 I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. We're here at the Winslow Technology Group, Dell EMC user group. Happy to have one of the users here, Brian Anderson, who's the director for the College of Arts and Science Information Technology at Boston University, within a short stone's throw here. Brian, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, you're welcome. Thank you for being here and being here while Scott's doing this, because it's kind of a fun event for us. Well, that's great. Tell us how many times have you been to this? My third event, I was actually a speaker last year. Excellent. I'm just coming as a user, listening to the sessions and being social with the rest of the people who do business at Winslow. Yeah, what do you get out of presenting and then attending an event like this? Feedback from my peers. I get to hear about what other people are doing, what their solutions are, how they solve some of the same problems we're trying to solve. And it's just a good networking event. That's awesome, Brian. And we love how peers can really share with other practitioners. So the good news, Boston University, I think we don't need to explain what the university is, but what are some of the drivers happening at the university level? Change is happening. Change is happening in every industry, but what specifically is happening there that kind of impacts your world? Yeah, there's a huge push right now to look at cloud as a solution for a whole variety of areas, replacing infrastructure that's currently in place, trying to figure out how cloud solutions fit into the academics. We have a lot of faculty that want to use cloud solutions to teach. And we've been playing catch up for the last few years, and we're really taking it seriously and trying to figure out how to provide those resources in both hybrid environments and cloud-only environments. Yeah, can you unpack that a little bit for us? Where are you with cloud today? What are you looking at? What are the criteria? What, obviously, cost is always a concern for everyone, but we know how fast higher education, the fees are going up, and therefore, you've got to be under a lot of pressure there. Oh, we are, we are. We're already using a lot of cloud-based services for things like email, file storage. We now have a Dropbox implementation that we're pushing out to our faculty this year. So it's a combination of what services can we take from on campus, move them out to the cloud, and is that feasible financially? It's a big transition to take the capital expenditure and transition over to OPEX, and it's really just the fine line of what services make sense to do so. I've talked to lots of K through 12 environments and the students there, obviously have a lot of high demands there. I have to think it's even more when we get to higher education. You mentioned a little bit the faculty demands and what they're doing. Maybe expand a little bit faculty and the students themselves, what are they looking for? What are they come into kind of expecting and how are you helping to deliver that? Well, I know a lot of students these days are coming from using services like Blackboard throughout most of their career until they get to the university. We also have Blackboard, but it's not as widely distributed as students are expecting. We have about a 50% adoption rate of Blackboard in our courses, so it's an effort to try to get faculty to convert their curriculum for the last 20 years into something that's online and that students today can really relate to and want to learn from. There's a lot of integrations with really cool technologies that students like to use and have used in previous schools that we want to try to get up and running so faculty can take advantage of them. So we're fighting the tie between what faculty want to do in their inertia versus what students are expecting when they walk in the door. Knowing how much the university costs per year and they get a great experience in the dorms and we want to make sure they get the same experience when they're in the classroom. Excellent. We heard in the opening remarks this morning really kind of that digital transformation that's going on. Scott Winslow talked about really some of those emerging solutions that they're helping to drive. What solutions do you use from WTG? Where do you look to them as a solution partner? Well, they introduced us to the Nutanix platform, the Dell XC series, and we've been using that for the last three years to provide VDI solutions for our students and that's enabling some of our faculty to be very creative in how they teach. We have one faculty who's trying to transform the chemistry lab experience to give the students hands-on experience without actually having to go to one of their prized rooms where all the research is actually done. So we're virtualizing instrumentation. They're able to play around with it and learn how to do it before they sit in front of it. And we're working with them to try to figure out how to expand that for training opportunities for their graduate students and PhD students. Yeah, Brian, what's the impact of online education, MOOCs and the like? Is that impacting your group yet? A little bit. BU has about 10 MOOCs they host per year. They're widely attended at the beginning and like every MOOC it dwindles as the semester goes. But it's been a fine line. We haven't accredited them yet so they're not really worth anything if students take them but we wanna get to that point where that is the case. We see the value, we see that's what the students want. We wanna make sure we have the total MOOC experience available for our students and external students. But it's just a lot of distance between where we are now and getting to that point. Okay, so I appreciate how you've been sharing how cloud is really developing in your environment. As you look into the partners that you work with, what's on your wish list, what would enable you to be able to move this transition even faster? Beyond, I'm sure, cost is always a concern but what would you be looking for? What would help you and your organization move even faster? Ease of manageability. Right now a lot of our partners are all siloed applications. If we had a service that could put a bunch of things under the same umbrella and allow ease of management of a whole variety of services, that would be a huge, huge one for us. That would probably make adoption much easier and would accelerate things a lot quicker than we can now. All right, what excites you most in technology space these days, Brian? I'm going to say the hyperconvergence and what that means for standard technology and how things have been done for the last 25 years. I think that's the future, that's where we are now and that's kind of the nice bridge between what we used to do to the cloud. And I think it's going to be here for a lot longer than people think. Yeah, and when you rolled out the hyperconvergence, is there any specific metric? What was the impact on your operations and any specific learnings that you would share with your peers? Well, for us, it was a new service. It was something brand new we were bringing in and I was amazed at how quickly my assistant administrators picked up on it and how quickly the faculty started to understand what it was and adopt it to their classes. All right, well, Brian Anderson, really appreciate you sharing us. The journey that BU and your organization are going through, you're watching theCUBE here at the WTG Dell EMC User Group event.