 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program a regular here at the VTUG, but no longer a local. So Chris Colotti, who's currently the field CTO at Tintry, great to see you, Chris. You too, Stu, it's been well. And love the attire. I know, I think every time I come into a presentation, I have a Patriots jersey on, or of some kind. Absolutely, I mean, there's a few things we know you for. So, you know, you love your virtualization, you love your Patriots, and you know, there's usually some workout things. So we're going to get some fitness tips. No, not today. Actually, you don't want to know what I did the other day with a buddy of mine. So we, you'll see me hobbling around because it was not a good leg day. Okay, so we'll be getting, we always liked here, I just had a user on of what they weren't like in the industry, so you'll give us what not to do to make sure that you can, you know, keep your fitness goals. Yeah. Don't hook up with a buddy who has a lot of sandbags in his truck that likes to work out with him. All right, so Chris, for those of our audience that haven't been to the event, and don't, you know, you give us just a little bit about your background and what you're doing these days. Yeah, so, I mean, the VTUGs, man, this has been around forever, I think. 12 years and 12 years of Harnes have been doing this. And I've been, I think I've been a part of it for a better part of the last decade or so. Just one, being a Patriots fan, two, being a virtualization person, and where I kind of grew my career from sort of being a sysadminton to where I am now. I just think this is one of the better events because it's all technology, right? I mean, we run into people that it's not just virtualization. You got AWS now, you got, you know, people all walks of life that come to this. And I think, honestly, I think you can't beat the venue, right? I mean, especially how many times have we been here where they cover the windows? And it's, if the windows are covered, it's a good year. As a matter of fact, this is the fifth year we've had theCUBE and every year the Patriots are still in the playoffs, working towards the Super Bowl and they're one step away again. I think the worst year for me was, I actually had the center stage keynote one year and they told me while I was presenting they were actually on the field practicing and it was all I could do to just not stop talking and say, I'll be right back, you know? So, you know, as you said, better part of a decade, you've been here, you were working for VMware when this was AV mug. Yes. But you've been involved. Tell us just what you're doing these days for work. Yeah, so I left VMware and moved over to Tintree, which is all flash storage partner. I came over there is, actually, I came over as a cloud evangelist kind of person and that shifted a little bit and a lot of that was around how to use our APIs and things like that for automation and private cloud. Now I actually, there's actually three field CTOs. I'm one of them and I spend most of my time really talking to customers, doing events, doing roadmap presentations, where we're going, what we're doing. I still spend my fair share on the road doing the shows and stuff in the world. You just throw out a bunch of things there. Talk cloud, API, storage. What are you hearing from customers these days? What are they getting right? What are they struggling with and what are they looking for? Yeah, it's funny. So for a long time I was a cloud guy, right? I mean, I did vCloud Air, I launched vCloud Air DR and I think what I heard coming over to Tintree is the folks are still struggling with that whole, do I, what do I put in the cloud? What don't I put in the cloud? Do I bring everything back? We've got a lot of customers that have brought stuff back on premises. I think a lot of customers are just still struggling with that concept. I mean, one of the first presentations I did, probably I think here was back in 2010, right around that time, when vCloud Air was, or vCloud Director was launched. Chris had me, Harney had me come down and do vCloud Director and it was like, it was dear in the headlights. It was so bleeding edge for VMware at that point to have this cloud product and this automation stuff and fast forward to today, eight years later, I still think people are struggling with that. They're just, they're not sure how to deal with it, right? And operationally I think people have come and really figured out that it's not about clouds as much as automation. We've got to simplify the way we do things, we've got to automate more, we've got to take day-to-day operations and do something different. Yeah, I mean, a line we've used often is cloud is not a destination, it's an operations model. Yes, yeah, for sure, for sure. Unfortunately, I think there's a lot of people who still think it's a destination while the old to the cloud ads, remember those? Microsoft, absolutely, there's lots of jokes on that. Yeah, you gave an interesting keynote this morning. I actually had one of the users that came in on our program earlier and she was like, I really, really enjoyed that. So Luigi Danico is a friend of ours and you talk a little bit more about IT and careers because we know the only thing that is consistent is that things are going to change. So give our audience a little bit of taste of what you talked about. Yeah, so it was actually interesting. We came up with the idea because I've come to these and done technical presentations all the time, but inevitably I always get somebody or a couple of people come up to you and say, how did you get to where you are? How did you evolve? And people who know my story, what's interesting about mine is I went to school for architectural engineering. I actually have a degree in architectural engineering, drawing blueprints and designing houses and they always look at me and say, how did you get to here? You're a system admin and I'm a system admin and how do I grow my career? So Luigi and I figured, you know, why don't we sort of take a little bit of that history? Because now we're kind of, I hate to say we're the old guys on the porch, you know, these days, but back in the day, we were a lot, we were younger, we were faster, we were, you know, as you go forward, how do you stay relevant? And that's what we wanted to kind of talk about. So we took a concept from an author by the name of John C. Maxwell and we kind of took one of his books and we kind of cobbled it down to five different aspects. We just talked about, you know, what to think about, how to move, not just always knowing the technology, what do you want to go, what do you want to do and how to get there, you know, not just to sit and say, well, it's never going to happen for me, right? You have to make something out of it yourself and I think the response was pretty good. It was different because it was, it was the first one in the morning, but it wasn't getting hit at nine a.m. with technicals. It was really just us telling our stories around, you know, how we got to where we were going and, you know, with one of the big parts about Luigi's was, you know, having just been let go from HP and now he's done some interviews and I thought it was really great because he came right out and said, you know, I'm going to just do my own thing. I've just decided, you know, there's never a good time to start your own company, so why not do it now, right? And that was after he went through four or five interviews. So hopefully it resonated with some people and for me it's always gotten harder to learn. You know, I think as we get older, I made the joke in the session, I lost my phone first thing this morning, literally couldn't remember where I put it, dropped it. I called my best friend, Chris Boyd, who's one of the other CTOs and I said, have you seen it? Because I'm going to send the, I was going to have him run around the west side with the buzzer going off, you know, to find my iPhone and go find it. It's like, I can't remember what I did yesterday. So learning, learning gets harder. Yeah. Well, learning's harder. The bar's not that high to kind of get into new stuff. When I walk around the show, two things struck me. Number one is the vendors, every single one of them are hiring SEs and they can't find enough good quality people. And it's more about the people than it is, you know, you can train them up. And secondly, in some of these new spaces, talk about like the cloud space. If you get your associates on like AWS, like people will call you immediately. Yeah, you'll get your phone calls. There's so much opportunity out there. I've had, we've both had lots of friends that have, you know, there's changes and consolidations in the industry and therefore there's people that it, hey, it's time for a change. Well, I never thought I'd work for a storage company. Yeah. I worked for VMware, which was acquired by EMC years ago, but we still never, as VMware employees, we didn't work for a storage company. VMware is a software company. We're a software company. And I still actually look at Tintree as a software company. Yes, we sell an appliance, but the crux of what Tintree does is really is the software, the OS itself, and that's what makes it different. So yeah, and I've had to learn, you know, more about storage than I knew before, and I was telling a guy at the show, you know, one of the things Luigi and I talked to people, I said, just learn something new every day. Just small as silly as it was, and we've told different stories. And the guy asked me, so what's the last thing you learned, technology-wise, outside of storage? I said, I actually learned containers because of my home media server environment. I had to go out and learn Docker because I wanted to run some stuff in. I didn't want to stand it up. I just wanted to figure out how containers work. So, you know, now Tim Gebet and I were on the phone back and forth. All right, how'd you get that container running? How's that? And what would you do for the storage and how'd you deal with this? And it's, but that to me is what keeps your brain a little bit sharp. I mean, I don't do puzzles and things like that, but you know, those stupid side projects that we all do because we're technologists, I think, help. Yeah, and you never know when those side projects and passions could turn into an opportunity from a career standpoint. Yeah, yeah. All right, Chris, you've been coming to this event you know, quite a long time as we said. Give us a, you know, what's changed and what stayed the same from your standpoint? Oh man, that's a tough one because I don't, I think a lot of stuff is essentially stayed the same in the realm of networking and storage. I think there's always a new, there's always a new player, but I look back at the last, I'm probably getting myself in trouble here, but you know, what do I, what was the last big innovative thing in the IT space, you know, when I was a system admin and I go back to those easy things, like I remember when I did my first storage or my first B motion, right? And it was like, how does that work? You know, and I used to have conversations and I do that today with engineers and I say, what are we innovating? What are we doing to change the game? And to me, and this is again, this is all my personal opinion, I suppose I'll preface it with that, right? Because I'm, most people know me now, I have a pretty strong opinion on stuff, but I think that's the tough part is, what do we, how do we move forward? You know, how do we evolve to the next really big innovative thing that just blows people's minds? And I think AWS definitely did that a little bit when it really started to go mainstream and people realized it was a real thing. It wasn't a bookstore anymore, you know, they had this other stuff. And we go through these cycles, right? But I think in the standard IT space, I'm still trying to figure out what's the, outside of those, what's the next, you know, really cool thing that we're going to see from the different vendors and who's innovating and who's just sort of maintaining. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can tell you that people here are excited. There's a lot to learn about, Akinos this morning, I mean everything from, you know, what's happening in the, you know, automation space, you know, developers, not a ton of developers at a show like this, but definitely lots of opportunity there. You talked to the AWS presentation, he's like, I'm live coding and showing you, you know, Lambda stuff and, you know, most people here aren't quite ready for the serverless world. That was like me doing the cloud director presentation. And things like that. Where I remember three years ago, it was like the AWS 101, everybody's like, oh my gosh, this cloud thing sounds really amazing. So it takes some time, we've heard about it. I remember back, you know, when I heard about Vmotion, when it was in development and right, it was still one of those things, you look back at your career and like, wow, that was amazing. It was that magic technology. It was almost those conversations, where were you when you did your first Vmotion, right? As a matter of fact, Duncan actually did a blog post about that, where you heard about it, and I pulled in Nid Buñon into the thread because I was lucky enough to go to a conference and moderate a session where he explained down to kernel zero how it worked and everything because, you know what they say, any technology that, you know, was significantly, you know, difficult to explain, you know, might as well be magic. So, you're right, interesting stuff to see where innovation is going in the industry. I think most people I know are pretty excited. There's so much going on there. There's no shortage of new things to learn. We just need to reach out and take those opportunities and I love your advice to keep learning something every day. Small as it is, you know, I mean, I told these guys this morning, one of my biggest learning experiences was when we moved. You know, I had to learn how to drive a motor home and a house and deal with, you know, stuff that I've never done, right? But it's all learning. I mean, I challenged them today to just, whether you go into the sessions or you're just walking around where the vendors are, just understand what those people do and take that away and internalize it and see how you can use it. All right, well, Chris, I'm glad to see you're still a true blue Patriots fans there and you haven't picked up. The tattoo is still real. Yeah. I haven't picked up the Southern drawl just yet, so. No, it's funny. My wife said I pick it up a little bit when I'm around our neighbors and then when I come back up here I could really turn on the Boston accent if I tried, but yeah. Well, you all come back for lots more coverage here from VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE.