 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is VMworld 2017 and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and with my co-host Peter Burris. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure, marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. Thanks for having me back. So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked, what's happening at the show, about your parties last night, how's the vibe? We're there? Yeah, responses from customers to your announcements. Give us the update. No, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Keep my voice, same. I went, I just didn't talk. Smart man. No, I mean, been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converged because that's what I do for a living. You know, and brought Josh along to talk a little about his experience with hyper-converged, but have had a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about? What's your role? Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa. For anybody's familiar with that. And we're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of the Eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. And your role? I'm a VP of Information Systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. Okay, so maybe paint a picture. Well, let me start here. When you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business and how they ripple through to IT. What are those drivers and how are you responding? Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world with the fintechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisors, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. Yeah, so things like blockchain and crypto and you guys launching your own currency anytime soon? No, we are monitoring it, but nothing like that. So how does the, how do those, I mean, somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like, wow, that's a pretty radical statement. So everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it's requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there? Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got to increase governments and regulations and compliance we have to deal with, sustain on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stacks, servers, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, you know, hyperconverged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. So can you talk a little bit more about that? What kind of, maybe the before and the after, what did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity and how many of these and those or however, whatever detail you're comfortable with. Sure. And what happened afterwards? Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-locate our data center facilities. You know, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continue to grow within that simplified or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we'd be able to reduce rack space. I think my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four and we're running the exact same workload at a higher performance. How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? What was the story that you told? It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think, you know, being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services and not always be the in the weeds or break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. Well, so you went to somebody, CFO, business, you remember, asked for money because you had a new project, but you would have had to do that anyway, correct? Yes, yes. Okay, so, so... Was it easier? Easier with the business case. Or were you nervous about that because you were sticking your neck out? No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it. So what I brought forward was well vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC and they just really were there the entire step of the way. And what was the business impact? I mean, or the IT impact from your standpoint? Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition to data domain and the data protection software. Is that important in banking? Yeah. You want to make sure that people track your data, your data, right? So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyperconverged or converged is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? Sure. That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hill's Bank of Trust? You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. You know, I've got a systems group, a networking group and a security group. So transforming or doing things differently within the IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp up time to get VxL up and running was very minimal. You still have a systems group and network group and a security group? At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point, we're still operating within that. Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor, whether it's FTEs or how they spent their time? We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider and not just a operational group that fixes servers and storage. So you're saying a little less? But it wasn't a dramatic change? We're still transforming though. So again, we still have this traditional IT structure within our group. So I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I wanted to start that, I had to start with that hardware layer first. What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of just freeing up resource and what do you want to do with that resource? Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. And any desire to get more of your weekends back or spend more time with your family or maybe golf a little bit more? Exactly, golf is always good. But we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend, managing these platforms or at least the hardware standpoint. Firmware upgrades and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware and then we got to appropriately match the storage site or the networking side of it. And the backup comment, easier to backup, more integrated? It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software. And it's just really simplified it. So backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and intentions to some other problems that might serve the business? Exactly, one of the themes I picked up here at VMware has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking. So but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger and it was a solid relationship. They've been there the entire way during the merger. Every question was answered, it wasn't anything that was a, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And it's, again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. So trust, really. Absolutely. And then if you had to do it over again, anything you do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? You know, I don't think so. You know, again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful then? What did you do up front that led to that success? You know, it was just a lot of relationship building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships. And Dell EMC does that exact same thing. All right, gents, thanks very much for coming back in theCUBE. Good to meet you, Josh. Take care. Thank you. All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from VMworld 2017. Right back.