the cloud. And what happens is you find a workload that doesn't fit whatever your direction is, right? And so all of a sudden, you know, if you're one of those people who say, oh, the cloud is just somebody else's computer, next thing you know you're on O365, next thing you know you're consuming Dropbox or who knows what, you've got all of these different public services and you have no integration between your on-prem environment and all these public services you're leveraging. And so you find yourself in a scenario where you're in a hybrid by accident and which means that you didn't build in the sort of management that would be able to consider these different silos of information, right? And so what we kind of advocate is that when you're approaching these strategic decisions, recognize upfront that you may very well end up in a hybrid scenario, at least in the next, you know, few years, this is probably what it's gonna look like, at least that's what I think. Recognize that upfront and build that into your plan. If you plan to end up in a hybrid end state, your whole environment is gonna be so much more cohesive, you're gonna have that app mobility, you're gonna have so much more flexibility than if you end up there by accident by moving half your workloads out, lift and shift and some things over here. Some stuff gets left behind, different groups are managing different things because they're different skill sets. You know, if you plan to be in that state at the end, you're gonna be in much better shape but you're also gonna be well positioned to continue to move things out as those services become more robust and as you can extract more value from those for your business, right? Yeah, I think if you look at the history of IT, it's very rare that we get one thing to rule them all. Right. It's like, well, Ethernet's done a good job at networking and the mainframe had its time there but at the end of the day, five years from now, it might just be all my solutions are cloud but it's just, as you said, that location matters a little bit less because, by the way, it's not just public and private, that edge computing thing is a huge draw that most companies I talk to have some kind of IoT incentive strategy that they're picking out. How can users be data-driven to get to the right things in the right place and really make smart decisions? Yeah, so I think that there's two facets here to being able to make data-driven decisions. The first is that you have to collect the data. We have to put in the diligence. So certainly, that's one of the places that we're able to help our customers in collecting that information and in quantifying it, attaching dollars and cents. Here's what the services will cost. Here's what the professional services, the replatforming will cost. Let's wrap some numbers around this. If you're trying to make those decisions, if you're creating a strategy and you haven't taken a look at what your costs are gonna be, what the level of effort is gonna be, that's a super incomplete strategy and it's one of the frustrating things for me as a customer-facing resource to walk into one of those situations where a customer is dead set on their strategy but really doesn't understand it themselves. And so we really welcome the opportunity to help those kind of customers do their diligence to be able to create more informed and data-driven strategies, leveraging information from their own environments. All right, Rick, last thing is we know things are changing all the time. What's the last thing you want people to know about Winslow Technology 2019 that they might not have understood if they looked at the company a year or three years ago? Yeah, so I think that some of the big changes that have really come to us in the last couple years is we're adding technical firepower at an alarming rate. So our growth is really focused on the services delivery and the engineering talent. We've brought in high-end security resources, high-end VMware resources. We're able to deliver those cloud connectivity capabilities from all those different products that you mentioned. We're able to deliver a fairly robust security portfolio today, not to mention the highest level of VMware expertise that there is out there. So put a lot of focus into the services, into professional services, into helping our customers sort of understand and make that journey straddle that public private hybrid multi sort of thing. And we think that services is going to drive a lot of this for us going forward. And so our capabilities are growing leaps and bounds year over year in the services and engineering talent perspective. All right, well, Rick Gallin, CTO of Winslow Technology. Always a pleasure to catch up. My prediction, next year I think we'll be another five to 10% closer in our agreement as to what the future looks like. Just because it will be today as opposed to tomorrow in the viewpoint. So be back with much more here from WTG 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE.