 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And welcome back to Las Vegas as theCUBE continues our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. So glad to have you along here for our day three coverage along with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, it's now a pleasure to welcome David Comrell with us. David is the Senior Director of Client Technology Services at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. David, thanks for being with us. Oh, no problem, glad to be here. Yeah, thanks for sharing your time with us. Absolutely. So first off, let's just talk about scope of your work again. You take care of all the obviously IT needs for the largest business school faculty in the world, right? So no pressure on you there, but talk about just kind of day to day those responsibilities. As you mentioned, my title is Senior Director of Client Technology Services essentially responsible for providing the support and services to four very distinct user groups that we happen to have at a university. And that's of course our wonderful faculty, our staff that make everything happen, our incredible students, and of course our alumni group, which is about 100,000 people strong at this point, just Wharton alums that are again very important, get back to the school, provide mentorship and job opportunities for our graduates. Again, very distinct needs for each of those four groups. And again, we provide a high quality and all the buzzwords, secure, safe, efficient, highly available services to these groups, and that's kind of what I do all day. So one of the cool things, I love acronyms and not that this industry doesn't have a few as you know, Stu, but whoopee. Yes. Which I absolutely love, making whoopee, but not what you might think, but walk us through that and what it stands for and what you did and then it really was ground breaking. Hey, you're putting me on the spot with this one. So yeah, so whoopee is the Wharton, if I could get this online, Wharton appear performance evaluation engine. So one of our incredible faculty, Pete Fader came up with this idea and it's no secret that grading is kind of bad. Faculty grading students, there's all kinds of challenges. There's, well, it's tedious. There's inherent biases when you're, the larger the class and when you have to grade 80 papers or a hundred papers or 200 papers, you know, it's really hard to keep consistency across when you're grading paper one through paper 100 through paper 200. Plus when you start giving up the work between TAs and different faculty teaching the same class, again, fraught with bias. So a number of people, you know, again, Pete Fader's idea to come up with a, basically an algorithm that helps the grading process. And basically what happens is, is students are grading themselves. So they basically, what we do is we'll give them five papers or five projects to grade and they don't actually grade. All they do have to do is rank it. You know, this is the best one. This is number one. This is the worst one. This is number five. And then there's this magic behind the scenes that, you know, that runs in our local infrastructure and our cloud infrastructure that basically runs an algorithm. And that algorithm is a secret sauce that, you know, some of our statistical geniuses at the Wharton School of which we have many came up with and it has all kinds of cool features. You could say, well, you know, this batch of five papers might be harder. I might have the five best papers in the class. So that's not fair that, you know, they still have to rank one the worst, right? You know, five. You can't say these two are the best, you know, and this one's third. So again, you actually, the students have to read the paper and just rank it. You know, I like this one the best. I like second, third, fourth, fifth. The algorithm takes into account difficulty of batches of papers. So again, you could literally have the five best or the five worst papers in the class and that's still going to provide meaningful data through the algorithm. So when you have, you know, 50, 100, 500 batches of five, you know, they all start to figure it out and the algorithm will actually figure out what the best paper is in the class and what the, you know, maybe again at the Wharton that they're not so great, greatest paper in the class. But not the worst, just not so great. Yeah, so again, because our students are brilliant. And it basically goes on the fact that if you do a quality paper, if the algorithm says you're the best, your weight means more than someone who might not have done such a good job on the paper, and you're considered a better grader, you know, and it's weighted towards the better grader. So again, there's all kinds of really cool stuff in there that we think is going to change, you know, get rid of some of that bias I spoke about before and help provide. And the data we've seen is, frankly, the students like doing it, you know, they don't like the additional work involved with it, but they, we're seeing some empirical evidence and some in-person interviews that they're learning more. They're reading five other students' papers. They're getting five other perspectives. They're saying, hey, I didn't think about that, or even, hey, you know, you know, they're all wrong here. You know, my paper was much better than theirs, but again, that doesn't necessarily matter when we start running the ranks. And again, we're getting much better, much, you know, better grading, which is hard to quantify. But you know, again, the folks that are on the academic team that are doing that have some really great data in the data. Yep. So, David, one of the themes we keep hearing in this show is about transformation. It's change happening, talking about how IT, how it's working with the business more and more. So, bring us inside just the university life in general and specifically, you work with one of the ancient eight. Yeah. So, how does cutting edge technology fit in with, you know, a federal institution? That's really interesting. I do have a couple of thoughts on that. So, my boss has a picture in his office of a Penn classroom from like, I think it's like 1908 or 1910. And there's literally a bunch of students sitting around. There's a faculty member standing up and there's a candle-powered projector, which I didn't know was a thing, but it's in the picture, projecting an image onto the wall from over 100 years ago. What's different about our classrooms today? Everything's the same except the projector is now an LED or a LCD projector. But again, we've still got people sitting around the room standing up. I think what we're seeing now and probably the previous 10 years from now until the next 10 years is education's probably going to change more in those 20 years that it has in 2,000 years since Socrates was standing around with a stone tablet or whatever they were doing. So, things like globalization, online courses, the MOOC space where, you know, Wharton is huge in the MOOC space, Wharton online programs where students can take, not even students, anybody, if you're in China or Africa or South America, you can take an introduction to Wharton, introduction to marketing class from a Wharton professor for free. I mean, there's also, we're a business school, we sell some of that content as well. Again, but you can get verified certificates. So we're seeing a lot of stuff change. The students today expect more. We can get into, we won't, well you can get into the whole millennial issue and short attention span and all that kind of stuff, but students today expect their faculty to be technology savvy. They expect content to be online. They expect to use devices. They expect to use, you know, we got tablets and laptops and phones. They want to be able to consume this content on multiple devices. So again, we're seeing significant transformations in education, again, which is, again, hasn't necessarily changed much in 2000 years or even 200 years, right? Yeah. So there's that. Now, speaking specifically about Wharton, one of the things I really thought is interesting is, you know, I've been there 13 years now. When I first started working there, you know, I'm going to make some generalizations here. A lot of our students wanted to go work in i-banking. They wanted to go work for the big banks. They wanted to go work for Goldman Sachs and things like that. You know, in the last five, seven, 10 years ago, they wanted to have a new, they wanted to create their own company, you know, to start up their own company, be entrepreneurial, have their app, have their big idea, start the next whatever.com, you know, and be successful that way. Now, in the last two, three, four years, we're seeing a lot of our students, you know, analytics, we're putting analytics, you know, with everything, you know, companies, businesses, organizations, no matter what you are, we have huge amounts of data available. How can we make meaningful decisions based on that data? So our dean, our new, I guess I can't call him our new dean, he's been there three, four years at this point, you know, really wants position Wharton as the analytics school. And again, every company in the world is trying to hire these kind of people and there just frankly aren't enough of them out there. So we, you know, the thing we're trying to teach our students is, one of the many things is how to analyze data, how to make meaningful decisions based on that data. And of course, when you have more data, you need more storage, you need more infrastructure, you need more processing, you know, all the stuff that, you know, Dell Nutanix are providing us, you know, with their, you know, hyperconverged infrastructure, their cloud offerings, you know, whether you know private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud, all that kind of stuff is, you know, positioning us as the analytics school requires, you know, a significant amount of technology on the back end. And again, working with our trusted partners like Dell and Nutanix, you know, we can, you know, provide that seamlessly in the back end. And again, they don't necessarily know, is it in our data center? Is it in the cloud? And they don't care. And they shouldn't care. But again, as they're collecting huge amounts of data, you know, running these reports and creating, you know, going back to whoopee, creating these algorithms to do incredible things and these secret sources, you know, we need the infrastructure to run that kind of stuff. And that's, I think, one of the greatest things that Wharton Computing provides, you know, the Wharton School of Business and their business, which is creating and disseminating knowledge. Yeah, well, David, I think you encapsulated something that I've been hearing from lots of users over the last year or so, is the vendor sometimes, it's private, it's hybrid, it's public. And from the user standpoint, it's like, no, well, we have a cloud strategy that we're working on. Can you bring us inside a little bit? What led to, how did you get to where you are today? How do you choose who you're partnering with, at least to some of those decisions? So, I love the word partner. Like, I hate the word vendor. You know, one of the great things about working at Wharton is we get to have these awesome partners. We, I want someone, when we're going to make an IT spend, we want someone who cares about our business. They don't, we don't want somebody to just, you know, write it, you know, we'll come in, give you a dog and pony show, write us a check, and you know, when you want more stuff, call us. You know, we want folks that are gonna provide the support, you know, pre-sales, you know, during installation, post-sales, you know, when they're coming out with new features, you know, we want them to be invested in what we do. And again, and I can truly say that Nutanix is a fantastic partner of ours. You know, Dell Nutanix are great partners. Dell's a great partner of Wharton and Penn as well. So again, that's what we really look for. Someone who is willing to invest, you know, their time, their smart people, their, you know, you know, tell us about the new features and functionality that are coming out. You know, call on us and say, hey, how are things are going? It's sort of, it's not just the little things but those little things really mean a lot to us as we're picking an IT partner. Because again, you know, working for the best business school in the world, we need to, you know, having the best students, the brightest faculty, the best, hardest-working staff, you know, we want to provide them a very, very high-quality IT support. And again, we need high-quality partners and not just, you know, vendors who care about the transaction. So that, again, that's really the bottom line for us when we're choosing our, again, our partners. Yeah, when you were talking about analytics and Wharton being the school of, you know, data analytics, what are your measuring sticks? In terms of what are you looking at? You're talking about four very separate groups of constituencies. And so what are you doing to evaluate your performance and what's critical in that respect? I think it all comes down to what do our business units think about us, right? You know, we're a service organization. You know, almost all IT shops are. If the business units aren't successful, you know, they don't need an IT department. If we're not providing them a high-quality IT services, we're not going to get the best faculty. We're not going to get the brightest students. We're not going to get the alumni engagement. Again, they want to be, I guess, wowed by their IT support. So providing, again, that's a big part of my job is providing that quality support and helping train and, you know, technology breaks. How do you deal with the problem? Again, nobody runs that rock solid 100% infrastructure. You know, Murphy's Law always comes into play. Problems always happen. How do you deal with the cracks in the armor as they come up? And I think that's what our business units want, again. And I think we're fortunate that, you know, we're computing our team, our staff, our CIO, my colleagues, my peers, my team, our team, right? You know, they're very well thought of, hopefully, by our clients, and that's how we're measured is by their success, right? Again, we want to help them, empower them to do their job at the highest level. Because, again, we are playing in pretty rare air when it comes to, again, the faculty, staff, students, and alumni that we attract to Penn and Wharton. Again, we want to keep doing that. You know, one of the things I love best, and I tell our wonderful faculty when we meet with them, is, you know, don't tell me we did a great job. Here's what I want you to tell me. I want you to say, hey, yeah, three years ago, I was at, I'm not going to name drop schools, but I was at this school and I asked them to do this thing that you said, sure, no problem to, and they couldn't do it, wouldn't do it, didn't have the ability, the infrastructure in place to do that. And, you know, boy, you guys, you guys with a smile on your face just made it happen. You know, again, you know, stuff like Whoopi, stuff like the analytics stuff. Again, all the, you know, again, tying it back to why we're here today is our partners and our technology partners that help us provide scalable, flexible solutions. You know, again, that's how we're measured. Well, higher learning. Higher learning. Absolutely. David, thanks for being with us. No problem, it was great. Share the Wharton story. David Conroe from the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania. Back with more live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at it for this break. 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