 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and this is our series on partners, how partners and the channel is adding value to help customers create business capabilities in this digital world. I'm here with John Barker, and he is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Versatile, local New England partner of HPEs. This is sponsored by HPE and Versatile. John, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Well thanks, Dave, I appreciate you having me here today. So tell us more about Versatile. You've been in business for a couple of decades, plus you have a deep background. Tell us about Versatile and your background. Sure, I'd be happy to do that. Versatile was founded 25 years ago, so 25th anniversary, and I probably would be lying if I didn't tell you, I probably would have been out of this business 25 years later, but it's a great business. It was founded by my partner and I, Kevin Meany. Like a lot of those stories, it started on a picnic bench in a basement actually. So we've grown the company over the years. I think one of the things that's important to us, and I think important to our customers, always had a great base in infrastructure. We've always had a great deal of engineering support from our company, from a company perspective. We feel like whether it was 25 years ago or today, making sure you've got a complete infrastructure in place for our customers is very important, that you can layer on top of those applications that those customers need to run their businesses. Well, you've seen the waves. I mean, we kind of started in the business around the same time and we sort of, we watched that PC era when everything was PC centric, it was all about personal productivity and we saw the internet wave, and obviously now the cloud has been this huge disruptor, and now we've got this digital wave, but what are the big trends that you're seeing in the marketplace with your customers? Well, clearly, cloud is not new anymore. It has certainly been here for several years now, but in a lot of cases, there are certainly companies who are born in the cloud who've gone there 100% right out of the gate, but in a lot of cases, our more traditional business, a lot of our customers are taking steps to get there or to build further down there, take advantage of what can be some, certainly cost saving opportunities, some convenience aspects associated with the cloud, but I think from a customer's perspective, there's a lot of new technology out there, and not that it wasn't true 10 years ago, but there's so much to understand and understand what makes the most sense for my operation, can I securely move to the cloud, right? Can I adequately support all of my customers? And I think that's really where a lot of customers are at, they're really looking for guidance there, they're trying to understand what all their choices are, how do I move there and who can help me get there? Yeah, and the pendulum swings. I mean, right after the dot-com bust, everybody was focused on cutting costs, you know, the post-Y2K situation, it feels like now people are trying to figure out, okay, how do I get competitive advantage? They see IT and data as a differentiator and they don't want to get disrupted, they don't want to get uberized, it's kind of the bromide. Presumably, you see that as well. How are customers looking at cloud, both public cloud and hybrid cloud as a differentiator? Are they looking at it to cut costs? Are they looking at it to support new apps and be more agile? What are you seeing? I think it's a lot of those things. I think throughout our history, it was all about putting that kind of base infrastructure together and storing a lot of data in a lot of places, making sure it's secure, do I have a proper disaster recovery plan in place? There wasn't a whole lot of thought back then, what is all this data we're storing and how do we take advantage of it? And that clearly is changing, right? So with the advent of analytics, we happen to do a lot of work in the healthcare space, which really, there's a treasure trove of data out there to kind of help in that space. I think it's, from a healthcare perspective, technology will be the savior, despite the fact that I think most doctors or certainly clinicians that you would talk to today almost look at it as a burden and that needs to change, needs to move forward. Well, healthcare is a real challenge. I mean, obviously you have HIPAA considerations, you've got all, it's a highly regulated industry. As you point out, docs have never really embraced technology in a big way, but now you've got, you've got machine to machine intelligence, you've got all kinds of embedded stuff and medical devices, and I think doctors are realizing that, wow, machines can actually help us make better diagnoses and it's an industry that's ripe for disruption. It really hasn't been heavily disrupted yet, but it's coming, isn't it? It definitely is coming. And again, certainly at the hospital level, I think that they're a little bit ahead of the game in terms of how they manage their resources, the data, the applications, but down to the clinician level, and you know, much like yourself, I'm sure if you've had to visit a, had an issue related to some kind of illness or injury, a lot of us aren't going to hospitals anymore. We're going to clinics, minute clinics, we're going to see our doctors, and in a lot of cases, those facilities haven't necessarily benefited technology refreshes over the last several years, and so they're really ripe to come into the kind of the 21st century here, along with things like telemedicine. So you talk about, from a physician standpoint, who struggled with just an EHR application, which continues to be somewhat of a burden for a lot of folks. Now they've got compliancy issues they need to worry about. They've got to be offering new services to their customers and to their patients like telemedicine creates even more issues on the back end from a data perspective, storage perspective, compliance, accessibility and ease of use don't necessarily go together, right? That's a tough balance, right? And so I think that, you know, from an enforcement perspective, it's only really starting to start in the healthcare space, whereas maybe in the commercials, certainly the financial markets have had no choice over the last 10 to 12 years to really harden down their facilities, their applications and their access to data. This is a whole new challenge for the healthcare space to tackle here going forward. So versatile experts at infrastructure and architecture, and architecture has obviously changed a lot over the past 25 years, right? You used to, you'd have an app and you'd put it down infrastructure, you know, it might have been, you know, UNIX or VMS or whatever it was, you'd build a hardened, you know, system around that, secure it and boom, there was your stovepipe that worked, it was rock solid. How are architectures, you know, changing today? How would you describe that today, today's architecture? Well, you know, we do a lot of work with Eulah Packard Enterprise. We've been a platinum partner of theirs for close to 20 years. And so we've certainly gotten very engaged with them and their product sets around how they can manage data and certainly in the storage space around their intelligent data platform, which makes a great deal of sense for us, for our customers. We do several things in terms of how we manage data. We also do private cloud hosting for medical applications use, you know, as well as we obviously put together solutions for our customers to be in the cloud. And so making sure that we're securing those platforms and putting the proper infrastructure in place from a storage perspective, from a compute perspective, then obviously from a network accessibility perspective is really, really quite important. I think in a lot of cases, both commercial and in the healthcare space especially, there are so many new technologies that can save customers money and provide better security over what they may have been doing in the past. And sometimes in healthcare is not alone, some of those changes are taking longer than they probably should. And the kind of the promise of what technology can deliver to those verticals is here. It just takes a great deal of time to some degree sit down with the customer and have them understand what their options are and what makes the most sense, get them comfortable obviously with the decisions they make, the data's going to be available, it's going to be secure, it's going to be easily accessible. So you guys come in with a whole house view obviously. So you're trying to help a customer achieve an outcome. So my question is, what are you looking for from a storage system partner? What's the ideal storage infrastructure? What do you need from storage? Sure, I mean really I think intelligent analytics, which is really obviously something that Yulia Packard Enterprise has really come on strong with, especially we were initially engaged with that in the Nimble product line, which is to say that the machine itself is starting to take care of a lot of the things you would expect for your IT folks to have to either worry about or manage. And I think part of the problem for all our customers is so many data points now. We talked a little bit earlier about the fact that the IoT is everywhere, whether it's commercial or in healthcare, you've got all sorts of devices now that are on the network that are providing some level of data back somewhere. How do you manage all that? And I think with InfoSight tools from HP Enterprise on the storage side, you're starting to get some analytics that are taking a much more proactive look at what the infrastructure's doing, potential issues, where you can make intelligent changes to improve performance, obviously keep things secure. Those kinds of technologies really are gonna be I think a bit of the hope for, if you will, whether it's healthcare or commercial, the amount of one IT costs, IT personnel, they're very expensive, obviously, those resources. And so if you can get intelligent deployments of solutions like that, then it can kind of take a huge burden off of the IT department. They can go about working on project work to a man, to a woman, all the customers that we work with always feel like they're spending too much time kind of managing their infrastructure. And I do think that we're finally getting to the point where we've got tools that can help us really do that and reduce the amount of effort and somewhat costs that goes into that. And also allow those resources to start to work on the more strategic projects for their companies, right? Where the activity should be spent trying to either improve patient care on the healthcare side, improve profitability in the commercial space. This is really groundbreaking kind of tools that we just haven't seen in this industry. Yeah, this is key. I mean, 10 years ago, people were afraid a lot of this automation, I often joke, but it's really not a joke. If your expertise is managing loans, you probably want to rethink your career path. And so, but again, 10 years ago, people were afraid that automation was going to take their jobs away. I think today they realize, wow, this train of digital transformation is left the station. And they want to shift their activities from things that are not adding value to the business to your point, things that are more strategic. So from an infrastructure standpoint, how are you helping customers achieve those outcomes? I think from our perspective, we take a very consultative approach, right? And oftentimes, I think, sometimes you can't see the forest through the trees in a lot of these organizations, right? They're too busy in their day-to-day jobs trying to manage their day-to-day efforts to actually take a strategic view of, what have I got here? How do I improve all this? What kinds of technology should I really be looking at? And I think it's almost impossible, right? We have a lot of very high-end engineers who in a lot of cases wouldn't be comfortable going to a small or medium business to spend their career there because it would be that only set of infrastructure that they would set up and then manage, right? So it becomes boring for those guys. And in a lot of cases, a lot of the ways that we've been able to retain our talents because we're looking at new challenges every day, new companies with new challenges for their corporations, for their healthcare organizations to kind of understand what are the issues? How do we come up with some solutions? How do we implement a phased approach to get them where they need to be? You were talking earlier about your partnership with HPE and previously HPE. What is it about that partnership that is unique? How do you guys differentiate in the marketplace and why HPE? Well, I think for us, it was an easy decision. HPE Enterprise has always been very partner-friendly, which is important to us. We've worked together for about 20 years and certainly from a technology perspective, and I think even for our customers, there's a bit of leapfrogging that goes on with all of these vendors, right? So to some degree, somebody might have the best new Gizmo for this year and somebody's gonna have something six months later, but there's consistency there. There's strategic kind of view of how they see the world unraveling and how we support IT going forward is really, I think, a notch above some of their competitors. I think hybrid is very important, everybody. I mentioned earlier, there are some, certainly some companies that make sense that can really almost go completely cloud, but in most cases, it's just not possible. There's several certainly of our customer base that is not going to be comfortable ever to some degree, putting everything in the cloud, but the ability to take advantage of the cloud and keep some of their IP, if you will, locally to them makes some sense. And so I think for hybrid cloud and hybrid storage and compute, HPE's really got an advantage there, HPE. Well, and a lot of that too, John, I would think is bringing the cloud operating model to your data wherever it exists, especially in healthcare. People aren't just going to throw all the healthcare data into the cloud. I mean, there's so many issues there and not the least of which is there's a lot of data on-prem that you just don't want to move into the clouds, too expensive, it's too time consuming. So then to me, and I'd like you to sort of comment on this, a lot of that is around the simplicity of managing that infrastructure. And in 3-par kind of years ago, we set a gold standard on simplicity and then now Nimble comes in with a lot of intelligent automation. Your thoughts on being able to bring that cloud model to on-prem or in a hybrid situation, is that a sort of valid way to think about it? Absolutely, I think it is. And I think, again, I go back to healthcare a little bit, but every 18 months, their storage requirements double. On top of that, because of compliancy issues, they have to hang onto their data indefinitely. I mean, that's got to be a frightening aspect for any storage manager who's trying to manage a healthcare organization, a large healthcare organization. I need to hang on to absolutely everything, email, all of my files. It's not 10 years, 15 years, it's indefinitely. So that's a major undertaking in terms of how do I manage all that, right? And so HP certainly got an array of ways to help with that, whether it's all flash, right, for the applications that require that kind of speed. There's multi-layers of storage deployment, backup solutions, right, and DR options that obviously allow to take advantage of the cloud where it makes a lot of sense. So there's a multitude of things that they need to think about. And I do believe HP's addressing those quite well. How are you changing the way in which you're hiring people today versus 10, 15 years ago? What's the skill set profile today? It really has changed. And as we talked about earlier, we've been in business for 25 years. And I think our ability to stay in business for that long has really been our ability to adapt and change. And you're right, our hiring practices and who we hire is very different than it was maybe even five years ago, where I've got to get cloud-level architects involved. Expensive but very worthwhile resources to be able to help customers with all of this. I do think what we get to deliver to our customers is the fact that we've got a multitude, hundreds and hundreds of customers and experiences that go along with that that we can bring to the table. They just couldn't possibly do on their own. It's quite impossible, unless you're in the largest of the largest organizations, you're not going to get exposed to the kinds of challenges and putting together kinds of solutions that are going to solve customers' problems without doing that. So it's been quite a different hire than it has been in the past. My last question for you, we think of a healthcare use case or any customer. So they're struggling. They've got, you know, everybody's got budget constraints. The market's moving super fast. You've got this cloud thing coming at them, the edge, IOT, you know, machine intelligence, AI. At the same time, they've got an existing business to run. And, you know, 80% of their time and their investment is on, you know, keeping the lights on, we hear that all the time. What's your advice to the customer? I'm sure this is a common story. They want to go from point A to point B, transform their business. They don't want to go broke doing it. They might not have the resources. So what do you do? How would you advise them? Well, look, I think, and we struggle like a lot of, there's a lot of partners in this world, in this country, right? Even in this region. And so trying to differentiate yourself. And we like to think that we're better than everybody else. And so does the other two or three thousand and I'm probably surrounded here in the 50 mile radius. Is really, you do need to find a trusted advisor that can help you through that. I think one of the places that we start, there's an opportunity to get some fairly immediate return on investment. I think that's important. Because to your point, there are challenges there. There are budget constraints. How am I going to do all that? Those two things kind of go in two different directions. But there are many of our customers, certainly whether it's in healthcare and even the commercial side, who may be doing some old things, some old IT things that could be replaced, including the cloud, in terms of how they may be, they may be using an old disaster recovery method, right? That they're paying a lot of money for lease lines. It's really kind of a cold site. They might go there once a year to try to see if they can recreate all their applications and get the thing up and running. There's clearly a cloud opportunity in there to save them a lot of money, reinvest that, maybe not sit on idle equipment that obviously costs money, is under some kind of maintenance and you need to obviously resource to support that. So I think that's a good conversation when I can get in with a customer and start to talk about, look, there's probably some areas here. We could save you money. So yes, we're going to charge you some money to get there. But the return on that is going to be much better than where you are today. I love that answer. So look for quick hits. Try to demonstrate some savings and generate some cash, if you will. Think like a business person. Use that as a gain share approach. Maybe go to the CFO and say, hey, if we can save this money, can we reinvest it in innovation, drive more business value, then you get that flywheel effect and you can build up credibility in your organization. And that's how you get from point A to point B without going broke. You actually can make money for the organization that way. Absolutely, it's a very good point. And because we talked about it earlier, IT has been under constraint for quite a while. And so, again, back to the ability for those people to think and have enough time to get into strategic conversations all by themselves. It's difficult, if not impossible. So they need help. They need consultants and they need trusted advisors, but obviously you need to prove your worth. I do think if you can start someplace where you can demonstrate, look, we can save you some real money here over the next year, 18 months, two years, is a great place to start. John, thanks so much for coming in and sharing your insights and best of luck out there. Well, thank you, Dave. I appreciate it very much. You're welcome. All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll see you next time.