 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Good morning, welcome to day three of VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE's continuing coverage of this big event in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman and we're very excited to be joined by a couple of gals in tech. We have Pumala Schmidt, you are the infrastructure lead for Independence Blue Cross and Theresa Miller, the founder of the 24 by seven IT connection, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having us. So Pumala, let's start with you. You are a very leading female in the technology and software space. Tell us about yourself, what do you do? What inspires you as a female leader in technology? I'm currently an infrastructure lead at Independence Blue Cross. I manage unified communications applications, exchange, Skype for business. What excites me is the ability to show young women that you can do anything. When I was younger, I was told that I didn't understand math very well, so I couldn't be an IT. Well, look at me here. So it's inspiring, I feel inspired when little girls tell me I want to do something technical. That's awesome, Theresa, what about you? What's your journey been like? My journey started over 20 years ago by accident while I was studying at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. There was an opportunity to study IT. It made sense to me and I dropped my accounting major just like that as soon as IT came to the forefront. I've been doing technology ever since and today now I have 24 by 7 IT connection. We do writing, we do webinars and we also do IT consulting. So you guys work together with the 24 by 7 IT connection. Tell us a little bit more about that. And I know that, Pamela, you mentioned Microsoft. Here we are at VMworld. Tell us about what kind of topics you cover on that 24 by 7 IT connection. We cover a broad range of topics. I usually cover the Microsoft Exchange Skype world. I actually blog for Theresa, but we do a podcast together, The Current Status. And we talk about all sorts of technology, storage, networking, and just the current trends. And we actually do it on video. There you do, and we have a glass of wine. We make it so it's like a casual conversation with your friends, you know, you just chatting and talking tech. Like here at the conference. Just to add to that, so from the blogging and like the approach we use, it really is about what's relevant to us. So like she said, we're covering energy computing, it might be Microsoft, it might be Linux, it just depends. We have several female writers and one male, and it's really about what's relevant, what's going on in their world, because then you know what's going on in someone else's. Pumalo, you've been in the center of a really interesting transition we've been seeing in the marketplace. I think about my career in tech, deploying servers for email and that whole push. Microsoft, huge push to get everybody on Office 365, you know, where that lives, we talk about, you know, softwares eating the world, you know. So give us that journey of application for you, how's that, that change your role, some of that dynamics, sounds like you might need a glass of wine after talking through some of these topics, yeah. Yeah, I actually started in the server world, server and infrastructure. I was racking and stacking servers, deploying VMs, and then at the same time I was also managing exchange, but as my career progressed, I kind of left that storage and server background and decided, you know what, applications. I wanted to focus a little bit more and really embrace the application world. Since I had that server background, now with my job, it just seems I can actually deploy these applications a lot better because I understand the underlying foundations behind it, exchange and the cloud. So right now, you know, the push is to be in the cloud. Where I work and a lot of organizations like ourselves, we don't go to the cloud yet, we're just not there. So there is a very strong push. Eventually, I suspect we'll all be in the cloud. I mean, that's just, it's not if it's when. Yeah, so I want to dig down just a tiny bit more because most people in the VMware community know Microsoft pretty well. The relationship of Microsoft and their application with virtualization and now with cloud is a really interesting dynamic. So you've gone against some of what Microsoft said in the past to kind of do what's best for your organization. Why don't you explain some of that to our audience? Yeah, so exchange, the preferred architecture for exchange is, or exchange 2016, 2013 is to be physical servers with DAZ through desktop storage which is, you know, not what most people are. I mean, it's a virtualized world now. I don't know any company that isn't virtualized. So I've taken the approach, what is the best situation or deployment for your organization? Yes, there's the preferred architecture, but it's not, I don't look at it as the holy grail or the Bible. I look at what is best for the organization, what are your requirements? So the requirement is to reduce data center costs, reduce some rack space, and you can't go to the cloud yet due to other requirements. Let's look at alternative solutions that still follow some of the guidance. So, you know, yes, I break away from it, but it's what's best for your business because not everybody can deploy physical. Teresa, I have to imagine you cover a lot of this. You know, what's really happening with customers versus, you know, no offense to our friends on the vendor side, but you know, they always think what's right as opposed to the person doing it, you know, knows what is right for their environment. That's one of the challenges with IT, right? There is no one way to do things, so. Every organization is going to take a different path and journey and that might be to the cloud. That might not be yet. That might be a combination. It could be like hybrid IT, I think, is another term that we keep hearing where maybe I have some applications in the cloud and some that will always remain on prem, but it has to match the culture and the fit of the business or you won't be successful with any IT project. So ladies, we're at VMworld 2017. Given both of your thoughts in terms of we need to do what's best for the business. Pamela, let me start with you. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Are you hearing other peers of yours echo the same feelings and sentiments? Yes, when we're out in the field, you know, I'm talking to people and it's, yeah, we're not there yet. We want to go there yet, but we can't do it. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the resources. And oftentimes, you know, our vendors, they forget that budgets, there's constraints. You know, resourcing. So, you know, my word to them is be patient with us. We want to go there. We like your products, but there's so many other factors in place, especially when you work for a large enterprise. You know, there's politics and large enterprises just take time to do things, especially certain industries, healthcare, financial sectors. You have certain regulations that you have to follow and in order to get to the cloud or whatever, you know, the latest trend is we may have to modify certain policies that are in place and then there's a downward effect because let's say we want to go to the cloud, then you have to go to, you know, your security department and what regulations or what, you know, retention policies do you have to change? And that may, you know, that may take time. So it's not like it's going to happen today. Teresa, same question, but I guess maybe, no, maybe a different question. In terms of your podcast, have you heard anything here that's inspired the next conversation that you guys want to have with your glass of wine? So I really think it's probably going to revolve around cloud again and in terms of, the other thing I keep seeing is analytics. Everybody's talking about analytics and I think that's a really interesting conversation because it means so many different things. The depth, what are you going to analyze? How do you manage that data? So I could see it being a combination of those topics and even maybe separate. Yeah, yeah, but Pumala, you and I were talking before the interview, we think about this community here. It used to be, you know, it was like hypervisor, virtualizing, we were all in this journey to virtualize. Now it's a little bit fragmented because there's so many different areas. Analytics, absolutely huge people. Security, lots of people going there. This whole cloud discussion on all the different apps. What are you seeing in the community? What are the topic areas? Is that, you know, is that a challenge for the community? The VMworld community was a pretty tight-knit community and now it feels, you know, while there's great connections and great people, it's broken into a few different pieces. What's your reaction to that? I do feel there's sort of a, not a disconnect, but there's so many different aspects and I think that's just the evolution of IT. We've evolved to the point where it's beyond IT. It's beyond the technical approaches. It is, it's almost like it's, IT's just another business department we are a business, we provide services to the other business units and it's just that evolution of we're service providers, all of us, whether we are in the data center or we are on apps developed, we are providing a service to somebody and we have customers. Do you find that that's an advantage? And we were talking to some guests earlier this week that I think it was an analyst from ESG that was saying, you know, you can show that certain problems, storage, certain costs aren't IT's problem, it's a business problem. Is that an advantage what you just kind of talked about in terms of getting eyes and ears of the business to provide, okay, this is a business challenge. We need to provide the right expertise, the right funding to support these services that are needed. I definitely think so. I mean, just from my own experience, understanding what the business wants and needs is huge and then just putting yourself in their shoes. What do they need, what can we do to make their jobs better? So that person, you know, clicking the button submitting our payroll or, you know, putting a purchase order in, what can we do to make that better? So, you know, it's one of the things I always do when I'm looking at projects, what value is this going to bring for our business? And I think that's just the way IT has evolved to where we're not the programmers in the basement anymore, you know, with the lights turned off and just coding away, we are business, we're all business analysts now because at the end of the day, it's our paycheck too. So these products that we're hearing about, at the end of the day, it affects us, it affects our business and the bottom line. And what is the website of 24x7 IT Connection that people can see and hear the value that you bring to the community? It's 24x7, so that's the 24x7, and then itconnection.com. And so like I said, we share a lot of really great stuff. We have something new every week, so it's definitely worth checking out. Ladies, thank you so much for joining, Stu and myself this morning and sharing your journeys into IT as well as your insights, what you've learned from the show would excite you and where people can go to find more information about the expertise that you bring to the community. We want to thank you for watching again. We are theCUBE live from day three of VMworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin for my esteemed co-host Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.