 Live from Massachusetts, here is your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. SiliconANGLE TV is covered on the ground at the VTUG Fall Forward 2014 here at beautiful Gillette Stadium. Joining talking to the users at the event and for this segment we've got Mark Lampson who's the director of IT for Westerly Public Schools. For those of you who don't know, Westerly, Rhode Island is in the South County western part of the state. Mark, thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about your role and a little bit about IT at the school system. Okay, thanks Stu. Thanks for having us. We're here today at the VTUG to launch the K-12 Special Entrance Group for K-12 Education. I wanted to thank Chris for having us here. We've attended many VTUGs in the past and the VM world and we just wanted to drum up some excitement around K-12 education and some of the IT challenges that K-12 shares with other markets and then some of the things that are unique to K-12 and education just for us. So we wanted to talk about both of those things. Okay, great. So yeah, great to have the communities that can pull together. Education of course has some very specialized challenges from budgetary users. We usually get some price advantages hopefully from some of the communities. What are some of the highlights that you got out of the panel? We enjoyed the panel. I brought three colleagues with me from K-12 and we talked, had a lot of interactivity with the audience because we didn't want to kill them with 1,000 PowerPoint slides. So we really just gave our little spiel at the beginning and then turned it over and made it more interactive for questions. We took questions on BYOD and policy and some challenges like that about the challenges of infrastructure, in particular power, the greening of the data center and just the infrastructure issues that older school buildings might have when you're moving to an environment where you're trying to give every student a laptop or something because this is what's expected for them to move from high school into college and careers and be ready to collaborate and contribute to their career or their college experience. Sure. Can you share a little detail? What's the experience of BYOD been in your district? It's been very proactive. It's been positive I should say and students and staff really find that rather than being an impediment and something they have to do sneakily behind their back that we're open to it and it teaches them to use technology responsibly to you know do either their jobs or their learning which is a plus and a benefit. So we would rather encourage responsible use rather than to try to police inappropriate use. Yeah I mean we always say no matter how much you lock it down they're usually going to find out how to use it. It reminds me a lot in enterprise you know companies are going to do stealth IT so if IT can't enable ways to get the main things done so is IT really an enabler for you know delivering services now in your district? Yes we found that as much as we can enable IT and enable the learners and the teachers to collaborate and also be compliant about the rules because we have to look at all those pieces then that turns it into a win and one of the things we've done is we were an early alpha and then beta partner of a storage company Data Gravity who's actually here today and they have a really unique play on storage where they add value by saying they can have insight into the data that they store which before storage has sort of been done and you would say okay the filing cabinet's purple and it's got seven drawers and 10,000 files but what are the contents of that and by being able to crack in and see those contents we can make actionable decisions that will improve student learning and outcomes so we can say look this kindergartener had perfect attendance let's celebrate that now and encourage that rather than waiting until they might have a truancy issue and build school. All right yeah Data Gravity definitely one that caught a lot of attention great buzz at VMworld. Talk to what led you to how did you find Data Gravity and you know how's the kind of alpha and beta been so far what would you say to your peers if they're looking at it you know how could they benefit from this. Right well I've brought a few peers with me that helped me launch this group and I've taken a couple of them over to see my friend Dave Siles at the booth and I have a joke where it's you know six degrees of Kevin Bacon it's like five degrees of Dave Siles in IT so everybody knows somebody that was him and he brought forward the opportunity and said you know do you want to give us feedback and input and be an alpha and I was like sure so it's been they've been really a great partner for us and a great opportunity for us to see what we can find out about our data that we never had insight into before. All right sounds like you know interesting fit for for education are you leveraging you know analytics and leveraging your data more is that a general trend you know what do you think of the whole big data discussion in IT today. Right well I presented VMworld and I had a slide on my slideshow where I show the big Hadoop elephant and I'm like look I'm never going to be the big Hadoop elephant shop and I don't want to be but I want to see and have insight and governments over the data that I do store and that I'm responsible for and I think there's more and more press to have all sorts of institutions including K-12 education have data governance policies and procedures in place so that PII doesn't leak out and I think their solution as well as some others are helping enable IT to do that better. All right so Mark it sounds like you're very active in the communities not only at things like the VTUG here but through your special interest group how do you recommend that really your peers get involved how can they get involved in your special interest group where would you point people to. Well I have a blog blog.k12virtualization.com and maybe I can send you a link or something we could cross link to one another but I think just coming to events like this and dial it logging with colleagues and peers networking that's what it's all about so there's all kinds of resources and if you don't know something just shoot somebody an email and they'll help you out so. All right well Mark always appreciate giving back to the community thanks so much for taking time out of your schedule to join us here at the VTUG fall forward 2014 event I'm Stu Miniman covering the user conference here at Gillette Stadium.