 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the second year of theCUBE at what is now WTG Transform 2018. And happy to welcome to the program, Scott Winslow, who's the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group. Scott, always great to see you. Good afternoon, Stu. Happy to be with you. Hey, and Scott, thank you so much. You not only brought us back a second year, we've got a nice table here, but I'm not tripping over myself saying that it's the 14th anniversary Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC user conference in lovely Boston, Massachusetts in the background, in fact, it was like, ah, it's literally WTG Transform rolls off the tongue. So thank you. You were the inspiration for us, Stu. Your comments last year precipitated the change in that name. I know your team just looked at it and felt sorry for me because it didn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as the new one. It was a mouthful. Yeah, so Scott, you and I, we bump into each other a bunch. We tend to go to many of the shows, the Dell show, the Nutanix show. Let's talk about your show first here. It's the 14th year, it's users. One of the reasons I love coming here, besides getting to talk to you and Rick and some of your partners, it's users. I will speak to more users in one day here than I do with some of the big shows I go to. Yeah, I mean, it's a great opportunity to thank our existing customer base. You know, we have a four fold purpose for this event. We like to educate our customers. We hope that they can pick up some knowledge, maybe an aha moment that they have with them looking at hyperconverged solutions or all flash solutions. We've got a new Dell client display here this year that we've never had in the past. So we're looking to educate. We love to give them an opportunity to collaborate with other practitioners to compare notes. The feedback I get from them is they really enjoy that piece of it. We want to have some fun. And it's a tradition that we want to keep rolling and they're helping to make it very successful. So it's been a great venue for us and a great event for us over 14 years now. And Scott, you couldn't have ordered a better day. I mean, New England, it might change in an hour but right now temperatures in the low 70s, it's mostly clear. Gorgeous backdrop here, as you mentioned in the open. Socks have their ace pitching tonight and they're still in first place. So yeah, it doesn't hurt. We're in the customer service business, right? So you have to think of everything. Temperature, starting picture. And we try to make sure we've got a good agenda and there's a lot of good information for them here. To get customers to come out and spend a day with you, this is why this event has grown to be so big. It's because year after year after year, I feel like we've delivered and then we have kind of a continuous improvement process and we try to improve it every year. Here we are. Talk about your business a little bit. First time we met, Winslow Technology was one of the, it was the Dell partner of the year. So been a long time Dell partner. The Dell acquisition merger with EMC. It's been interesting to watch. I know you've got some viewpoints but before we get into kind of the Dell piece of it, talk about your business as, I guess we call you a channel partner down there. What's driving your business? How's growth going? How are things up here in New England and beyond? Because you're much more than New England. Yeah, I mean, well, we've certainly evolved our business over the years with acquisitions being a big part of that. Initially we started out as a compelling partner and then compelling was acquired by Dell and then five or six years later after that we have the Dell EMC consolidation. So I think we've had to learn to be flexible. And one of the things we've seen with that is we just, each time there was an acquisition, it allowed us to increase the size of our portfolio with more solutions that we can offer our end users, more services that we can provide. You know, along the way we've added a lot of other solutions to like the Nutanix solution in the hyperconverged space. So our business is going great. We're, you know, the highest employee count we've ever had our revenues were as high as they've ever been last year. We had a record Q3, record Q4 in Q1. We grew our Dell business by over 30%. That makes Dell very happy. That makes us very happy as well. So, you know, as this whole industry evolves and, you know, the digital economy progresses, there continue to be the need for the services that we provide. All right, so let's talk about Dell. As you said, you've come from the compelling piece, the Dell XC, which is the Nutanix OM is something that I know your team is, you know, very involved with, you know, how is Dell and Dell EMC? How are they doing for the channel these days? I think they're doing very well. I think they, you know, Dell likes to say they have big ears and they listen well. I think that they have proven that. They've put together a very good channel partner program under the leadership of John Byrne initially and now Joyce Mullen. You know, I think that they incent you to work with them. They try to incent the sales people and sent the companies, but they also put together very good programs for you to run marketing events like this. So an event like this, we couldn't do it without the support of Dell Technologies and they've been, you know, very supportive of us. You know, they're providing speakers like Dave Singer. You've got all kinds of subject matter experts here. We've got lots of hardware and software folks through, you know, demo. So I think overall the partner program's been very good. Great, and Nutanix, as you said, you get it through the Dell. So I'm curious, has the move as Nutanix is shifting more to really that software model? Does that have any impact on your business or are you isolated from that since you've been using the Dell XCs? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, we've been involved in Nutanix for, you know, three plus years now, right? Before Dell acquired EMC, our hyper-converged solution was Nutanix. We built together, you know, a very nice base of customers, many of whom, you know, are here today. So as they evolve to a software model, I do think they're going to be less concerned about what hardware platform it goes on because they're truly creating all their revenues, you know, from the software side. So they're very, they don't care really what hardware platform is being used. So, you know, we feel like we've got the best two solutions in the hyper-converged marketplace between the portfolio of Dell solutions, you know, VSAN, VxRail, Vblock, VCE, and then Nutanix with the Nutanix solution. Typically with Nutanix, we tend to put that on a Dell server platform. That's where we lean. We think Dell's got the best server technology in the industry. That's a nice way for us to bridge that gap between the two companies. So a lot of times our customers are putting a Nutanix solution on a Dell platform. Yeah, key themes I heard in your talk, Rick's talk, David Singer's talk this morning and what I hear from customers, digital transformation and hybrid cloud. Are those top of mind with your customers today? Absolutely, yeah. I think, you know, Rick alluded to it in his talk, a lot of customers are coming to us saying, hey, help us with our cloud strategy. And so we're going in and saying, tell us about your applications. You know, these are applications that we think belong in the public cloud that makes sense in the public cloud. And, you know, that could be disaster recovery, it could be backup, it could be Office 365. And these are other applications that we think might be more well suited for a non-premise solution. So that could be active file transfer. And so, you know, we think that leads naturally to a hybrid cloud discussion. We've got a customer here today, a financial customer from New Hampshire and their CIO call me. I'd known him previously at a famous sneaker company in town. He went to a financial institution and he said, hey, we want to move everything to the cloud. Can you come up and consult with us on that? And we ended up putting in a hybrid cloud forum, you know, featuring a hyper-converged solution that had the cloud integration that he needed. So I think that's the kind of activity we're involved in today. Yeah, use the word conversation. And that, and the customers I've talked to, they like, they need advice and they want someone that's not just, oh, well, here's the solution that you're going to buy. No, no, no, it's a conversation. There's lots of decision points and as you build out that hybrid cloud, yes. It's going to be made up by definition, multiple pieces. It's not necessarily going to be one company that's going to do it all, but, you know, your team helps them along that journey. Absolutely. I mean, you can't go in with a cookie cutter approach. It's the, you know, you've got two ears and one mouth. We tell our salespeople, you got to use them in that portion. So you really got to kind of listen to the customer. As I said, try to understand what their applications are. You got to understand what their biases are. If it's a Microsoft shop, you know, Azure might be their choice for, you know, public cloud or they might be interested in AWS. So you got to kind of work through those, you know, scenarios and then build out a solution that's going to work for them. We, and we rely on our solutions architects, Brian Vino runs our SA team and he's got a group of five SA's that we think are very adept at, you know, putting those solutions together. Yeah, Brian's actually not far from I said here, you've got the new hands-on lab is one of the new things that you added here. Anything from that or from other things at the event that you'd want to highlight as we wrap? Yeah, I think, I mean, the hands-on lab gives, you know, customers the opportunity to come in and play with kind of structured and scripted demos. And I see a number of customers in there using that. So I'll talk to our team after the event and find out how it went. We always try to look for, you know, improvements along the way, but you know, there's opportunity in there to play with those demos in terms of storage, in terms of hyper-converged, in terms of Dell OpenManage Essentials, which is the software that manages your entire server farm. So I think that's been a good addition. I'd say the other addition is, this year, as we were planning it, we said, hey, our people are really good. We need to get our people up in front instead of relying so much on the OEM and they're great and they provide great resources. But I know that our people have so much to offer as well, particularly because, you know, we're out there, you know, putting solutions together for customers. And I think that breadth and depth comes through. So that's been a nice addition this year where it's not just been Rick Allen and myself, but we've utilized a number of members on our team. Ed Palmer is the moderator for a customer experience as an outcome session this afternoon that we're really excited about because at the end of the day as a solution provider, that's our job is to produce results and outcomes for our customers. That's how we're going to be judged. That's how we want to be judged. So I'm really excited about that session because we've got Improvada and Boston Architectural College they're going to present up their respective deployments and they were different of hyperconverged technology. So I think the voice of the customer, we really want to make sure we're continuing to bring that back to this event. So. Well, Scott, always a pleasure to see you. Thanks so much for bringing the queue back to this event and thank you for all the customers we get access to. We always love to talk to the customers. By the way, if you're looking to have a customer on the queue, that's what we're always looking for customers. So either look at the events where we do have a Boston area studio and a lovely Palo Alto studio. So reach out to the team, be happy to talk. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the queue.