 I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group, Dell EMC user group. Happy to have one of the users at the event, Hassan Barakat, who's the director of Global IT at Cell Signaling Technology. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu. All right, so Hassan, tell us a little bit about your organization, your role there, and your local, correct? Right, we are out of Danvers and Beverly in Massachusetts. We employ about 450 people. We produce antibodies used in cancer research. They are manufactured here in Massachusetts and shipped all over the world. All right, and what are the uses for these antibodies? Mostly they're used in cancer research at universities and as well as pharma companies. So people that are, organizations that are trying to cure disease use our antibodies, which have a very good reputation in the industry to further their research goals. Okay, so healthcare is highly regulated, going through massive amounts of change. What are some of the biggest drivers in your company's business today? So speed is one, quality is another, and we try to embrace change from a technology perspective and enable our users and scientists to be the best that they can be from an IT perspective. All right, and Hassan, what's the relationship between business and IT? Is, you know, what does that look like today? So we have a lot of labs that we generate a lot of data. We trawl through a lot of that data. So our users need robust IT systems and messaging and other sort of technologies to further our business around the world. We cover the globe, we're not just here, we're also in Europe and China and Japan. All right, so we've really been looking at, you know, it's been said probably way too many times, data is the new oil in many ways. Data is the new flywheel for most businesses. The more you have and the more you can access, the more things you can do with it. What do you have to do from an IT standpoint to make sure that you have data available and can leverage that data? And maybe you can tell me what's kind of interesting with how you use data today. Stu, we do generate a lot of data. And in the old days, we did not probably generate as much data and our systems do require constant refresh and scalability and agility. So what we are trying to do now is to embrace that change and be as fast as possible. We have, we're looking to the cloud, we are looking to be as fast and agile as possible with all of our scientific data and also our business data, our commercial data, our messaging, these are all challenges that create a lot of need for agility and speed. All right, Hassan, connect the dots for us then. We're at this event, I look down to the X-Ball Hall. I see things like Dell servers, storage, hyper-converged, hybrid cloud. What are you using today? How are things changing in your environment to be able to deliver all of those data solutions that you talked about? All of the above, and that's why we're here. We are, we do have a lot of Dell servers on-prem. We try and build, we're trying to build a hybrid cloud as much as possible. We leverage AWS, we're starting to leverage AWS. We have partners where our enterprise business systems are, our commercial systems, our financial systems. We try and leverage these using Dell storage, Dell hardware, and also Dell endpoint products. So our users are now using a mix of Apple systems, Macintosh systems, as well as Dell laptops, monitors, keyboards, mice and everything else. And Winslow helps us connect all of it together. Yeah, how much of that do you architect? How much do you rely on a partner like WTG to help put all those things together? That's a good question. We're lucky in the sense that we have a good team that we sort of know what it is that we're looking for, but whenever we run up against some challenges that we don't maybe fully understand roadmaps and things like that, what's coming out of Dell, Winslow has been a great partner to help us navigate through that, you know, minefield. We have a compelling storage on-prem. We have a vertex servers that are split into application clusters and database clusters. And, you know, currently we're basically looking at expanding our Dell laptop footprint as well. And we have replaced almost 100 lab systems as well from ancient aging XP machines to state-of-the-art Dell XPS systems that are running Windows 10. All right, it sounds like you're going through a lot of change to kind of reinvent a lot of the pieces in your environment. What kind of support do you get from your management? How, you know, you hear an IT, it's like, oh, you know, my budget's flat, my headcount is flat to negative. To make these changes usually requires some investment. How do you accomplish that inside your firm? We have historically not invested as much in IT as maybe we should have over the years. So currently we now have an IT refresh budget to bring out these systems and replace them with state-of-the-art, so it's all about change. And the more static we are, the more, you know, my boss calls these aging systems a Jurassic petting zoo. We're trying to basically get to a level of performance and reliability that gives our scientists and our users and eventually our customers and people all across the world a fair shot at doing what they need to do. All right, Hassan, you're working with a number of vendors out there. If you have on your wish list, you know, what would you like to see from those partners that would make your job and your company's business even better? Communication's always a good one. You know, we try and make sure that we stay on top of change. Sometimes, you know, that's not always possible. We end up with systems that are not scalable, so you know, if there's one thing that I would like to see, everybody please provide scalable systems as businesses grow, as data grows, scalability is incredibly important. Being static and stuck where we are and not having to do forklift upgrades and continuous, you know, migrations, if we can continue to be, if these vendors could help us be scalable and these partners could help us scale, that's really what we're looking for. We're growing at a fast clip. We, you know, there are certain areas of the business such as China that are growing at, you know, over 30% year on year in some cases. And so that scalability requires flexibility from our partners. All right, well, Hassan Barakat, really appreciate you joining, sharing with our community, everything happening in your space. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.