 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's fifth year at the VTUG Winter Warmer. 2018 is the 12th year of this event. Always love when we get to talk to some of the users at the conference, which why I'm really happy to introduce to our audience Sumaro, who is a network manager at United Methodist Homes. Thanks for joining me, Sue. No problem. All right, so first tell me a little bit about yourself and what brings you all the way from upstate New York to come to the VTUG? Well, I like to go to conferences whenever I can, continue my education in IT. I grew up with computers in my house in the 80s. My dad was a physics teacher and a scientist, so we always had a Commodore 64 or an Amiga in our house growing up when most people had Atari. We had computers. Yeah, totally. So Commodore 64 Classic, I myself was a Tandy radio check, the TRS-80 Model 3, so in a similar era. Yep, I actually took a basic coding class on a TRS-80 when I was around 10, I think. So anyway, grew up with computers and somehow stumbled into IT later in life, but so that's why I'm here. Okay, and United Methodist Homes tells us just a little bit about what the mission of the company is. United Methodist Homes is a long-term care corporation. We have four facilities, two in the Binghamton area and two in northeastern Pennsylvania. And we have all levels of care from nursing homes, skilled care, up to independent living and everything in between. Okay, and as network manager, what's under your purview? Well, it's kind of a silly title, actually, in long-term care or in healthcare or nonprofits as we are. You often wear many hats, and so that's sort of a weird title for me, but I supervise our help desk, which we serve centrally from our corporate office. We serve about 600 actual computer users and all in total about 1,200 employees who interface with the technology in some way. So I supervise the help desk. I make sure our network is running well. IT has changed over the years so that we're now providing more of a service and making sure that everything is up and running network-wise for everyone instead of keeping our servers running all the time. Yeah, it reminds me, the old saying, it was like, oh, the network is the computer, things like that, so you've got both ends of it. So what kind of things are you looking at from a technology standpoint when you come to a event like this? Did you catch some of the keynotes this morning? There was a broad spectrum. What are the kind of things that you're digging into and find interesting? Yeah, the keynotes are really interesting. I think the first one that I went to with Luigi and Chris was great, just to kind of expand your thinking about your own career personally and where you want to go with your life was really interesting. I also watched Randall do his coding, which is completely outside of what I do every day, but was fascinating. And then the last major keynote was fantastic. I think that from my perspective in my company, we're kind of small and we don't do a whole lot of, we don't run apps and things like that. So the things that we have virtualized is mostly storage. So I'm looking at better ways that we can manage our storage and stuff. Most of the applications that we run now are SaaS applications hosted by somebody else in their cloud or a public cloud or wherever. So I'm not really so much looking at the cloud technologies like more businesses are that are providing an application for their company. Yeah, it sounds like cloud and SaaS is part of the overall strategy. Have you been seeing that dynamic change in your company? How does it impact kind of what you're doing? Or is it just kind of a separate organization? Yeah, it's definitely been a shift in the last few years. We used to run all of our applications in-house. Long-term care is caught up now with the hospitals and so we have our electronic medical record, which is a hosted application. Whereas up until five years ago, that was an on-premises application that we hosted and had to run and maintain and update and upgrade and make sure it was available. So now it's definitely been a shift that everything is now hosted. So we just make sure that our network is up and running and support our users and all of their issues when they break things, flip their screens, drop something, provide hardware for them, all that sort of stuff. The cost and pace of innovation changed. On the news this week, they were saying, okay, medical records on your iPhone is up for debate. Does regulation impact kind of your day-to-day activities and what are some of the challenges in that area? Absolutely, one of the other things we have to do is interface with the providers. We have medical providers that come in from the outside and they need to access our EMR also, so we need to provide access for them on sometimes whatever device they bring in, which is not always compatible, so we have a whole other set of challenges there. Where we can manage our computers for our employees by pushing out policies and things that are required for the application. When someone comes in from the outside, it isn't necessarily set up right, so we have that other set of challenges. And regulation-wise, yes, there's always, the government is always pushing out new and updated regulations for healthcare and we have to keep on top of that too. Of course we have HIPAA concerns and things like that, which also comes into play when you're talking about cloud and any hosted application. We have to be concerned about HIPAA as well. Yeah, wondering when I look at the space that you're in, the ultimate goal is you want the patients, the people at your company to be able to spend more time, help them not be caught up in the technology of things. Could you maybe talk a little bit about that dynamic? Yeah, one of the things that I always say is we need to give our employees the tools that they need to do their job most efficiently. A nurse needs to be ready to go at the beginning of her shift on her laptop, ready to pass meds, and when they can't remember their password or that computer isn't working, my team needs to work as quickly as we can to get them back to work. That's our, we serve our users, really. We're not there being all techy and they want us to fix them and get them back to work and that's what we do. So we put tools in their hands, any device that they need to make them more efficient. And I try hard to provide a variety of devices for people who have different preferences on how they do their work. Some people prefer a laptop. Some people prefer to stand at a wall-mounted touchscreen and document. Some people want to carry a tablet with them. So I try to provide a range of devices so that they can have whatever suits them and makes them most comfortable to get their job done. Yeah, love that. It's not necessarily about the cool or trendier thing. It's about getting business done, helping, and in your case, enabling your employees to really help the people that are there. Anything you want to highlight is things you're excited to look at this show or just technology in general? I'm just kind of here for the general nature of it. I enjoy the networking and getting to talk to people and keeping current in what's happening in the industry and my career, so that's why I come. All right, well, Sumaro, really appreciate you coming, sharing with our audience. User groups like this, all about the users. Happy to have lots of them on the program. So big thanks to the VTUD group for bringing us some great guests, and we'll be back with more coverage here. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.