 with Stu Miniman, and this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, where we go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We're here at the V-Tug Winter Warmer Live from Gillette Stadium, you can see in our background, the Patriots aren't here, they're, I don't know if they're out of the state yet, maybe they're acclimating to the mile high air, thin air, but we're here. And Mark Cantlin, the second is here, he is team lead of desktop applications at the UMass Memorial Health Care Center in Worcester, fantastic facility, a lot of innovation going on there, Mark, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Hey, thanks for having me. You guys have a great reputation in the area, really wonderful alternative to the Boston hospitals, especially for those of us who live sort of in the central, west part of the state. So tell us a little bit about the organization and your role there. So we're a decent sized regional hospital with five main campuses and probably hundreds of CMG sites where they do in outpatient kind of work. We have, I wanna say somewhere in the vicinity of at the moment 16,000 devices that we have to manage. There was a push of several years back for us to start moving some of that to the virtual side of things. So what my role there is, I have a small team of folks that manage images and the Zen desktop infrastructure that we use there to deliver those desktops. It's obviously a big Citrix shop. Big Citrix shop. The gold standard and what was used to be, we used to call it VDI or desktop virtualization. It's really now expanded into, with mobile. Yeah, they have a lot of services. Yeah, so I mean the sort of desktop virtualization, so an outdated term in a way, but we still use it. But when we say desktop, we're talking about all the mobile devices as well, right? So talk about the impact that mobile has had and how you've addressed that. So it's interesting because as a hospital, of course we have to deal with the HIPAA violation, not HIPAA violations, but HIPAA standards. If there are HIPAA violations, you have to deal with them. But hopefully. Yeah, we don't want any of those. And so data and the security of that data is pretty tantamount in the things that we need to deal with. We can't let patient data get out. That would be a really bad thing. So mobile devices are interesting because a lot of folks bring their devices to work with them nowadays. It's not the case from, we didn't used to have to deal with that sort of thing, but everybody has a smartphone and they want their wireless connectivity and they want to be able to do printing and get their emails and whatnot. And that's a pretty big deal with a hospital because some of that email that floats around is obviously patient sensitive. I haven't actually become super familiar with the offerings that Citrix has in their mobile space right at the moment, but we're actually meeting with them in about a week to go over that and possibly look at whether or not we're going to be integrating it into our current environment. So how do you deal with bring your own device? At the moment, with a 10-foot pole, we had our strategy. Just not a very good one. Yeah, it's not a very good one. We don't have them connect to our network, is what it boils down to. So you just say no. We basically just say no at the moment with the promise that we're developing a strategy to bring that kind of thing in. So in your world, the risks obviously outweigh the rewards because if you allow people to connect and you haven't thought it through, it's screwed basically. That's just it, if we just jump into it blindly, it could create all kinds of headaches and lawsuits and who wants those? And the requirements that you're hearing from customers of those that you sort of stated before, they want wireless access, they want printing capability, they want access to all their apps, some of their apps? Yeah, I mean, more and more, we see doctors that come in with iPads and say, I'd like to be able to do the work that I need to do while I'm walking around with an iPad, not have to stop at a terminal or bring a laptop around with me just to be able to hold something as convenient as a tablet or an iPad and say, you need this prescription and this is send it off to the next doctor and that sort of thing. So, obviously the infrastructure to put something like that in place is enormous anyway just to have the back end to deal with the software components of all that kind of stuff. But then the security of that device, whether or not it stores that information and whatnot, it requires a lot of thought and consideration about how you implement it. John Furrier, who was my partner and the co-host of theCUBE, typically was texting me earlier saying, what do practitioners asking, what do practitioners and how do practitioners get information on the top conversations? You're on Twitter. Do you use Twitter for the top conversations? If so, or even if not, what are the top conversations specifically related to this topic? To healthcare. To healthcare and to encompassing mobile that you're seeing, let's start with healthcare. What are you seeing there in terms of the top conversations that you're tracking? Well, I wouldn't say that I use Twitter a whole lot to track this stuff. I count on my team to find that stuff on Twitter and then just keep me informed. Okay, so in the Twitter rubric of top conversations, what are the top conversations that you see happening wherever that you're tracking? Well, I mean, security is a big one. It's got to be a big one because any organization, whether you're a hospital or not, I mean, you want to be able to protect your clients and your data and your employees and whomever it is that has sensitive information passing through your systems. So security's huge with these mobile devices. Bring your own device. Even corporate supplied mobile devices, you've got to have a plan in place. So I want to come back to security but before we do that unpack that a little bit, but are there any other conversations that you're sort of top of mind for you? I guess for the portability of the app, underlying infrastructure of the applications, being able to work on all of these various devices is also kind of a big conversation, which is where the virtualization part comes in huge, especially with like Zen App and Zen Client and those sorts of things where we're actually able to say, okay, bring your device. We don't really even have to do much but make sure that it functions and then we can make sure you have access to these things like the applications you need through Zen App. So it's the virtualization of the infrastructure to accommodate these devices. And is it also, and I know this, well, I think this is not your area of expertise, but also the applications themselves. You've got the mobile version, you go to the full site. Well, that's just it. So, I mean, for a while the buzz words in application development was, oh, these are portable. Yeah, okay. But what makes an app portable, does that mean that you can use it on a web browser or do you use it on a web browser on a Linux device or any web browser? Or does it require a specific web browser? And in healthcare, specifically in healthcare, which I think, I don't know whether accurate or not that it gets the reputation of being sort of dinosaur as far as technology is concerned in most places with maybe a few exceptions here and there. That I lost my train of thought, I apologize. But the... Well, we're talking about the portability of the app. I was going to ask you about HTML5, but you guys are rewriting in HTML5, but basically making that work on Linux or Unix or whatever device. Yeah, I mean, what defines portable now, and I think that, you know, so a lot of the applications we use, they are web apps now. You know, you enter your patient information through a web browser. So you were saying that the medical community is not known for being aggressive earlier adopters of technology and sort of innovators there. Is that a pattern? In all cases, I think that it's, you know, it's probably getting a lot better. But... Is part of that historically, that doctors have sort of resisted and they'd like writing messy notes or... It could be. It's hard. They like shiny toys too, though. Yeah, they do. They certainly want their iPads. Mobile should change that, right? Right, mobile should change that. It's a renaissance, I would think, in healthcare. Yeah. In terms of technology adoption. So do you feel specifically that the bad rap that healthcare has received over the last, you know, several decades in terms of being technology adopters will change as a result of mobile? Oh, I think that it's a huge space that's definitely giant. People are definitely moving, you know, boulders in that direction. They want, healthcare wants to be as wired as it can get, you know? I mean, and I believe there's actually regulations, because I don't know these regulations off the top of my head, but electronic health records say no more. Yeah, and EMR is basically a mandate, right? I mean... Yeah, mandate. So they want any doctor anywhere you go to a hospital, you go on vacation, go to a hospital, they want to be able to have access to that information. You know? And you've got to show meaningful use to get paid as well. So there's a business angle also here. Mark, I'm wondering if I can dig into kind of your environment a little bit. Sure. So the biggest challenge is that, you know, most places have going to desktop virtualization, or VDI is, you know, do I build a desktop team? Because used to be, I had just a desktop people going around and handling all that. I'm wondering, can you talk, how long have you been doing the solution? You know, how was the kind of creation of your team and how do you interface with the rest of the kind of the IT staff? Well, that's interesting, because we have of those conversations daily about what's going on. So it's background. They decided prior to hiring me that they wanted a virtual environment, that they wanted to be able to put and replace physical devices with thin clients in things places like patient rooms and, you know, in the hallways and stuff and preferably on mobile carts so that they don't have expensive hardware just laying around all over the place. Additionally, I believe envisioned that it would provide them with a more stable and consistent environment so that doctor going on third floor and the fourth floor is gonna get the same device no matter where he goes. So they planned and built an environment using the VMware hypervisor, ESX, and Citrix and Teststop to provide those things and then proceeded to go around and replace a lot of devices in the hospital with thin clients or? Just curious, what's the hardware stack sitting under that? You mean get the company making the thin clients? Well, the thin clients, the server, the storage, you know, those pieces. Yeah, so the VMware stuff on the servers that they're all on, I don't actually know. I don't get to see that stuff much. It's not relevant to what you're doing. No, no, it's not relevant. You manage the software and the desktops. Yeah, I mean we use Weiss thin clients too, so. Everybody talks about server virtualization, you hear desktop to virtualization. They're two different worlds, aren't they? Yes, we do both. So talk about, a lot of people sort of lump them in the same kid, I buy my virtualization from VMware, I'll just get my desktop virtualization from them too, which may or may not be a good thing or a bad thing, but what's the difference? The big difference is that practitioners should think about between how they look at their strategy for infrastructure virtualization, specifically, you know, server storage and networking, versus desktop and mobile virtualization. So if I understand correctly the way that we do it, at the very least, is it's largely integrated in similar systems. So we have, you know, massive amounts of hosts to host the desktop, the virtual farms, they have a lot of hosts, and some of those are very similar to what we do for the virtualization of the server stuff that we virtualize, because some of the servers are virtualized, obviously, whereas some of them are not, due to different requirements. The desktop stuff is, I think, a little easier to think about because you shoot for how much do I need to provide to the client so we can put, you know, pretty simple mathematics to find out what sort of memory and whatnot you need to throw at it, servers can be trickier because they're servers, they're all gonna, each one requires different things, different amounts of storage, different memory requirements, processor requirements. Well, the workload's different, right? The sizing is probably different. Yeah, we can guarantee, you know, that most users are going to do X, Y, and Z on the desktop, it's not that difficult. Right, I mean, the desktop workload profile is gonna be different than a server workload profile. It's a lot more generic. Okay, more generic, but probably more rights as well, right? Well, no, not necessarily. Not necessarily. There's more reading going on at the... Yeah, I mean, because it depends, I guess that does sort of depend on the user, like somebody who does home coding that codes medical stuff, they're gonna be doing a lot of rights, but a doctor may not necessarily, they might just be looking at the charts or the X-rays, images, and that sort of thing. Right, let's go back to security a little bit. So you said, you know, that's the top priority, that's one of the conversations that people should be paying attention to. I wonder if we can unpack that a little bit because in your world, like we mentioned, HIPAA, the security and privacy, which are like two sides of the same coin, so you've got that dimension of complexity, but you've also got physical security, hospitals, people coming and going, they're generally pretty open, you've certainly got logical security. Sure, anybody walks into a hospital, sure. What's that? Anybody can walk into a hospital. I mean, basically that, right? So you've got that aspect of it. So how do you look at security? How would you advise your fellow practitioners in your industry to look at security? Closely. So where do you start? I would definitely start. It's basic network security. I can't tell you how many places I've walked into where if you see an open port in the wall and just take an ethernet cable and plug into it, it works. And that's kind of a frightening thought. We love that on theCUBE because we can broadcast anywhere about that. Yeah, well, there's that, but basic network security that should never be ignored. As far as from the virtual side, I think as long as you've got a pretty solid team that understands how to run all the switches and firewalls that come along with it, I mean, that's tricky stuff. Right, okay, good. All right, we'll give you, Mark, the last word. Put the bumper sticker on your trip here to the, your first trip to Gillette Stadium. First trip to Gillette Stadium. What are you sort of hoping to get out of as you're pulling away on Route 1? What's the bumper sticker say on the back of your car? See, that's tricky. I was there? Yeah. I don't know. Good. Any final nuggets you want to take from you were attending the Amazon event this morning? Oh, yeah, the Amazon event this morning was fantastic. I've come from, I'm a 13 generation New Englander. So most of us are pretty well died in the wool. We're going to do it ourselves and own everything that we do. Walking away from that, I think I'm a change man, seeing the hybrid services that you can get in the public cloud. Great, that's a much better bumper sticker. I went to Gillette, attended the VTUG Winter Warmer, and now I'm a change man. I'm a change, there you go. So, okay, so you were impressed with the Amazon pitch. So you'd not heard the Amazon marketing pitch before? Not from some, not from an Amazonian. Right. Right, well, well, when you hear it from Amazon's. When you hear it from non-Amazonians, you hear a lot of, it's not secure, it's not this, it's not blah, blah, blah, blah, but what impressed you about the pitch? I just think that they've gone, it makes sense that they've gone to such a great lengths to ensure that all this stuff works. Obviously the need for it to work for them was the driving thing behind it. And I don't know that that had ever necessarily occurred to me. But the story of how AWS came about, yeah. That is an interesting story, but one has to be impressed with the multitude of services that they provide and the pace at which they provide them. It's amazing, it's remarkable. And then, but as I say, when you talk to Amazon, all they do is, not all they do, but they really emphasize security. Did that surprise you? No, I mean, it didn't surprise me that they emphasized it. It surprised me to see that, you know, they had, I'm not sure what the relationship is, but that they're certified to do HIPAA, you know, security to conform to those regulations. Yeah, they've got HIPAA compliance. They've got, I mean, they throw up all the four letters. I just hadn't been paying that close attention, I guess. So would you believe that, well, first of all, is UMass medical using Amazon in any way that you know of? No, but there has obviously been a lot of talk. Are you positive? I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure, okay, but not a hundred percent. Not a hundred percent, but I would say 98. You'd probably know about it if somebody were doing it because it's a board level thing. As far as I can tell right now, we do everything internally, but there's obviously been talk with the world sort of moving towards these public and hybrid clouds where things are working together to go in that direction. To the extent that it goes in that direction, how involved do you feel the IT department will be in that decision and in the managing or deploying or brokering of those services? Well, that's a trick question because we won't be allowed to make any decisions. Well, but you can influence decisions, you can provide advice, you could give notions of blind spots that management needs to pay attention to. Sure, sure. I mean, somebody in IT will have a seat at the table, won't they or no? Are you just... Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, culturally, is it more, this is what we're doing, make it happen or is it? I guess the level that I'm at in my team, I would be more like Gruntz, so no from my level, but yes, there'd be IT involvement, you know, upwards. Well, but oftentimes the quote-unquote Gruntz actually can help you discover blind spots, so you guys in the corner office maybe talk more to the Gruntz and... Yeah, well, oh my team's great, they're the best team in the whole hospital, but the... Well, but I mean, in general, maybe even not in your specific situation, but when you think about IT in general and the whole notion of business lines swiping a credit card, CMO says, hey, I want to just go do a project, I'm going to hire a developer and go do my own Amazon thing. It sounds like that's not the culture of your organization. Oh, no, we would have to integrate a lot of different teams to come together and discuss, well, how is it and when and why is it that we are using these services? I mean, specifically the hybrid cloud, the beauty of it is, of course, during peak hours of business, you can just utilize all of the resources that you need, they're there, take them, and then shut them off and not pay for them when they're done, and from a hospital's point of view, especially a non-profit like UMass, I mean, that's a big deal. Well, one of the things I often hear about Amazon is it's more expensive, and I've said myself a number of times, renting is always more expensive than owning, but let me ask you a question, what percent as your infrastructure utilized? Right now? Think about servers and even desktop infrastructure, what percent would you guess is utilized, even virtualized infrastructure, what? All of it, 50%. 50%, okay, so there's another 50%, right? Now did you see, did he talk about the service that Amazon announced, it's Amazon Workspaces, I believe it's called, did he talk about that at all? The desktop is a service, he did mention that, yep. And that's, I mean, that would be of interest. As a VDI guy, that interested you, yeah, okay? So it's what, $50 per user per month or something like that? I mean, does that catch your attention? Does that make you go, hmm. Well, I think that, you know, from talking to some of the higher ups above me about what they would use this for, when you bring in vendors to, you know, develop new projects or work on things, they don't necessarily wanna have to give them the resources that they've, you know, portioned for use by their employees and clients, and whatnot, but to use something like the Amazon Web Services to deploy desktops that can build proof of concept systems and whatnot in, which that appeals to them, at least that's the thought at this point. Like, oh, that sounds like something we should do. Yeah. All right, Mark, well, we're out of time. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and appreciate you coming by. Welcome to Gillette Stadium. I hope you enjoy your first trip here, and thanks again. Thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back. This is theCUBE, Silicon Angles, live production of the VTUG Winter Warmer. We're here at Gillette Stadium. We'll be right back.