 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2017. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back, as it should be evident from the intro to our package and the giant mural of Teddy Brusky behind us here, we're at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots who this Sunday will be facing the Pittsburgh Steelers. Happy to welcome back to the program John Wade, who's the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. He's a Pittsburgh guy, sport in his color, so we took the jacket off, gonna talk a little tech, then we'll talk a little football, so John, great to see you. Great to see you, it's our Sunday uniform, as we could say. Absolutely. So we'll be back here Sunday for the AFC Championship and as is it, we'll talk to football a little later. But bring us up to speed, what's the latest with Expedient, what's keeping you busy these days? Right, yeah, so Expedient, to using Antonio Brown saying, business is booming in Expedient and we had a pretty great year last year. We executed on a private cloud strategy that I was talked about a little bit last year at this time and actually represented about 35% of our sales, new sales last year, new revenue was all focused on private clouds, that's big for us. We had a great year on the DR as a service, we doubled the DR as a service practice in the year, so that was always good. Data centers are still booming, believe it or not, people think the data centers are going away. We have a $5 million project here in Boston where we're adding 10,000 square feet, we're renovating 10,000 square feet. In Pittsburgh, we're adding our third data center there. It's about a $12 million project that'll come online here in December. So, co-location's growing for us, cloud's growing for us, managed services are growing for us. And one of the biggest things that we saw last year is large businesses wanting to come to us. So these are big traditional companies that have been operating for a while that they own their own VMware infrastructure. They wanted to come in and just put it in co-location. We started talking private cloud, conversation shifted pretty quickly because they just didn't want to be in the infrastructure game anymore. Well, yeah, John, you and I've been talking for a while about this, but if we talk to end users and you talk to the enterprise, I mean, we've been saying for years, don't build another data center. You've got to go to somebody that has better expertise on that. I mean, just from the concrete slab, power, cooling, all those things are, there's a small number of companies that know how to do that well and there's even, you know, big enterprises really, it's not the expertise that they need to learn, right? I mean, I've been looking at what skill set do you need to have internal, what's critical for your business and that physical layer really isn't something that most companies need to have. They need to turn to, you know, big cloud guys are companies like you. They have that. Why do you guys have expertise in that that's much better than the enterprise? Yeah, and that's a good point. I mean, digital transformation has been, you know, the term is kind of big and huge, right? But it's starting to be reflected in a lot of these businesses where, you know, they need to do something different to either enhance their customer interfaces, you know, add new revenue streams, do something like that. They need to do something and to make a really difference in change. And, you know, we're seeing that drive a lot more work on their IT teams and they just simply can't do all the blocking and tackling. They can't sit there and go through hardware refreshes, run VMware, you know, run whatever hypervisor they're running. And those are basically just operational tasks that they can't do. We've been building a business on this for the last 10 years. So we've reached operational efficiency. We're getting bigger and we're, you know, multiplying our growth instead of just a few percentage points and we're able to actually handle that load for them. And as soon as they see that and they realize that, oh man, I don't have to deal with a VMware patch anymore or VMware upgrade, great. There you go. You handle that for us. We'll go and work on something that's strategic for us instead. Yeah, so I know we talked a little bit about last year, but give us the update. What are customers comfortable with giving up today and how do they work along that spectrum to buying more things as a service? So one of the biggest things that we saw a driver on, like I mentioned, two X growth in DR as a service. So it's like, we wanted a DR plan. We've been talking about a DR plan forever. You guys finally, you know, as a service provider in cloud community have something that's reasonable financial. It helps me technically solve my business challenges. You go and you handle this. And that's really kind of step one. And then as soon as they say, okay, they're handling our DR pretty well. They're handling those types of things. Let's go and do some other things. And primary, you know, services start to go next. And again, you kind of work up the infrastructure from the bottom all the way up. And one of our changes and shifts that we made as a service provider, we now go on the customer site. So this whole on premises thing where people were trying to, you know, maybe buy a box to kind of get it on, there's a big fault in that. There's no ops there. And really what they want at the end of the day is the operation. We're bringing that to them. We're handling everything, you know, private cloud on their data center site anymore. That's all on us anymore. They don't have to really worry about it. Yeah, maybe you can compare and contrast a little bit. There's, you know, a number of vendors in here that are selling kind of that simplicity in a box. So, you know, Nutanix, Cohesity, you know, a bunch of other players, you know, some of the systems integrators help with some of that. You know, compare and contrast that versus what you guys do. It's very similar. I mean, we're all trying to do the same thing and kind of make the administrators life a little bit easier. The biggest thing, I mean, they're really the biggest thing that we're doing. And, you know, we're investigating also using some of those boxes and partnering with some of those companies. And all they want us to do is provide the operations. And that's where I think that people are really challenged with is they just don't have the operational efficiency. They don't have the ops people to do it. So we come in and we handle and do that. Which is interesting because then you'll hear some of the bigger companies. I mean, I think Oracle kind of announced that they want to even do stuff on their customer site. So you have this big software company and, you know, they have a hardware aspect of it as well. Now they want to do ops. Now they want to do services. That's hard. I know it's hard because I've lived it for 13 years in May of my life is trying to do the ops side. That's really, really hard to do. Creating software hardware, not that it's easy, but it's a very specific resources that you need to do that. Services a little bit different. It's, you know, even when you have a cool new box, it's, you know, the most customers say, oh wait, can I just do it the way I was doing it before? And it's a little faster, a little bit better. It's like when you get, you know, a laptop upgrade, you know, switching my operational model is a real challenge. How do you got, you know, who drives that in the customer environments? You know, how much does it require education on your side? How are customers, you know, getting over the hump for that? One of the things that we always try to do is we keep native interfaces for our customers. So that was really our biggest claim to fame when we launched our cloud product in 2007, really more of infrastructure service. We gave them vSphere. They didn't have anything new to learn. They loved it. They didn't have to have anything new to learn. That's great. We do the same thing inside of their environment. So we're not building VCD, you know, platforms out for them today. We're giving them traditional vSphere, what they want, and then adding, you know, layers of automation on top of it that we've developed over time, as well as then ticketing, change control management that we do, that we give that basically to them to start to use. And then we interact with them pretty closely. So we really build in operations. We become an extension of their team, but they also have full administrative access to all the boxes. So it's not like we're taking anything away from them as well. They're just not picking hardware anymore. Yeah, so talk a little bit about how much being local matters. You attended AWS re-invent, you know, the public cloud guys are, you know, spending billions of dollars, you know, it's like a billion a quarter at least for most of these big guys. Talk a little bit about your geographies and, you know, why it matters to have that kind of footprint. Yeah, I mean, we run in seven cities and we're very specific about our cities is we found that a lot of our customers actually like to, you know, like to know us, like to, you know, understand where their data is, but there's also a physics problem that we have to deal with. The physics of, you know, the relationship, but also physics of closeness to the data, whether it's something that's actually a physics, you know, bound where they just need to transfer this much data or they just need to know where it is or they like to know where it is. And that's, you know, creating a major play for regional service providers. And you see a lot of growth in this, you know, expedience obviously growing, but there's a lot of other companies out there growing, buying other companies like us and continuing to build this kind of regional network. And I think you even see the cloud, the tier one cloud providers starting to add more data centers, get closer to the customer, get more regional, add more offices. And, you know, again, it's important just to know you, know where your data lives, and then the physics. We're running into companies now that are generating 15 petabytes of data a day. There's no way they can wait to send all that data out to Ashburn or wherever their local, you know, tier one cloud provider lives and then try to do analysis on it. The wait time is just too large. The connectivity would be too expensive. So that local is still going to be very, very important, I think, for a long time coming. What about things like mobile services? You know, you hear the public cloud provider talking about, you know, when you've got a global footprint you need to get to the user. Is that a competitive advantage they have or how does the networking help solve that? I think it's a, you know, it maybe is a competitive advantage they have. They kind of have their own, you know, we saw, you know, James Hamilton's presentation. I mean, their network that they've built across all their AWS data centers, it's insane. I mean, it's incredible. You know, the nice thing is, is me as a, you know, service provider focused on, you know, East Coast, Midwest. Yeah, I have kind of, you know, my local niche, but I also partner with companies that I can get a global reach if I need to. We've created our own private 10 gig backbone between all of our data centers that we're continuing to upgrade and we have access to other companies like Equinix. And that's part of what I'm doing with my private cloud stuff. I don't need to build a data center every place I need to put a private cloud. I need to have an Equinix data center or somebody else like it and then I can go and interconnect with them. And I've done, actually I've blogged about like connecting with AWS and I can do direct connects into Ashburn and I can do that for my customers. So I can start to give them that global reach if they want to, but it's usually going to take a few components maybe to do it. Speak to kind of the update on, but you know, partners you're working with. I know there's some strategic and you know, virtualization on networking that have enabled you to offer some really cool services. You know, what's new? Yeah, the big one for us this year was, so we're rolling out NSX here in February. So that we've spent a lot of time with VMware. It's been a great relationship there from the technology side. I think they're pretty far advanced there and they're handling everything that we need. The other counter. And what's the driver? What will be the benefit to your users for going to NSX? Well, one of the biggest things that we wanted is we're using it as a revenue generation. So SDN, you have to find something. It's either going to save you capital, save you operational or generate revenue. We're starting with generate revenue. And what I challenged the product strategy team with an exciting speeding is if we had to connect two customers together, you know, one cloud and one cloud here, but we couldn't have a private connection in between it, how would you do it? And we came up with utilizing NSX and we're creating what's called a layer two VPN across public internet. So when I do my private clouds on site, it's all over public internet. I have a site here, site here, uses NSX. And what it does is actually creates a bridge in between the two sites so then I can have my VMs move back and forth, do whatever. We, so we did, you know, a lot with NSX there to engage that and enable that, which our customers are loving because now if they run out of resources on the primary site or if they feel like something doesn't want to run there, it's a drag and drop move it to the secondary site, doesn't lose a ping, doesn't, you know, lose any connectivity or communication and it's up and running on the secondary site and going. So we partnered heavy with them and then we have a huge partnership with Zerto as well that they're actually enabling a lot of what we call push button DR and that's the failover of those VMs from the customer site into our data center or even between some of our data centers. Great, how important is security in what you're doing with NSX? Security is a big focus. I think there, one of the things that's lacking right now in the industry is just application awareness and I think I'm going to start to, you know, see a lot more of that in NSX as it gives you a layer that you can plug in some really cool technologies that's out there. For instance, I mean, Palo Alto has a plugin, you can plug in NSX, you start to learn a lot more about your network, learn a lot more about your data. Doing some of the micro segmentation thing, creating automation and policy. So if you have a PCI customer, create a policy around it, there you go. If it ever breaches because somebody made a change, we'll get notified, we'll make sure that we alert the right parties, fix it, make sure it doesn't cause a problem for us. So last tech question I have before we talk about some of the football, you know, as you look out 2017, you know, what are the things that, you know, are getting you interested from a strategy standpoint and how much of a gap is it between kind of the bleeding edge that you look at and where kind of your early customers are? I think, you know, the biggest, the biggest things I'm looking at in 2017 are continued self-service, you know, trying to push more to the customer if they want to. We're always going to be a full service managed service shop so we can actually help them out if they need to. But if they want to, you know, do a lot of self-service because that's what their team wants to do, we want to give it to them. So, you know, simplifying ways, you know, backups work and analytics on backups and dark data and some of that kind of stuff that's laying around, which I know you had Rawlinson on who's, you know, talking about a Cohesity. I think that's all very, very interesting and we're continuing to see data growth at a rapid rate. We're going to have to figure out how to manage that in the future. All right, so I just cut some feedback from the audience. John Furrier's watching. He said I have to get the Steelers jersey off of the cube. Oh boy. So, you know, big game Sunday night, you know, what's your prediction? Well, hang on, I'm pretty nervous. So let me wipe that sweat off my brow before we get started, John. John, make sure you're watching this. So yeah, I'll bring it down. I don't want you to get too offended. But yeah, I think- It's all right, we understand the terrible hanky that you need to bring for after, you know, TB12 and the Patriots. We all grow up in different places. I think this Sunday is going to be a great game. I think, you know, you and I were at the game in Pittsburgh. I think Ben and Brady were bummed that they didn't get to play each other. I think they get their shot. I think it's going to be pretty epic from that standpoint. I mean, two of the best quarterbacks that we've seen, I mean, definitely Brady has, you know, how many Super Bowl appearances, how many, you know, AFC championship appearances. It's been like Ben, Brady, or Manning in every one for the last 12, 15 years, right? Yeah, well, you're duplicating, I mean, there's two Mannings. So one of them has been in all of them. Yeah, one of the Mannings, yeah. Absolutely, I mean, look, you know, the sixth year in a row, the Patriots have been in the AFC championship. Brady has been to six Super Bowls. Love to see him get to a seventh there. Get that, I think as the Steelers said, he needs one for the thumb. Yeah, right, yeah, right, one for the thumb. The fan base got that, you know, in Pittsburgh a bunch of years back, you know, you guys still do have, you know, more trophies than us. So looking forward to going to be exciting game. It's here, so, you know, Patriots, great home field advantage here at the Wrazer. I think it's a huge advantage that you're here. I think it's a huge advantage. I mean, although, you know, I watched in 2004, you guys come in and beat us in Heinz Field. The first year was open. I mean, so I've seen it happen, go happen the other way, but I think not having Gronk is going to be a little bit of a different picture for you guys, but we'll see how it all goes. I don't know if you can stop Levy on Bell when he kind of unplugged the controller freezes and then moves around, we'll see. Well, somebody tells me Deion Branch is showing up here in a little bit as a Patriot alum. I remember it was the, the commercial he did is who's Tom Brady's favorite? And there was like, you know, four wide receivers that anybody out of New England never heard from. So Brady's always been good dealing with the parts. He's got some great, you know, talent there to help, you know, Patriots so far haven't lost with Deion Lewis in the lineup. So which Gronk was there, but definitely looking forward to Sunday. I think the coaching is also what comes into play. I mean, Balacek's been able to make whatever work for how many years now. I mean, I think he walks in with a game plan and he goes. I'm sure he's, he's picked apart the Steelers. He knows where the weak links are. He knows where, you know, the strong suits are that he needs isolate. It's going to be a good game. All right, well, John, always appreciate having you on theCUBE. Glad to have a little fun here with some football here. And, you know, VTUG, like most user group events, you know, it's about the community. It's about, you know, geeking out with the tech and doing some other stuff. So we'll be back with getting towards the end of our coverage here from the VTUG, Winter Warmer 2017. You're watching theCUBE. Go pass.