 Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org with SiliconAngle.tv's coverage of the VTUG Fall Forward 2014. Talking to the users at this user group, joining me for this segment is Marcin Vashak with Panagora Asset Management. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. Alright, so we're talking about lots of different virtualization technologies. Your part of the IT role is really to deal a lot with kind of the applications, mobility and the like. Tell us a little bit about your role and your IT organization. Well, I work for a small investment firm in Boston. We have 120 employees, about 16 IT staff. Four of those are system administrators on one of them. I focus mainly on virtualization, Citrix, security, and recently also mobile data management. Alright, can you paint a picture for us of what your IT environment is? My understanding is from a virtualization hypervisor standpoint, you use VMware and you're using Citrix for a lot of the application delivery. Yes, we are a vSphere shop, version 55 currently. Looking forward to going to version 6 once it's released. We do have a Citrix infrastructure, which we use for our users to allow them to remotely connect to the office and be able to do their day-to-day job from any location in the world. Yeah, when we talk about really Citrix environments and the users, too many people have been stuck on just virtualizing the desktop when really more people are looking at really virtualizing the data and the applications to get it to the users that are mobile. Can you talk a little bit about what BYOD means to your environment and what applications and data are you pushing to the end users in your environment? Well, BYOD in our environment means that we allow users to bring their own laptops, bring their own tablets, their own phones, connect them to our infrastructure and access applications that are hosted on our network. That's about it. Alright, so Marcin, you've been at the company for 14 years. Can you talk the last few years, you know, what's changed in the mobile environment, your user environment? What's putting stress on the IT environment and where are you guys really helping the business move forward? As far as the mobile environment, the BYOD environment, the biggest challenge for us is to sort of get a hand on how many devices are connecting to our network, what types of device are going to our network, what those devices are doing. So we're trying to lock down certain types of access. We're trying to control what users can and cannot do on our network with their own devices. Alright, so yeah, how much do you need to lock down in that environment to do most of your users carry around two devices, one for all of the work stuff that has financial stuff and a separate one for personal or how do you manage that interaction? Well, the most part, these are all user devices and like the biggest challenge is to make sure that those devices are not jailbroken in the case of Apple devices or rooted in the case of Android devices because if once something is rooted, you don't know there's some kind of a road process running on that device that could be accessing our data and possibly stealing information. Can you talk about how really cloud-enabled apps, SaaS environment interacts with your environment? Are you using things like Salesforce and Dropbox and the like or is that separate? We used to use Dropbox but now we have an in-house area for files and documents and that's all done through the MDM application which is the AirWatch that we just released recently. Can you talk a little bit about your AirWatch experience? That was one of the bigger acquisitions VMware's made in the last year. How does that fit into your over-environment interact with things like your VMware and Citrix environments today? It doesn't as much interact as much as VMware and Citrix. This is mainly to manage mobile devices. It's been a great addition. It's been also a great challenge for us. Mainly with the user community, a lot of the users are very uncomfortable with letting us control their devices. We had to come up with a set of policies, outlining exactly what we will and will not control on those devices. We still have quite a few users that need to convert over to AirWatch but we're getting there. All right. So, Marcin, one of the great things about a user conference like this is you get to talk to your peers, find out what they're doing. Can you share either something that you've come here to share some experience and learn a little bit or what you're hoping to learn from the event? This is probably my fourth or fifth V-talk that I've been to. This year I came in looking for more information on vSphere 6. I came in to look for more information about BCP and disaster recovery and I'm also here to reconnect with some of the vendors. Really appreciate you coming to talk with us, share your experiences, always love talking to the users. This is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org. Check out all the coverage we have from this and previous V-tugs, lots of virtualization and cloud content throughout the cube, wikibon and silicon angle networks.