 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Well good morning, welcome here on theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017. We're live at the Venetian theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of course of SiliconANGLE TV, where John Furrier loves to say we extract the signal from the noise. To help me do that, Rebecca Knight, co-host here. And also joining us from Dell EMC is Rhea Barrett, Rhea, good to see you this morning. Thank you, thanks for having us. The Senior Director of Product Marketing, and Marty Vandemore from Heartland Financial. Marty, you have a mouthful. You're the SVP in Director of Operations and Infrastructure. So a big portfolio with Heartland Financial. Good to see you as well, sir. Nice to be here. Tell us a little bit first off about your operation, who you are, your footprint, and a little bit more about your responsibilities. Sure, yeah. Heartland Financial is a bank holding company, founded in 1981. We have 10 independent bank charters, which is a little bit different for a company our size, but we believe in having a community bank focus. So we have local boards of directors and individual charters for our banks. We're in 12 states. We have 112 locations serving 87 communities. So we try to have that local bank feel, but still have the financial resources to serve some of the mid-market and larger customers. So yeah, we are primarily in the Midwest, in Western United States, and headquartered in Dubuque, Iowa, which is where our main IT operation is located, and we try to service everybody out of that to such a location. All right, so financial services and obviously data protection, paramount importance as far as Marty's concerned. You and I were talking off camera about the difference between protection and security, and there is not even a fine line. There's a pretty defined line, if you will. Go ahead and run me through that. It really is, it's a question we get a lot. What's the difference between data security and data protection? And one really good way to think about it is, data security is about making sure things don't go wrong, and data protection is about recoverability when and if things go wrong, which they inevitably do. So one is about eating right and working out, so that's the security aspect, and the other one is about health insurance, because if something goes wrong, they want to make sure you're covered. So that would be the way I would really describe the difference between the two. But we do see a convergence as we look at some use cases for our customers where the two are starting to really kind of blend together and become part of, again, some of the good challenges that customers have. Marty, you're a relatively new customer to Dell EMC. Can you tell us a little bit about what you were looking for in your data protection and security, and why you made the switch to Dell EMC? Absolutely, yes. Up until three or four years ago, we were a traditional shop using traditional tape backup, but we knew that using traditional tape had many challenges to it. The backup windows were shrinking, so we were having shortened windows to be able to get our data backed up and protected. The recoverability was going to take too long, and if we did have a significant issue, we were not going to be able to meet our recovery time objectives, which is the amount of time to recover. Over the years, I've been in banking over 30 years, and that window to recover has really shrunk from days to now hours, so having this data protection suite has allowed us to shrink that recovery time objective to a very small window of hours to keep our business up and running. Can you break that down about how your customers feel that? How that makes a difference in their lives and in their banking? Well, our customers now expect their financial services at their fingertips 24-7, so if we don't have their data, first of all, secured and protected, they'll feel that in some way or another. But then having it available for them at 24-7 is very important, and having their data protected allows us to do that. What are you hearing from customers since you've made the switch? Have you gotten feedback in terms of how it is changing their, how they run their financial lives? I think the most important thing is we're not hearing feedback from them. In the negative way. Exactly, so they're being serviced. No news is good news. Exactly. They're being serviced, and things are working the way they should. You know, any more, too. It used to be, I guess, data centers, everything was clumped in one place, right? And so that was a concern because everything was in one place. Now you've got this scatter shot, all these inputs and outputs, and it's going- It's the data fog. It's called the data fog now. Run a new set of headaches for you, yeah? It really is. It's interesting. I mean, I would say in the financial services, you're also a highly regulated business. So much more than just how customers are feeling data protection. I think financial services just really needs to be able to make sure that they can recover under multiple scenarios. Now the data fog is an interesting one. You talked about a lot of your different locations, and we're seeing that across all different businesses now. Customers used to have a data center or two or three, and there was massive data between four walls, and it was pretty much straightforward to be able to protect it. Now we're seeing cloud deployments. We're seeing data really moving to where the consumers are to the edge, and those four walls have pretty much disappeared. So you have no longer this data center, but more centers of data. And data protection is really evolving, I think. We had some cloud announcements here yesterday, and it's really all about how do you protect that data that's no longer between four walls, limited to four walls? So Marty, are you seeing that in your practice in terms of trying to maintain some control but having a lot of different repositories, if you will, of data and going out to different places or spots, or I guess exactly, how are you trying to find, I guess, answers to these kinds of costs? Making your way through the data fog. Yeah, the data fog. Yeah, the data fog. Because 30 years plus in the business, you've seen some changes, I would have said. I definitely have seen some changes. And we are, financial services are traditionally a little bit more conservative, so we've been able to kind of watch this marketplace and learn from some of the mistakes, maybe some of the other industries are making. But it's certainly starting to hit us, and our data is starting to spread. But we're working with Dell EMC to make sure that as that data spreads, that data isn't secure, it's backed up, it's protected, and we still have control over it. Absolutely, invisibility. Yep, yes, yes. Rhea, in terms of working with a client like Heartland Financial, how much learning goes on between your financial services clients, your clients in genomics research, your clients in other media and entertainment, how much do you learn in terms of what one client is dealing with in terms of data challenges and another? That's a great question. Again, at the end of the day, one of the things that makes data protection interesting is it's not about infrastructure, it's about data, and it really starts at the application level. And depending on the different businesses and industries, they have very different requirements. We talked about different applications, and Dell EMC within their data protection supports the most heterogeneous application platforms out there. We have support for VMware, we have support for multiple hypervisors and optimized solutions. So it's really about data protection, it's not about the infrastructure or where the data sits, it's all the way from the data's creation to the networks to the resting point of data. So we learn a lot, and we're finding out more and more about how to build best practices into some of the products that we're bringing to market as well. I'll take a cloud as an example. We're evolving as our customers journey in cloud, how they're using, how they're deploying, it's changing, and we have to make sure that we're morphing our portfolio to meet the, not just their requirements from yesteryear, but where they want to go and how they want to utilize these new forms of compute and deployment. Marty, I want to talk about the technology as a recruitment tool. We've heard a lot from a survey that Dell EMC did about how millennials will quit a job if they don't think the technology is hot. CEOs view technology as a major way to retain their top talent. Have you seen, do you see evidence of that in your workforce at Heartland? Absolutely, yes. We've made a significant investment over the last three or four years in not only data protection, but also the VBOT converged infrastructure and having that type of technology in our shop definitely draws in talent and allows them to work with the latest greatest tools and which is what excites people that are in technology. So it definitely has made a difference. Yeah, Rhea, maybe the size of the enterprise. Does that affect or did that come into play here? You've got mid-range, maybe they have different concerns and the enterprise has different concerns. Where's their overlap there where they do have some commonality? I think they do, there's a lot of commonality. I think more and more customers are under such a time crunch and technology and the accelerated business cycles are really forcing IT to come up with solutions that are just going to be fast to deploy, easy to manage. And we see that across both mid-range customers as well as enterprise customers. Now on the enterprise customer side they have some additional requirements. Traditional backup is no longer meeting their requirements for scale. Some of their applications have grown so big that the data path needs to be addressed. You can't just do things the way you've traditionally done. The other one is I think on the enterprise side there's a lot more complexity. So they're looking for, when we talk about ease of management they want to have direct access to our APIs. They want to be able to build and automate their people and processes around the technology but it's very different than going in and doing things in a UI. So there are a lot of overlap especially in the requirements around simplicity and speed of deployment, ease of scale. But then there's definitely some differences in terms of how they want to use the technology and how they want to deploy it and how far it needs to scale. Marty, Rhea just got a touch on something about speed. Do you find, is there any kind of tension or just a kind of an inherent conflict between the need for protection, the need for security, the need to maybe walk before you run and then maybe on the financial services side we got to go, go, go, go, go because we want to remain competitive. We want to offer new opportunities for our client base but yet you've got to be the watch guard, right? You've got to make sure the brakes are being pumped a little bit to keep some of that exuberance somewhat constrained. I can see where you can view it that way but what's happened is with the technology that Dell EMC has they, their technology is running in the background so we're still able to keep up and still keep things protected behind that. So we're doing real-time snapshots, we're doing real-time replication so we're able to keep those services up and keep up with the business but yet still keep things protected on a real-time basis so it really hasn't hindered us at all. We've been able to keep up. That's great, great. So Rhea, if you would, let's, if you could provide, I guess, maybe a roadmap for a financial service for the next three, five years. Challenges, barriers, obstacles. You know, what would it be that you'd say, well, if we can solve this for them because everybody's looking for the next better mousetrap, you know, what would that be? I think the deployment model's changing and what we kind of talked about, the data fog is going to be something that both financial services and many of our other customers in different industries are going to have to really figure a way around. How do you protect data that's no longer just defined by four walls? How do you define, you know, how do you protect and make sure that you can meet the regulatory compliance requirements that is looked upon by your business? And I think it's going to be a little bit of a learning. I think there is a misconception by a lot of customers that if their data is in the cloud, it's somehow automatically protected because of the nature of cloud. And that's absolutely not the case. And I think if we can really help our customers with standardized deployments, if we can really help our customers with architectures that can not only scale up, but scale out as well. So multi-dimensional scale so that we can meet their growing needs. And if we can help our customers with ease of deployment, whether that's in the form of blueprints that they can use, whether that's in the form of a technology that we announced yesterday, integrated data protection appliance where convergence has now come to data protection where everything is built in cookie-cuttered. So if you want to just standardize on your deployments, you now have that option. So those are some of the challenges. Make it simple. Make it fast. Make it scale. Words to live by. And make it cheaper. Exactly. Always. Yeah, hey. That's always a consideration. Thank you. Rhea, Marty, thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you on the program. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Marty. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. Thank you for joining us here at Dell EMC World. We'll have more after this.