 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. You know, in this COVID-19 pandemic, we've been reaching out to folks that really have good visibility on what's going on out there. Tim Conley is here. He's a principal with the ATS Group and a partner of IBMs. Tim, good to see you again, man. Thanks for coming on. You got Dave, how are you today? Not too bad, you hanging in there with all this craziness? How are things? Yeah, we show our, it's like Groundhog Day every day, right? I know, the family's going crazy. They want to get out and, well, summer's coming. So, you know, hopefully the pandemic is going to calm down a little bit here. Give us some breathing room. I hear that. But so, tell us what's going on these days with your company, with the ATS Group. What are you seeing in the marketplace? Give us the update. Sure, Dave, we've been in business 19 years now as an IBM Systems Integrator, doing a lot of work around storage. There's a lot of shiny new nickels out there these days that we're trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the game on. You know, our customers are demand excellence from us because that's what we've been giving them the last, you know, 19 years. So they demand that from us, which is actually a great position for us to be in. But, you know, a lot of the new shiny new nickels out there today takes a lot of energy to focus on those. Make sure we're talking to our customers about the right things, the right times in the marketplace. Well, I had Ed Walsh on the other day and actually a couple of times this, within the last six months. And he shared with us actually in studio when we didn't have to be six feet apart. The new announcements, the simplification of the portfolio, presumably you've seen that. What was your reaction and how do you think the customers will react? It's a good question. Like I said, we're always looking to be leading edge. That's actually where we got our name from. Advanced Technology Services Group. So IBM consistently comes out with some really good products and solutions and we're constantly vetting them out in our innovation center and beta programs and things like that. Couple of key things that are working now with us is hybrid multi-cloud. You know, IBM comes out, like I said, with some good solutions. We vet them out and we're real excited about spectrum virtualized for public cloud. We've been using that for probably the last 12, 14 months. So trying to get the word out to our customers on what it means to our partners as well. We can have a simple 10 minute conversation with our customers and our partners. Kind of describe it at a high level and then they can gain interest from at that point. It could be a little tricky but we try to take that out of trickiness out of it and let our customers know what's really going on, how it works for disaster recovery for data protection to the cloud. Customers always want to talk about those things but a lot of them really don't know those specifics. So we literally intend a 15 minute and simplify it to them let them know how it works and what scenarios it might work for them. And again, doing a tests and POCs, things like that's really easy for us to do or doing one of our big federal customers want to call today at 12 o'clock. Going over that implementation, they're pretty excited about trying it out because everybody thinks they want to move some things to the cloud. So spectrum virtualized it allows us to do that pretty transparently. In fact, we used it ourselves last year because we took the journey to the cloud for SaaS offering took us over a year to do it. Let me tell you, it's not easy. People make it sound like going to cloud is a snap. Spin up some OS instances, some EBS storage and away we go, it's not that easy. I was just talking to a software executive who started his company 37 years ago. We both agreed and that's the kind of when I started in this business, we both agreed it just keeps getting more and more complicated. So firms like yours are our key. But you're okay. So you talk about hybrid multi-cloud. Of course, IBM has a cloud but IBM itself says, hey, we hope people put their data into our cloud but we know there's other clouds out there. Well, hence multi-cloud. So what do you see as going on in the marketplace specifically as it relates to multi-cloud? And I wonder if you could weave in the COVID-19 are you seeing people more receptive to cloud? Yeah, I'll tell you with COVID-19 we've had some opportunities delay because customers don't quite know where the market's going to go for themselves if you actually have one customer go out of business. So that ultimately delayed a deal forever, right? But overall things aren't that bad but we do see customers looking to make some things easier for themselves. They might have been thinking about the cloud but COVID's kind of brought it to the forefront and they want to make things easier right away. Maybe even save some money, right? So we have a calculator we created for our customers to really go measure things to see what actually would it cost to go to cloud? You know, a lot of customers have no clue what it is. We could do that in five minutes for them. It's really interesting. So again, we'll give them that information that hey, going to cloud might be an opportunity that they didn't think might be exist until now. So spectrum virtualized, otherwise known, but those have been around for a while like I have is kind of the roots of this are in the SBC, the sand volume controller and the history of that product is software that enables you to virtualize not just IBM storage but anybody's storage. And of course, one of the major use cases was has been migration. So in downturns, people want to get more value out of existing system. You know, maybe they come off lease or maybe they want to elongate the life and they may not have all the function so they can plug it into an SBC and they get all the wonderful new bells and whistles and the capabilities there. I wonder if we could talk about that and again, what you're seeing just in terms of the current economic situation and then specifically as it relates to cloud. That's a really good point. So you're tying two key things in today, right? Customers are looking to save money because they don't know what their financial outlook is based on COVID-19. So being able to help customers and you know, right? SBC's spectrum virtualized been around for gosh, probably 11, 12 years now, 13 years actually, right? So we pride ourselves on bringing that to customers, show them how they can virtualize their environments in the storage arena. And we have some gigantic customers in the federal space, commercial space. So we don't just bring out white paper say, yeah, well, it kind of looks good, right? We actually have distinct customers and talk to them about how they can drive their storage efficiencies up with IBM technology, especially virtualization. And then, you know, reducing their overall costs, that's key, especially now customers are constantly looking to reduce their costs and whatnot with their storage. So that's a perfect inroads to that. And then bringing in the multi-cloud part of it, you're just extending spectrum virtualized to the cloud, you know, was in IBM cloud first, was in AWS back June of last year. And now we're working on IBM on putting that out into Azure, you know? So we can bring those savings to customers in the cloud, which they didn't know they could do that before. All right, Tim, talk a little bit more about multi-cloud because, you know, I've joked recently, up until recently anyway, that multi-cloud is more of a symptom of multi-vendor as opposed to a strategy, but with shadow IT and sort of rogue systems and the marketing department, the sales, everybody doing their own cloud, essentially multi-cloud has become a strategy that the CIO has been asked to come in. Hey, we got all these clouds. Clean up the crime scene, I call it. What are you seeing today around multi-cloud? That's a great point. I like that term. I want to steal it if you don't mind. Multi-clouds, customers are very much interested in. We have several customers doing multi-cloud, IBM, Amazon, Azure. We actually did a study for an Azure customer where we actually projected them to go to AWS with substantial cost savings. Some of that had to do with right sizing their environment where they weren't right sized in Azure today. Like I tell you, cloud's not simple. It's not easy. Again, I said this earlier, we took that journey ourselves, spent a lot of time and energy with some really smart guys on my team to take that journey. So multi-cloud is a really great idea and should be looked at. But I'm telling you, it's not quite that easy to just shift around, but there are definitely things to move to different cloud vendors. Again, if we bring it back to the storage arena, right? Spectrum virtualized today is in IBM and Amazon. It's not another cloud. So if you want to go that route, perfect opportunity to go multi-cloud. Yeah, I mean, I think you're making a good point. Let's face it for our audience. We're in the early days of multi-cloud. Yes, everybody has multiple clouds. Everybody talks about having multiple clouds, but to be able to run applications natively in all these different clouds with the control plane, the data plane, the transport plane, all these disparate systems and really be able to take native advantage of the local cloud services. That's not only very complex. It's really not fully baked out here today, but we heard this week at IBM Think, a lot of talk about Red Hat containers and OpenShift. So we're starting on that journey and that's really the promise of multi-cloud to be able to ultimately run applications anywhere. But as you point out, that's a very complex situation today for customers. Yeah, that's a good point. So I totally follow up with you on that. That's multi-cloud customers are looking at it and there are some distinct advantages to the different cloud vendors. One could even say on-prem is a form of cloud, right? That's just your private cloud. So keeping things on-prem for certain scenarios makes sense, be able to tie that back to the big cloud vendors, IBM, Amazon, Azure, right? Tying them together is a direction people are looking to go and are kind of, some of them are there and have done it, but I'd say some or more of them are in the infancy stage of that. But what are you seeing in terms of just kind of switching topics on you? In terms of things like governance, compliance, a lot of talk about cyber resiliency, especially given the pandemic, what are you seeing there with customers? Wow, that's a big topic. It's an interesting data classification. You'd think it'd be that easy, especially for some of our Fed customers, it's not that easy, right? Trying to classify the data, they just don't know, they might know the applications, but they don't know the content of that data. Is it able to be, what is it? Section 126, something like that? Is it able to go to the cloud? So customers have a struggle on their hands trying to do that, right? The technology groups within the customers, the storage folks, the OS folks, the apps folks, they're all about the cloud, moving things to the cloud, but at the end of the day, it's just security folks that need to be able to do that data classification to see can the data even go there, let alone the application or whatnot? Fairly easy to do that kind of stuff, but the data classification, we see that's the hard part. Hey, so you talked about shiny new toys at the beginning of this conversation. You know, IBM, they try to be a shiny old toy, they have been around, you know, a century. Why IBM though? What is it about IBM that you choose to partner with them and, you know, give us the good, the bad and what you'd like to see improved? I would say we've been a partner for IBM a long time. I used to work for IBM, you know, a million years ago. At the end of the day, our customers demand excellence from us and they demand things to work, right? So for me to put my company and my resources into an opportunity for my customers, we can count on IBM because one, we have one great relationship with them, they have fantastic solutions. And then we've got them out, our customers demand that, and I can give real world examples of one customer to another. So again, it's not like a white paper I read it from vendor XYZ. At the end of the day, we're implementing these solutions at our customers. A lot of times we're doing it in our lab first to make sure it works as design, figure out the shiny new nickels, you know, what's broken with that nickel? Why is it not so shiny? Or is it really shiny as it appears to be, right? So be able to do that stuff in-house is great, but at the end of the day, our customers demand excellence and we have to be bringing solutions to our customers and IBM provides quite a few solutions, especially around storage arena, where we live and breathe that into the marketplace. So we have to use great solutions that we can trust and nowhere. My last question is, what have you learned in the last couple of months with this pandemic? Now that we start to hopefully come out of it, at least for a little while, what are you learning? What's been accelerated or pulled forward? And we're obviously not just going back to 2019. So how are you seeing your business and your customers responding? What's the sort of mindset going forward? I'd say two things. So there's the COVID stuff and then I talk about ransomware, cyber security, that could be another whole topic, right? But at the end of the day, I've been on a lot of webinars and things of last three, four weeks, five weeks, listening to different vendors talk about their shiny new nickels. And it's, quite frankly, it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo and that's not the world we live in because that's not what our customers are asking from us. But a lot of customers are really concerned about cyber security ransomware. I have two customers locally that got hit with ransomware last fall. And let me tell you, it's not a pretty scene and they were not prepared for it, right? So one of our jobs is to really help our customers understand where their gaps are within their organizations so that if they do get hit by cyber crime, or ransomware that they can actually survive that and not actually have to pay for it and be up and running in a variable small amount of time, which is key. Like I said, two customers got hit just of mine within 20 miles of our business and they weren't prepared for it. I can't leave it there, Tim. What do I got to do? If I'm an organization that's concerned about ransomware, which is probably every organization, what are the steps that I should take immediately? I would say a health assessment is something and it doesn't have to be from ETS. It could be from anybody that's got the experience and whatnot. We do health checks for our customers consistently and they don't have to be expensive. They don't have to be like months. People always think of health check. Oh my God, it's going to take so much time. It really doesn't. It's a quick, quick health check and we can look at those key things within your organization to see where you might not be prepared. And I'm talking like not prepared. Like if you get ransomware tomorrow, you very well could be out of business. It's not hard to see those kinds of things and you can make it more detailed if customers want that, right? I would definitely have customers if you're interested in that, call us, call any other vendor out there that's doing those kinds of things, but it's fairly easy for folks like us and other vendors to be able to do those health checks. Take a quick look in your environment and see where your gaps are that you could literally go out of business tomorrow. Okay, so first pass is you're looking for open chest wounds that you got to close immediately, stop bleeding. And then what? You start implementing best practices, air gap, obviously. Air gap, you still were right on my mind. Air gap, right? Yeah, look and see what's the requirements. First of all, make sure you can survive the event and get back up and running a reasonable amount of time, right? That one customer I mentioned, it was probably four or five weeks before they were able to restore all their servers and they were fortunate that a lot of those were dev test things that they could kind of wait a little bit long. But the other one, they nearly went out of business because they just weren't prepared for it, right? So yeah, air gaping is a key thing, right? Where I put my data can't be touched, right? That's a fairly easy thing to start off with. Yeah, and then the whole process of recovery, who's on deck, et cetera, et cetera, how communications occurs, there's technology and of course, as always, there's people in process. Well, Tim, I'll give you the last word, bring us home. Bring us home. Hey, Dave, thanks very much for your time today. This was a great time talking to you about some key things that we've worked with day and day out our last couple of months. Again, bringing our solutions to our customers that they demand that excellence from us, bringing IBM solutions that we natively know and love and trust because we've done them many, many times with other customers. So pretty excited about what's going on in the industry. Looking at all those shiny new nickels and see which one are actually shiny at the end of the day. All right, Tim, well, listen. Thanks for coming back in the cubes. Great to see you. I hope we get to see each other face to face. Sounds good, Dave. Thanks for your time. Thank you. You're welcome and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Go to siliconangle.com. You'll check out all the news about theCUBE.net where all these videos live in wikibon.com where I talk weekly. We'll see you next time on theCUBE.