 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering IBM Edge 2015, brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to Edge 2015. This is Dave Vellante. Jamie Gamakas here with Tim Cluberance and Jamie's the CEO and president and Tim is the solutions architect at Evolving Solutions out of Minneapolis. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. It's good to see you. Thank you very much. So, Jamie, let's start with you. President CEO, tell us about Evolving Solutions. You know what's our 20th year in business? We're celebrating a little bit of an anniversary here. Congratulations. Thank you very, very much. It's awesome, 20 years. Absolutely, the partnership with IBM has certainly evolved over the 20 years. We've got about 70 employees and roughly $100 million in annual revenue. The bulk of that is with IBM. There's been a lot of shift, a lot of change, as I said, in the partnership over the 20 years for the positive. Tim, what's your role at Evolving? Yeah, I'm a solution architect and my role is to help customers. We try to focus a little bit more on bridging that gap for customers between the sales side and the technical side. So, I focus on building relationships with customers and we spend a lot of time doing that at Evolving. So, let's roll back 20 years. Wow, the world was a different place, wasn't it? You know what I mean? It was a mainframe centric was shifting into a client server, no internet really to speak of. A little bit, certainly no Facebook, no social, no mobile, no ways. You're right. Who could have predicted this? And even the pace of the change right now is happening so dramatically. I mean, it's almost a hockey stick. The first 10 years were, we were still selling IBM products. Still, there's some, the predecessors to the today's power technology, the R6000 was a big part of our portfolio even at that point in time. But the pace of change that is occurring today in the market and it's driven by the customers, of course, is dramatic. And we have to be able to adapt to that change. I mean, almost quarterly, we are really listening to what the clients are telling us and helping them on their journey. That's where the Tims come in, really to add value to the clients in the infrastructure level of their environment. So, Jimmy, you've decided to sort of invest in a role of a solutions architect. Jimmy, I want to dig in a little bit more. So, how do you spend your time with clients? It varies. Our architect team does do implementations and stuff as needed, but we spend a lot of time just understanding what the business requirements are for our customers. We spend a lot of time training and helping them understand what new technologies are available from IBM and our partners. And then we stay engaged throughout the whole process to make sure that they continue to, you know, continue to find a solution that's right for their business needs. Are there industries where you specialize? You know, we gravitate, we're really a cross industry partner. We gravitate towards those industries that are consuming technology, one of them being healthcare. And it's not that we have deep skills in any specific facet of healthcare other than the fact that just through repetition we have an awareness, a deep awareness of healthcare environments. So we're able to replicate that capacity needs, capacity planning, really understanding some of the key core applications that are driving healthcare growth. And if you think about the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which is our home base and we have a significant presence, there are some large healthcare institutions in that geography. So it's been a natural evolution. So let's take healthcare. It's, I guess people say it's recession proof. So during the downturn, you know, it maybe didn't get as affected, you know, the healthcare industry and the government were sort of still spending. Yet you had the Affordable Care Act come into play and that's caused dislocations. Historically, docs haven't been big consumers of technology, although that's changing certainly with mobile. So what are you hearing from that constituency? How are they dealing with meaningful use and what does it mean ultimately for the architecture? So Jimmy, maybe you could start about, what are those patterns that you're seeing in healthcare? So the consumption of technology is accelerating in that industry in all facets of it. I mean, you look at some of the companies up there and how they're branching out into other segments of healthcare through acquisitions. It really is all about data, the accumulation of data and what they can do to act on that data. Ironically, the technology side of healthcare never saw a significant downturn. And the reason was, is because the automation was still needed throughout the, you know, the 2000s. I mean, they were on a growth curve to accumulate data, understand data through analytics, what they can do with it. And also the healthcare companies, at least in the Twin Cities, and I suspect throughout North America, I mean, they're on an acquisition, an aggressive acquisition pace. So meaningful use and other things, those are all elements of what was driving the growth, but it really is all facets of the business that are increasing and utilizing technology much different today than they were in the past. And the Tim's, our solutions architect role, it is such a significant part of our participation and investment in that market. I think Tim probably spends, you know, 50%, maybe 75% of his time with some of our healthcare clients solving problems. You know, Tim, if I roll back, I think about theCUBE started in 2010. So it's sort of five years in now. I mean, if you think about the cloud discussion back then, it's very bifurcated. You had the Amazons of the World saying, public cloud, working with developers, and you had the rest of the enterprise world saying, private cloud. And now it's evolved. They talked about hybrid cloud, but it really, you know, wasn't real. And it seems like it is now. So as an architect, what are you seeing in cloud? How are you connecting the public cloud, the hybrid cloud and the private cloud dots? So there's a, well, depending on the industry, of course, I've been talking about healthcare, there's a sort of a battle between protecting data as well and making data available on a cloud level and for analytics type applications, et cetera. So plus the other thing that we deal with a lot is just the rapid growth of the data. And there's some tough, there's some tough decisions to be made about how you get the data to the cloud, how we process it. So my role, essentially, is to help bridge some of those and to make sure that customers are able to grow that infrastructure at the pace that their data is increasing. So what do you see as best practice? Cause people are concerned about putting their data in the cloud, although some people aren't. People don't, you can't move big chunks of data. There's too much data, right? It brings you to a grinding halt. So how do you solve that problem? You obviously have to think through, like I said before, the business requirements, you know, the data governance, edicts, et cetera, but how do you solve that? That's a tough question to answer cause it's a little bit different for every customer depending on what type of data that is and how sensitive the data is. So I'm not sure I could say there's one solution that's right for every customer. And I suppose that's part of the benefit from evolving and having a team of architects that provides that bridge so we can help find the right solution for each customer. So a customer says, I like this cloud. The CEO's all over it, the CFO wants to shift CapEx to OpEx, wants this outsource, you know, a lot of it except this little piece over here which is our family jewels. So help me, right? Do you hear that a lot? Or is it more the other way of people saying, you know, we're going to use the cloud for some test and dev, maybe some analytics, you know, we'll throw some stuff in the cloud but help us protect our core assets. Yeah, we have customers that are sort of dabbling, I suppose is a good way to put it. Yeah, so that's the sort of more common use case, is that right, you guys? No, I think they would like to invest more in it but they're kind of cautiously entering in some of that space and other customers are going much more full into it but I think that's a little more rare at the moment. But yeah. And how do you look at that, Jamie? Is the chief executive of a company that has for 20 years been pretty basically on-premises infrastructure in place? How do you look at the cloud? How do you turn it into an opportunity? So we've made an investment in the cloud, we have a dedicated group that is doing nothing but working cloud opportunities and I mean, it's our responsibility and our goal to help our clients on that journey to the cloud and that doesn't mean just taking them and moving apps to the cloud. What it really is, is helping them understand what's the benefit of going to the cloud? What are the security risks of going to the cloud? You alluded to the fact that there are the family jewels, there are applications that are going to remain on-premise. There are applications that are much more logically placed in the cloud and then there are some that are going to be shared. There are the compute may be in the cloud, this is what we're seeing or hearing more and more frequently where the compute may be in the cloud but the storage, the data may actually still reside in a private enterprise. So really there isn't a one-size-fits-all but the more sensitive the data, so compare healthcare to manufacturing, the more likely that that data is going to be owned and privately held in an on-premise environment. And your relationship with IBM extends to cloud offerings? It does, absolutely. It means software and Bluemix and all of the above. Do you private label that or? We don't as of this point in time. But you could, that's part of the business model. Absolutely, so Watson, Bluemix, Softlayer, I mean they are all part of our strategic growth initiative and the key is our infrastructure business is growing, grew at 65, 70% last year and which is for a 20-year-old company is phenomenal. Now it's interesting because you have kind of a bifurcation of the business partner market and it really is for the first time there is a strong recognition of those companies that are investing, have invested over time in deep resources and then you have the other side of that bifurcated why those partners that have chosen not to invest are most likely not going to be able to survive. Box sellers, absolutely. For years we've loved the box sellers, it's great moving boxes, moving boxes but if you don't transform, you know, you're going to be driftwood. You are. You tsunami. Correct. That's interesting, that's an interesting call you have to make about private labeling or not, you got the great IBM brand, you got a hundred million dollar company building your own brand so be interesting to watch how that proceeds. So good luck with that. We got to go, we got to leave it there but thanks for coming on theCUBE and congratulations for all your success, amazing story and we appreciate your time. Sounds good, thank you very much, we appreciate your time. You're welcome, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back to wrap. This is Dave Vellante, this is theCUBE, we'll be back right after this word.