 Massachusetts, it's the Cube. Covering WTG Transform 2019. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at WTG Transform 2019 across the mass pike from Fenway Park where we're hoping the rain's gonna stop in time for the game tonight where we have 189 users here with Winslow Technology digging in a lot of technology, networking with their peers and I'm thrilled to have on another one of the end users on the program. Plum and Dimitra is Director of Information Technologies at Kiowa Island Golf Resorts, coming to us from South Carolina. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, so I was actually telling you, I'm familiar with Kiowa, my father's retired down to Johns Island right off of Charleston, South Carolina. You have a beautiful golf course there. They've been professional events there. We actually have one of our Cubos. Does some PGA coverage, John Walls. So he and I have talked about Kiowa a few times, but for those of our audience that aren't as familiar and haven't been able to enjoy it, tell us a little bit about Kiowa. Kiowa is a beautiful island over about 10 miles on the ocean front side and where the Kiowa Golf Resort is spread out. We have different accommodations with a lot of different activities for all ages, starting with the Sanctuary Hotel, which is a five-star biforops and a five-diamond butt triple A. Or you can choose any of our villas from one to eight-bedroom villas. All that comes with, we have five beautiful golf courses, which one of them is Ocean Course, a previously hosted Ryder Cup in 1991, and PGA in 2012. And we are also proud to be a host of the PGA 2021. Very exciting. A part of that, we are announced to be Tennis Resort, number one in the world by tennisresortonline.com. We have over 22 tennis courts, different variations from car courts to clay. On top of that, we have a lot of pools, swimming pools, water parks, a lot of recreation, kayaking. It's just a beautiful, can be a beautiful journey for any visitors. Yeah, so Plumman, I think some of the IT people listening to this are gonna be like, boy, he's got a tough job there. Sounds gorgeous, right on the ocean, so many things there. But it's a little bit inside the IT year world, what that entails, and boy, there's gotta be some different challenges and opportunities that you face versus kind of the traditional business IT. As every island, we have all our friends like salty water and all things like that. And besides that, I mentioned that the company's spread out over 10 miles. We have a total of 23 locations, and all they share are the same systems and applications. Our current challenges from an IT standpoint are things that not all of the vendors, they can keep up with the current technology and be all new and modern. So we have some, what we call old school applications that they can keep up. And then you have the new applications that they can be hosted on the clouds, for instance. In the same time, those applications need to somewhat work with each other and have some interfaces. So this is where we kind of like face the, these days, a challenge a little bit and where our partnership with Winslow were able to help us determine which is the best route for us. And we determined that having a data center on islands and they have another one off the island is something is the best for us to go. They helped us go through the planning of what's the right setup to be used and I think we're in the right direction. Okay, so great. So you have two data centers and you're also using cloud services if I heard right? Correct. Okay, there's been a big discussion here is like what is the cloud strategy and it is an ever-changing world and there is no one right answer. So when you look at yourselves, what is your cloud strategy today and what makes you help determine where you'll be moving in the future? In one of the sessions, they mentioned it's all about checks and balance and it's to be able to measure how to apply your cash in a way that it makes sense. And one day maybe for some applications makes sense to be on-premise, another day makes sense to bring it on the cloud. And I can give you an example. Recently what we did was we were looking into switching to Office 365, pretty much everybody knows about it. And there's a good study that after you go over a certain threshold, it's much easier and much more cost-effective to have something on-premise versus going to the cloud version. Now, again, it depends on the size of the company, it depends on your future projects and goals. For some people it may be different than us, but I think that the future more and more things will be what's called calling the cloud which is mainly by other providers. And we're gonna have a tool called a key that you can get to those applications from anywhere. I'm gonna bring us inside a little bit that the data center, you said you have two of them. What's your infrastructure stack look like today? We've been looking at the various solutions, hyper-converged and hybrids and with the help of Winslow, we determined that sticking to the three-to-one traditional solution is the way we go. We use their compelling products, all-flash arrays, very flexible and very reliable, very nice speed that provide. Performance-wise are great products. Then after that storage solution you have two data switches and then a number of servers. We use on top of that the VMware as our hypervisor along with their VDI environment go horizon for some remote clients that they don't need much. But that's basically our setup. Great, and how long have you been using the compelling solutions? The compelling solutions, we've been using them for a year and a half since I joined the company. But my relationship with Winslow goes far back since 2013 where I used to work for another company here on Ntucket and the very first person I worked with was John Clifford from Winslow, a very great guy and he introduced us to the Dell world. This is when we bought the first Ecologic and afterwards I went to Belmont where we also bought a few compelants and we just keep going along. All right, great. Plumbing last question I have for you. What brings you to an event like this? What were you hoping to get out of it and how's it been going for you so far? Well, what brings me to an event like this? Most of the time is on one side to see what Dell has to offer. And some people attend Dell conference but I think a place like this where you have smaller scale conference it's much more beneficial for me. A, from a learning experience and B, from creating connections, making connections with other users which this is the best because they can, sales rep can tell you, yeah, this is what you need but then from a user perspective it's priceless to absorb experience. Plumbing to me, Truff. I really appreciate you sharing your journey and everything that Kiwik Alffords is doing. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. All right, we'll be back with more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.