 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a special on the ground here at the VTUG Summer Slam 2019. It is the 16th year of the event. We had hosted theCUBE many times at the VTUG Winter Warmer. And sad to say this is actually the final interview for VTUG and into the final VTUG event. But before we can wrap up, friend of mine, Sean Tulien, who is a V architect with Dell EMC. I've been promising him for years that we would one of these days do an interview on theCUBE at the VTUG. So it is the absolute final interview. So Sean, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. All right, so not only do you work for Dell EMC, but you were part of the social team here at the VTUG event. I had conversations with Luigi. It was also his first time in the program. And Matt, who I've spoken with in the past. So give us a little bit about your background at this event and what this community has meant to you. Oh, sure. So I'm trying to remember, I think this is my fifth or sixth summer slam. I mean, I basically, once I started my professional career, one of the first things that we did was look for user groups. And so when they used to hold this event back at Gillette, that was very close to home. And that was my first experience with, I think back then it was the New England V-Mug. But it's still the same community. And community has always been a big part of my life and my career. I mean, I even joined EMC's social media community team to basically work with influencers in the broader IT community. But I always make sure that I can do events like this in the New England area because it's so important to be a part of this community and the IT crowd. Everybody knows everybody and you can always learn something new just by talking to people. So like I purposely go during lunch and sit down with people who I've never met before and introduce myself and see what they do for a living. And it's been a wonderful experience every year. Yeah, it's a great point. Community is so important at these events. And especially at a regional event, the logo on your shirt doesn't matter as much because for the years we've been attending this, almost everybody has changed jobs. Companies have been acquired, companies go public, people change their jobs. So it's about the learning as a community, the growth of what's happening in our careers more than kind of some of the day-to-day battle that might happen in the storage community. Yeah, yeah. You got to be able to separate, say, your professional competitiveness and be able to just embrace people as people and be able to talk to them and share knowledge. And I think anyone else who's a part of the community is able to do that themselves as well. Yeah, it's been interesting. Virtualization was one of those galvanizing technology that brought a lot of people, was the bloggers and people helping to participate in. Cloud's been interesting in many ways. There's some fragmentation, there's some tough competition out there. Yet we're all learning and as most customers today, they've got hybrid cloud, they've got multi-cloud. They've got lots of environments and therefore the users don't necessarily look at some of those battles are going on, but they're looking to help run their business and how are you seeing that environment? What do you hear from users that you speak with today? So I'm hearing a variety of things. There's a lot of people that are on different points, we'll call it in their cloud journey. There are some people who have just kind of gotten an edict from the board or upper management that says cloud first, or we're going to do everything in the cloud. And some people who have jumped all in with that are learning a very painful lesson, especially with their wallet. We've found that kind of the sweet spot in it is that hybrid cloud. There are some workloads that are absolutely great for cloud and there are some that is just expensive. And so depending on the size of your infrastructure, you can actually save a good amount of money by setting up something local and having a cloud strategy as well. It's all about evaluating the workload. And I think earlier today during the keynotes this morning, that message was really coming across that it's not all about the cloud or even just one cloud. I mean, there's countless cloud providers out there with all sorts of different operating models and pricing models. And the beauty of it is we're in a place now with the technology that people can almost nickel and dime and do what is best for them and not necessarily be told this is how it's going to be, this is your only option. Yeah, one of the things I took away from the keynotes this morning is it is also easy to get caught up on the latest cool tool or the wave or what people are talking about. But it's what skill sets do I have? How do I make sure I understand what's valuable for my business and my career as we bring this one to a close? Sean, what plus do you have on that? Well, it's funny you brought up skill sets because a lot of that can be learned from the community. If you don't have the professional skill sets or maybe your employer might not pay the ump the ump for organized training, there are so many community-based free trainings and webinar series and stuff like that that can get you learned up in this. I remember in my career I was talking with a customer who was like, we're making a shift, we're going to start being more cloud focused and here I'm doing updating their VMware environment and he's like, I need to get better at this and I rattled off a few different community programs. I talked to him again six months later, he went through all that and now he's playing around in Azure and Amazon and starting to learn some of that and they almost gave him a promotion. They reorg them into a new role where he's got more cloud responsibilities and effectively saved his job because he went out to the community and learned these skills. Yeah, but I always find in these events, right? If you were open to new ideas, that intellectual curiosity, there is so much opportunity in tech these days. Sean, I want to give you the final word. Any memories you have from these events, either the main or the winter event that you want to share as we bring our coverage to a close? I mean, this event has been going on for so long and it's always good stuff every single time. I'm going to miss the rubber chickens that has always stuck out and to me as one of the big highlights. For those that don't know, that's Hans from VMware, brings the rubber chickens. We'll throw the little keychains at you when you go. Yeah, but in general, there's a lot of events out there where it's the morning and maybe the afternoon. The party afterwards, and I'm not here to be like party, party, party, but is almost just as important as the event itself. And I've never seen any other user group or event like that, that really puts in that time for networking. I get almost just as much business done there talking to people when you're waiting in line for lobster and stuff like that here, as just kind of mingling around during the day. You meet so many people and make business connections and everything at the after party, which is why I keep thinking they invest so much money in the after hours piece of it. Yeah, I think great point to end on, Sean. The community is really central to what goes on there. This event listened to the customers and grew the breadth of the topics that they covered. They kept to keep on it. So 16 years of phenomenal run. I want to have a big shout out to everyone that helped put the VTUG on. Of course, that is Chris and Don Harnie at the core. Chris Williams did a lot of work there, but many other people that helped behind the scenes to make it happen. And of course, it was always the users at this event that were the drivers for it, as well as the sponsors that helped participate and grew this. Sean Tulene, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the CUBE alumni and I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you, as always, for watching this program. It's been our pleasure to see all of the VTUGs. If you go to thecube.net, go up to the search bar and touch VTUG, you can see previous years, we've had so many great guests on the program. I got to interview some of the alumni from the Patriots, which were some definite highlights for me as well as some great technical content and good friends that I've made over the years. So with that, we are signing off from the final VTUG here in Maine, and thank you, as always, for watching the CUBE.