 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman and we're at WTG Transform 2018. Help him to welcome one of the users at the show, Jerry Flick, who's with Belmont. He's the divisional director of IT. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, and welcome to the Boston area. You're from Charleston, South Carolina. I live in Charleston now, yeah. But I'm familiar with the area from the Northeast, but I love being here. Boston's a great town. We got a lovely weather. It's in the low 70s, you know, the socks should have a nice game here. So have you been to this event before? I have, this is my third year. Okay, actually, you've been to more of them than me. So let's start with Belmont. Tell us a little bit about the organization for those that don't know. Absolutely, so Belmont is a worldwide luxury hotel experience, hospitality industry. So we have hotels, we have restaurants, there's train excursions, river cruises, and really the focus on Belmont is providing a superior level of service to the guests that take part in our experiences. Well, Jerry, the great thing I love talking about users is their lives are pretty stable. There's not these things like Airbnb and other technologies that are just saying, oh yeah, we'll spin up an app and just put your company that's been around for decades out of business, right? It's nice and stable. Yeah, that sounds like a little sarcasm, but. I've been known to be a little sarcastic. Jerry, tell us, how long has Belmont been in business? You said it's worldwide, how many employees, and how does Belmont deal with the digital transformation that's coming down? Well, they took the name about five years ago. They used to be Orient Express, prior to that, and many people know the Orient Express from the Agatha Christie novels. My wife loved the new movie, so. Yeah, so did mine, actually. But what they do is we have over 50 properties worldwide. I joined about seven months ago, and one of the initiatives they have now is to double the amount of properties and experiences they have by 2020. So, as part of what I do in the division I manage, I have North America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I have about eight properties under my belt, and we have to make sure that we coordinate with corporate for our company policies, our IT structure, which is kind of complicated because you're dealing with multiple countries and different technologies that people like, different flavors, so it certainly presents its own challenges. All right, so, Jerry, when you say you've got those properties and really the IT, what does that mean? What's under your purview from an IT perspective? Sure, so each property has either an IT director or a manager, and then depending on the size of the property, they have different IT personnel that handle everything from the infrastructure, the servers, as well as through user support and even interfacing with the clients. Guest Wi-Fi is a big thing, so people want to come to our properties and make sure that they can get on the internet well, they can watch TV, and they can do that, and that all comes down to what we have to provide them. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, help connect us a little bit. The role of IT and the pressures put on you versus, wow, lots of challenges from the business side these days. I'm sure cost pressures are there. You need to be able to know when things are available, know that the client is getting great service when they're at your facilities. Yeah, actually, they like to use the term we need to be cost-neutral, so everything that we do, of course, IT is a cost in itself, but when the clients come in, and again, they expect that high quality service, that internet connectivity, and really just whatever it is that the technology can drive to make their experience better, they look to us, but from a standpoint of support, we're 24-7, we have to keep the systems running, we have to make sure that everything from property management is going and that we keep them moving, we keep business running. Yeah, so in my career in IT, I've gotten to get under the cover sometimes in hospitality, when you've got hundreds or thousands of rooms, just even the basic phone system, let alone the internet and everything, there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of gear, maintaining, people talk about their data centers, but boy, you've got so many properties to deal with. What are some of the challenges there? And bring us inside that infrastructure as to how you have to build it and architect it to make it fit that cost-neutral mandate that you have. Yeah, we definitely want to be innovative. So, for example, with our Charleston facility, we recently deployed a Nutanix cluster on a Dell XC series, and we did that through Winslow Technology. And some of the things that we look to that for is we don't have a lot of data, we don't have big data, and recently we had to implement GDPR policy because we are worldwide, so that really kind of limits. We're going to have even less data within our system. So having an implementation of Nutanix is really a great way to provision the servers we need. We do have a mix of cloud systems as well as on-prem. So definitely a hybrid cloud model would be something that I would like to see moving forward as well as within the division, try to synchronize everything, make everybody synergize so that we can try to be like a flagship to the brand and really set the standard for what is the best in technology. Yeah, so a lot of conversation in the keynote this morning about hybrid cloud. Want to get your reaction as to what you heard as well as, you know, the big question is, how do you figure out what to put where? Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I've had a lot of sessions with Rick. I think he's really in tune with what's going on, so pretty much the whole Winslow staff, you know, you can reach out to them and if you don't specialize in something, you know, you're not going to know everything in IT, especially when you're dealing with, as you mentioned, you know, what's underneath. But to be able to reach out to a partner like that and say, hey, do you have a subject matter expert in this, it really gives you a good idea of where the industry's going. And that's my goal, so make sure we stay ahead of that so that we can provide the business with a cost-neutral way to make it better and, you know, continue to provide that spirit of service. Okay, you said that you've deployed the OEM Nutanix solution with Dell. Can you give us a little bit insight? You know, what applications sit there? What kind of scale do you go to with that? Is it something that mostly just runs and you don't need to touch it or is it something that's growing over time? Yeah, I mean, we recently did it. It's within the last month. So what we did, fortunately, we were able to just build it and not initially have to migrate anything over. But for our use, property management, we have an Opera property management system and that's going to be key to, you know, keeping that running and we are looking to keep that on-prem. Everything else, like our point of sale service, they do need cached systems within the infrastructure and then we're looking to upgrade our phone system, which, you know, depending on if we do that cloud-based or not, having a Nutanix cluster in play like that and really just the reactions I'm getting from my team that's working with it, they've used other systems. They've used the huge sand systems of the past and to be able to spin up a Windows server in less than six minutes, you know, they really love it. We're using the Acropolis hypervisor and the simplicity of it, it's easy to use. The buttons, it's real, it's just very simple. It's not as layered as a lot of the system. So, I think from a, you know, as we move forward the performance of it, we're really going to see a quick turnaround and it's going to make the employees happy working with it as well. Awesome, Jerry, last thing I want to ask you, you've been to this show for three years. What brings you, you know, up beside, you know, the beautiful Boston weather? You mentioned talking to Rick and the team, maybe checking out the Red Sox. What was the value of coming to events like this? Well, you know, again, Winslow's a unique company. They're smaller and they have a certain niche in an area, but, you know, I've worked with several of the account reps. I've worked with the engineers and they really have a good foothold on technology, but their process of getting to know the customers and being able to really anticipate what they need, as well as, you know, they're not going to oversell you. They're not going to sell you something you don't need. And even if they present something and you're not interested, there's no pressure there. So they really make it easy to work with them. And so aside from being here in Boston and loving it, I do enjoy being with the Winslow team and being treated so nicely by them. All right, Jerry, pleasure meeting you. Thanks so much and congrats on the progress with Belmont. Awesome, thank you. All right, always love talking to the users and we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.