 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group, Dell EMC User Group, happy to have on the program one of the users here at the event, Andrew Baxter, who's the director, Systems Engineering with Commonwealth Financial Network. Andrew, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. All right, tell us a little bit about your organization and your role there. Certainly, Commonwealth Financial Network is an independent broker-dealer. We have a network of roughly 2,000 advisors throughout the country, just based in the U.S. right now, and that's what we do. We're a clearinghouse for them. We provide all their IT infrastructure for them. Okay, the good news is that financial, like most industries, isn't going through any change today, right? Oh yeah, absolutely, no. We've got the Department of Labor's our big bugaboo right now. Yes, what are some of the biggest challenging is regulation, is it uncertainty, is, you know, technology, what are some of the drivers for the business? It's a combination of both. We have a lot of issues with regulation because of such people as Enron and whatnot. Smartest people in the room, right? Exactly, and it's not, the regulation's not a bad thing. It's just can be problematic to work with. So the most recent one is the Department of Labor where they have decided how your retirement funding can be managed and to make sure that there is no conflict of interest. Okay, so yeah, we're not going to get political here and go into how much government and everything like that. What does that mean to you all? Tell us a little bit about what you manage and really from the standpoint. So my group is responsible for our virtualization, our server platform, all of our storage, our data protection, be it backup, anti-virus, things like that. So we've got several different systems from a performance standpoint, and then we also have things from a compliance standpoint. A lot of worm drives in the form of Centera or Hitachi Content Platform, and then the storage that goes around that and the applications that go with them. All right, well, you've got one of the hot button topics, security, tell us a little bit about, there's the compliance and the security. How is that impacting what you're doing these days? So there's sort of two different things. Compliance is one thing, maintaining your compliance with security level. We have a whole group, two groups actually, independent of each other that sort of check each other and then check us to make sure that one, we're keeping the patch levels up, but also that we're following best practices to try to keep the bad guys out. We, I think everybody knows that you can't keep them out if they really want in. It's really comes down to how you're going to react, and so we've got to make sure that we have the tools in place to be able to react appropriately. Yeah, one of the things we've been looking at is security used to just be, oh, the networking people take care of it, or we put up some firewalls, we do some things. Now, security, a lot of times, getting up to the board level type of discussion, what's the dynamic in your organization? Yeah, so we do have the traditional on the network side, but we have a group within that that is specifically focused on that, and it's more than just the network side of it, and then we have the information security group, and that's more the board level where they're helping to define what types of data are critical. Personally identifiable information, we have HIPAA, other regulations like that, FINRA, the SEC, that we have to make sure that we secure your information as well as possible. Okay, what brings you to this event? So we've been a customer or a partner with Winslow, I like to think of my vendors for lack of a better word as partners, I don't want to just use them as somebody I call when I need something, I want them to be somebody who is involved in the process, whatever that may be, and in this case, right now we're currently using them for all of our virtual desktop infrastructure from the storage, the server standpoint. We're using some Dell products for wireless and things like that, and then as the time goes on and we start to do more refresh of equipment, then we're going to be looking at all the vendors and not just the traditional ones. So you get the big three, sort of HPE, Dell, and Lenovo in the server market or UCS as well. So we're gonna make sure that we look at all of them and see who has the best offering for us for what we need. Okay, what about cloud? How does that fit into your organization? Do you have, you know, cloud means many things to many people, but what's it mean to your organization? What's the strategy look like today? So we have two situations. One, we are actually a cloud for all of our advisors. We provide them with their exchange, their active directory, their antivirus, their patching, things like that. And then we're also looking at the Azure and the AWS offerings. We have to be very careful as we move to those offerings we have to make sure that we retain the security level when that data leaves our hands as it were. The financial markets tend to be a little slow moving to that kind of stuff because we've got very sensitive data that we've got to make sure that doesn't go away. Doesn't get breached and doesn't become generally available to the world. Yeah, talk to us a little bit about what data means to your organization. Of course, securities piece. How are you, are there initiatives to leverage data more? You look almost like a service provider. Sure. We've seen many organizations that leverage that kind of technology. So one of the, there's a couple different ways we do that. One of them is the actual software we've written for our advisors to use. So we're providing them with all the information they could ever want about their clients, the performance of the portfolios, things like that. But then there's also, on the other side, we're starting to look more into the Power BI, that kind of information so that we can start leveraging sort of paying more attention to how our products are being used in a more proactive manner, instead of reactive. Okay, curious how things like hyper ledger and blockchain, you know, play into, it doesn't play into anything you're doing today. What is your organization looking at? Not currently, it will be down the road, I'm sure. But at this point, it's not something because we really just haven't moved anything out to that area yet. Okay, great. I want to give you really the last word. What do you kind of, when you come into an event like this, what are you looking for? What do you hope to take away from this? I'm looking for what's new. What's coming, I need to make sure that I'm trying to stay ahead of things. Because part of what we have to do is we have to set the tone for what's going to be coming in the coming years. And so I don't want to just see the same old thing. And that's one thing I like about Winslow. They do keep on the cutting edge. They do keep forward. They've got cloud, for lack of a better term, as part of their portfolio. And I feel that they actually know what they're doing. I have worked with some vendors that, they could spell the word, but that was about it. So, absolutely, the cloud washing, if you will. Yes. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. Appreciate the updates on where all of this technology fits into your environment. And you've been watching The Cube.