 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group, Dell EMC user group, and happy to have on the program multi-time guest of theCUBE, Scott Winslow, who's the president and founder of Winslow Technology Group. Scott, thanks so much for having us here. Good to be here Stu, good afternoon. All right, so you opened up the event here. I think you've said you've got between 150 and 175 users, and if I remember right, your first user event was actually here, and it was like what, eight users? So, great location here in Boston, friendly right behind, you're taking your users to the game. Tell us a little bit about the history of the company and this event. Yeah, when we started the user group 13 years ago, it was here at the Hotel Commonwealth, and it's been a great venue for us. Really, it started with eight customers around a conference room table. We had Marty Sanders, the CTO from Compelent, Phil Soren, one of my mentors as the CEO of Compelent and founder, and I think we were talking about how do we improve the GUI on the enterprise manager for Compelent, and that was how it started, and kind of last minute, we decided to go to Ballgame afterwards, and that was kind of the roots of this event, but it's changed over the 13 or 14 years, but we try to provide really good education for our customers, give them some things to think about in their infrastructure and their environments. We try to be a thought leader, and it's kind of evolved around that theme for the last 13 or 14 years. Obviously a lot bigger now than it was. We've grown up. The challenge for us is how do we continue to have our customers have a white glove experience as we continue to grow, but we're really excited about where Compelent took us to Dell and Dell led us to Dell EMC, and here we are. Yeah, so Compelent to Dell, Dell to Dell EMC, and we're still talking to the storage industry about making their user interfaces better, right? We are. We are, well, I mean, we are in that one sense, but in another sense, as you move into hyper-converged, that really is kind of the backdrop for that story, because as you get into hyper-converged infrastructures, you're talking about one-click upgrades of server-storage networking hypervisor, so I think it really is kind of a good backdrop, and we've seen that evolve over the years. Yes, Scott, when you look at your portfolio, you've started out very much storage, a server-storage network, hyper-converged, the PC and mobile cloud. How many people you have in the company now, and how do you manage that kind of change and expanse of your portfolio without getting a mile-wide and an inch deep? Yeah, we've got 37 people in the company now, so we've added six this year already. I think we try not to go too wide in terms of number of vendors. We've tried to focus on a few key strategic partners, so for us, that's Dell EMC, it's Nutanix, it's VMware, and try to really specialize in those areas. We think customers are looking for a partner that's got deep technical expertise, really good sales acumen. I guess a fair criticism of us would be you don't go wide enough. You're not partnered with Cisco or HB, but we'll accept that. We think it's led to 35% growth over the last three years, and we think it's been a good strategy for us. Yeah, no strong growth, absolutely. What are you hearing from your users? How much is this digital transformation pulling them along and driving them to that breadth of solutions that you're offering? Yeah, I mean, we're having conversations with them every day, and the conversation oftentimes is, do we continue down the path we've been or are very comfortable with a three to one solution? For us, a lot of times that's a Dell server, Dell networking, Dell Compellent. We're very comfortable providing that, but as they look and say, hey, we built this wonderful car, but it's probably gonna run out of gas at some point, do we move into more of a hyper-converged solution? Do we look at a cloud solution, and how do they continue to evolve their environments? And that's provided a great role for us to consult with them in that regard. Yeah, all of your partners, Dell, Nutanix, VMware, all trying to figure out how they live in kind of this hybrid or multi-cloud world. How are your partners doing? What view is kind of the voice of the customer? Do you want to see from them to kind of mature these solutions even further? Well, I think we've seen it already. If you think about like at .next, Nutanix announces cloud integration with Google. I think we're looking for solutions where we can provide a really good on-prem solution for some of the data, but then you have to have the ability to go off-prem and have cloud integration. And if I look at Nutanix, Dell, EMC, VMware, I think they're providing that. If you look at like an NSX solution from VMware, for example, we've seen the virtualization of compute with VMware, we've seen the virtualization of storage with products like Compellent and others, and now you've got a virtualization layer and abstraction layer in networking with NSX, and that provides some real benefits in terms of what can be done around operating efficiencies and networking, micro-segmentation, et cetera. So we see those vendors providing those kinds of solutions. Yeah, so NSX is going to be one of the critical components when we get VMware on AWS. I'm curious whether that Microsoft Azure Stack or Jeremy Burton was talking this morning about Virtustream being able to go on-premises. Those solutions, they excite you to they excite your customers, what do you say? They do, they do excite our customers. I would say right now we're, I don't know if they excite our CFO as much. We're having a lot of conversations with customers about the things like NSX. I wouldn't say it's been a big revenue driver for us. We're still driving a lot of revenue through some of the traditional server storage networking hyper-converged solutions, but I would say as it relates to an NSX, for example, it's a topic that customers want to talk about, security's very much top of mind, and it hasn't translated yet into a lot of revenue, but it's definitely a part of the building blocks that our customers are looking at. Yeah, you bring up your CFO. I'm curious, how does the customers looking to kind of change CapEx into OPEX, how does that affect you? Are you, are service providers in the public cloud, those an opportunity for you, for partnership? Are they a challenge for kind of the channel's business model? Yeah, it's a good question. I think we've seen a lot of the partners that we work with try to provide an operating OPEX model and try to be more cloud-like in their solution. So if you look at the Nutanix's and the VxRails, having a solution from Dell EMC or from Nutanix where you can present it up almost like a cloud solution where they only have to commit to maybe 40% of the overall payment or they can grow it very quickly like they would a cloud solution. So we're seeing a lot of that type of activity, I would say. At the same time, we're reaching out to the cloud providers, the Amazon's and the Azure's to figure out can we be partnered with them and what does that model look like and it's certainly not going to be a lot of margin working with those types of providers but you can build a big consulting practice around it. So we're heavily engaged in those kind of discussions. All right, Scott, last thing, as your users, as they walk away from this year's event, what do you want them to think about their relationship with you and kind of their big takeaway from the event? Yeah, I mean, for us, we try to be the trusted advisor, right? That's our role. You've got a number of OEMs out there. We're putting solutions together. That's why we call our engineering team the solutions architects because we're piecing it all together for them. I look at the manufacturers kind of as like a big aircraft carrier and they're good aircraft carriers but we're a little speedboat, right? We can go back and forth, we're very nimble, we can demo stuff quickly. So I want them to think about us as a solution provider, as a trusted advisor and to think about some of the new technologies that we presented up today. They're so busy working through day to day problems that in one afternoon to be able to come out here and hear about like a cloud solution, like Vergestream, NSX, to hear about what's going on at Hyperconverge, what's going on in the managed security market. I'm hoping they'll take away some of those ideas and think about how they might apply in their business. All right, well, Scott, really appreciate you bringing theCUBE here, looking forward to talking to a lot of your customers as well as some of the partners and everyone here at the show. I've been Stu Miniman, this is theCUBE.