 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Have with me Chris Harney who's the founder. Yes. President, VTUG. Great to see you Chris. Great to see you. So 12th annual, one of this event, it's gone through a couple of name changes. Actually the fifth year we've been doing it. I'd been coming for a few years before that, but for just for our audience that doesn't know, explain kind of the why of the VTUG and what's changed over the years. So VTUG was originally still founded on the principle that we can get smarter together. If everyone learns a little piece and teaches everyone, because back when it started, there was no YouTube. There was no Google. You had to learn it on your own. And we started out learning how to virtualize machines, we learned how VMotion worked. Well now you're talking serverless applications. You're talking cloud or cloud native. You're talking, is stuff going to the cloud? Is it staying on-prem? How do you automate? And it's changing, I mean more is law has gone out the window. Change is happening in weeks rather than years. Yeah, and Chris, I always love this. It's one of our first events of the year, the last few years. It's a user group. It's good grounding for me to really understand the typical people in IT. What do they care about? What are they struggling in what's going on in their world? So, you were going to bring us some of the users that we have on here, but from your standpoint, what are you seeing, what are you hearing? Yeah, so I'm hearing that users are struggling. The old adage, 80% of their job is maintaining systems and 20% is upgrades. Yet 20% of the budget is spent on upgrades and 80, so the numbers are skewed. So they're having trouble keeping up with technology. Yeah, you threw out some things. You talked about serverless type applications. Keynotes this morning, we had Microsoft, you had Amazon, you had some developer tracks going on looking at orchestration, and you had some stalwarts in the industry talking about what's happening from an IT standpoint. Where is kind of, there is no typical, but when you look at the range of people that are here, are they still doing my virtualization rollout? Where are they in the cloud journey? Have they heard about things like Kubernetes and serverless yet? So this audience may have heard of Kubernetes. Very few people are implementing it. I still think we matured 10 years ago and we haven't kind of made that next leap yet. So people are still, they've got VMware, they're looking at NSX and they're running on what's the next hardware platform. Hyperconverge is still a big deal. Yeah, and Hyperconverge is a big deal. I mean, we've been watching it for many days. As I said, this is a good grounding for us because, right, it's like, oh, well, I was at AWS re-invent. I was at KubeCon and you talk about all this stuff where the future's going, but what's happening today is super important. I like, you talked about some of the dynamics about how they spend budget. We talk a lot today about, it's got to be a switch from CAPEX to OPEX and consumption, and that's changing a lot people's roles. So training, education, so super important. What are they getting coming to an event like this and what are the resources you're using that are important today? So at this event, I think there's a lot of validation. We get inundated with marketing, go to the cloud, go to the cloud, and all of these users are coming together. Hey, what are you doing for cloud? And they're realizing that everyone is pretty much in the same boat together. So that's one thing, they get networking, they share their problems and what the fixes are, and then the vendors, they bring their A-game. They really do some great training sessions. We've got 20 different training sessions going on upstairs and the users will go up there and they'll be able to talk one-on-one with real engineers who are doing this stuff. Yeah, so Chris, you and I are both big Patriots fans. We've got Teddy Bruceke behind us here. Patriots are actually on the practice field right now getting ready for yet another Super Bowl. Eight and 16 years. So yeah, it's amazing, hopefully bringing ring number six home. I think we're good luck here with theCUBE. Every time we've done your event, the Patriots have still been in the hunt. So we got to keep that going. But look at the Patriots and say they've done so well. Other than Belchak and Brady, there's been a lot of change. You're going to have Patriots alumni coming and I'm hoping we'll talk to Logan Mankins and be like, the people change, the strategies change, but how do you keep that winning formula? And it's a lot of it's same in IT. I mean, so much tech has changed in 12 years. What's the same and what's different from your viewpoint? So the same, we all have end users. We aren't applications delivered without hesitation or without issues. So that'll always be the same. What's changed is how do we deliver that? We used to put a server in one application and then we had Sands. So we could put the Sands and have smaller servers to virtualization to automation. People are still looking at clones and making that automation happen faster. But I think security's starting to take a forefront to that. We're seeing lots of the intel, some viruses and some weaknesses. So I think a lot more people are spending more time remediating possible issues and less time building new stuff. Yeah, great points there. I mean, I'm an infrastructure guy by background and you talked, we went from a server to we went to a VM and even we talk about things like containers and then functions. It's that delivery of how do I deliver my applications? How do I build and modernize applications? The term cloud native gets thrown out a lot. Developers are involved here. And it still matters, some of those underneath pizza. Even something like serverless, eventually somebody is responsible for that infrastructure. It's just, we looked at, on our Wikibon research looked at, we see a big shift going to platforms, whether that be a public cloud or even something like hyperconverge. There's less that I need to be worried about building and playing with those geek knobs and more software is going to allow me to handle that. As data grows, as scale happens, I can't have people in there having to worry about some of those pieces. Machine learning needs to help. The software itself needs to do it. And that's a shift. It's challenging for people to kind of embrace that change, understand where they add value and where they need to go. And it's events like this, that I think help people understand where they need to make those transition points and where they can keep adding value. You're spot on there and I think people, just to your point, they need to learn that the more things they can affect, the more positive influence they can have on the company, and the longer they'll be there, the longer they'll want them there. If you're just affecting one thing, you don't have as much value. If you're affecting a thousand things, there's a lot more value to you. All right, well, Chris, once again, it's a pleasure having you on the program. We really appreciate it that we could come, help share the user activity with our community. So thanks so much and wish in the past, good luck. Absolutely. Do you have a prediction on the score? Hate to do predictions when we're going to be there. I'm confident that the Patriots do well. If history has shown us anything, it's usually a close game. Absolutely. I've seen a couple of Eagles fans here, but a lot of Patriots colors, so thanks so much. And we're going to be back with lots more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.