 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE. Covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's premier broadcast. We go out to all the enterprise tech shows, help extract the signal from the noise. Hi everybody and happy 2016. I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Really excited to be at the 10th annual virtualization technology user group. Helped me to kick off the session is the founder of the VTUG, Chris Harney. Chris, always good to see you. You and I are both Patriots ticket holders. Excited to be at your event and the Patriots are still alive in the playoffs. I know, can you imagine? We've been here 10 years and eight of those 10 years, the Patriots have been in the playoffs. Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking off camera about just the legacy and what amazing things that in bill we trust and Brady, everything that they've done. So really impressive. You're going to have a couple of former Patriots here at the event. It's always, not only some good local flavor, but getting all the users out. Absolutely, it's a fun event. What I love about it is it's education and the sharing ideas. To have Red Hat, Amazon, someone talking about Amazon, Microsoft, VMware all here and sharing those, what they think is happening in the industry with everyone. It's fun. Yeah, so Chris, I mean, 10 years. We all, when we get these anniversary numbers, we step back for a second. You've gone through a tremendous journey in your career. Give us a little bit about, how things have changed for you in the last 10 years and where VTUG has come from. It was originally VMUG, not a VTUG. Well, you know, I looked back 10 years and I was racking these seven new servers and throwing NT on an exchange. So as one server for one application, then we grew to VMware and we're putting multiple servers, multiple applications on a server. Well now, we've been doing that for five years and we're starting to look out five years. You know, what's my job going to be? You know, it's not going to be what it was 10 years ago. We went from Windows admins to virtualization admins and architects and having to understand the whole stack. You know, now we're looking at DevOps. We're looking at cloud on-prem or off-prem and what that means and then it's fun to explore. Yeah, so, you know, one of the things I've seen interesting, especially since you've pivoted to be the VTUG, is right, you've added the cloud. We've had keynotes today from Amazon, from Microsoft, from Red Hat, from VMware, still, of course, and, you know, a lot of cloud discussion. So, you know, I found some of the users coming here. It's still really new to them. I mean, kind of two years ago, AWS 101 was, you know, kind of old hat to some of us that are industry watchers, but for the average virtualization admin, it was like, wow, this is really neat and interesting. Absolutely. I'm still intrigued today when I go to companies that haven't even touched virtualization. You know, we've been at it for over a decade and people are saying, all right, which hypervisors do I use? Which cloud platform do I use? How do I automate that? So, it is, it's a journey for all of us. I mean, you've seen it as much as, if not more than all of us, you know, going to all the industry events, but this just is a microcosm of all of them, hopefully put together, and we're hoping, you know, it's a community to you, the users, to add your input and grow it in the direction that benefits your career. Yeah, so maybe can you talk a little bit more, kind of the transition of what jobs there are and what do the users need, you know, what do they need to kind of do their job today and to make sure that they'll be gainfully employed five years from now? You know, if you're still doing a right click deploy, I think that's a help desk job and too many admins have forgotten that, you know, we need to learn every day, whether it's automation, whether it's DevOps, whether it's cloud, and there are so many free sources out there to educate yourself, being brown bag, MOOC. So I think people's skills are one. You know, as a group, we're not very extroverts and we don't do a great job communicating, so I think learning how to talk with business peers is probably the most important skill set that any IT person could learn. Yeah, well, it's a tough one. So what kind of sessions are happening at the event? What are people getting out of it? What are the users asking of you and the community for? You know, that's a loaded question because it all depends. There's people that have just started this journey from virtualization to people who have been there for 10 years. You know, I think you need to add and multiple hyper-vises to your tool belt. You need to add some automation skills, so puppet chef and those type of things. We'll have more of those sessions in the future. Today, we've got a lot on hyper-diverged and hybrid cloud, because that's still new to a lot of people. And so would you try to stay with the 80%? You know, you don't want to be basic for newbies, but we have to add some of that. The one thing that I continue to see, though, is the 101 classes or the 101 breakout sessions are still the most highly attended. People want to make sure that their skill sets are proper, they want to make sure they're doing it right, and some of them, it's new to them still. Yeah, so I'm wondering, what's your thoughts on just kind of tech in New England? We actually had, you know, there's big announcement recently, those of us that watch tech, I mean, GE's moving their headquarters to Boston, you know, we've kind of looked and said, okay, biomedical had a real strong presence here. You know, IoT is one of those new things a lot of people are talking about, and you look at the universities we have, you look at GE, and you say, oh, okay, kind of medical devices and everything, Boston's got a lot of those, and there's a lot of potential here for Boston to be one of the hubs of some of these transformations. What do you see about tech in New England? Tech in New England is awesome. We have some great startups. We've got a lot of venture capital firms still feeding that, and with, you know, you've got MIT, you've got all these amazing schools that people want to go there and get jobs out of. So I think it's smart for companies to move their tech here because there's an untapped wealth of talent available. Yeah, I guess the other thing we'd look at early in the year 2016, unfortunately the stock market hasn't been, you know, it's kind of, you know, please don't look at your 401K because it'll just make you sad, but macroeconomic, there's always worries about what's that going to mean for jobs, what's that for me if I own IT? What's that mean to my budgets? I mean, you know, the joke always has been, you know, when's the last time you raised your hand when somebody said, hey, you know, who's actually going to get an increase in their headcount or in their budgets for IT? So what do you see from the financial standpoint? You know, I don't know that it has affected budgets yet. You know, the budgets were determined and in 2015 the stock market was still doing well and I think people still have their budgets. It hasn't dropped enough and people are still optimistic. You know, oil is a big factor. What's going to happen when I ran Thomas 500 million gallons into the supply chain and, you know, low prices really aren't that great for us because now oil companies shut down, it's a domino effect. Yeah, there's a real ripple effect. It might be nice, you know, when I can go to the pump and it's cheaper and heck, I've been, talk about all the events we're going to. I've been booking my flights right now because flights are pretty cheap, you know, going across country, to the gas, but you know, a lot of macroeconomic chains. All right, so there's been a little bit of organizational change at VTUG. We're going to have you new co-leaders. Can you just tell us, you know, the mission of VTUG, the event you guys are doing, you know, what's the update on VTUG? You know, VTUG is a user community and we want input from users is to help users be educated and together we make each other smarter, you know. So if we can share ideas and share knowledge, the community has to grow. New England community is a better and stronger and smarter community. Well, we've always had a board of advisors and they've kind of helped us out, but to make it a little more public, we've brought on two very intelligent virtualization guys that are in industry today. So Chris Williams and Sean Markham, and they're going to help co-lead and help reach out to existing users and new users and get their input and hopefully make it a stronger and bigger community. All right, great, Chris, really appreciate you having us. It's been a great partnership for a number of years. So thanks so much. We're going to have your co-leaders come on that. Perfect. Thanks so much. We go to VTUG.com to check out more on your site and of course we'll have all these videos up on our site. So we'll be here all day, here from beautiful Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots and for today the VTUG. We'll be right back after this quick break.