 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. Happy to welcome to the program. Got a CIO in the house. Russ Rodridge, who is the, with Chinbro. It's correct, how? How you doing? Happy to be here. Excellent. So, 30 year for yourself at the show. First impressions at the show, what brings you back? Yeah, third year, I've really enjoyed it each previous years. I skipped a year, last year, travel related issue, but I think the layout, I like the naming convention change. I like everything about it. I think this is an excellent program that the Winslow Technology Group has done. Excellent, they felt pity on me when they did the name change, if you heard, because saying the whole user group, Dell EMC, Winslow Technology Group, was a bit of a tongue twister. But that's, you know, first world problems. So Russ, for people that don't know, tell us a little bit about Chinbro. Yeah, so Chinbro is a construction company headquartered in Pittsfield, Maine. We're nationwide where we do our projects. We're in numerous markets from building, infrastructure, oil, gas, chemical, industrial manufacturing. We have a lot of projects done every year in the hundreds range. And we're a little under a billion dollars. Got about 2,500 team members across the country. Okay, and is the CIO, you know, how big is your team? How many locations do you manage? And, you know, tell us, yeah, let's go there first. Sure, yeah, so I have 30 person team. We have everything from application development to help desk, to data analytics, business intelligence teams, have infrastructure organization, I have field support, business analysts, and we're a full service organization. All right, so Russ, let's first start with Chinbro. You know, what are some of the biggest challenges you're facing into business? What's, does that term digital transformation resonate with your world? It does. The construction industry is very interesting. It's a low margin industry, right? And so as a result of that, we're always looking to save money. We're always looking to be lean. We have a major initiative in the company around lean transformation. Some of that is digital related. You know, getting off of paper, moving into paper forms, into electronic forms, and then not having to touch the data too many times. So we have been moving too digital for quite a few years now. So it's not new to the organization, but it is a big challenge. Okay, so absolutely we see that a lot. What is the role of IT to the business these days? So we have gone from being the elevator music, as I like to call it, like we're in the background, you know we're kind of there, to a strategic partner. I've reported from finance, and I've moved to the CFO, from CFO, excuse me, into the CEO role. And it's been a great challenge. There's some other organizational changes that we're looking at, but we're no longer that background music. We're very strategic in what we do. We actually run several committees for the company looking at project prioritization, workflow prioritizations, and helping the organization to build an application roadmap and strategy. Yeah, love that. I mean, when you talk just organizationally, it says a lot. You know, under the CFO, you're a cost center. We are a cost center. Moving under the CEO, you're strategic to the business, right? That's correct. You talked about applications. So let's go there first, because that's, you know, that application modernization is big challenge. When I talk about modernization, I always say applications are the long pole in the task. So what does that mean to you? What kind of transformations are you going through inside? Yeah, again, our industry is dealing with a lot of fragmented software, and it's a problem a lot of industries face, but ours, I feel, is we're on the very tail end of the industries that have moved to digital, that have moved to modernization of our apps. A lot of our products are on-premise. Our ERP system, we've been on it for 20 years, for example, and they've modernized. We're getting into mobile. Our imaging and workflow systems are starting to get more modernized, but they're legacy products, and it's difficult when you have to deal with infrastructure that we have in the construction world. We don't always have connectivity, so we have to have a lot of offline. We do a lot of work with Citrix, and it can be very problematic. Yeah, you've been dealing with the issues that we talk about with edge computing and IoT is something you've been living with for years, right? Absolutely, so IoT is one of those transformational pieces for us as well. We have a lot of equipment, that's one of the parts of our business, 25,000 pieces of gear and heavy iron, and we don't have a really good solution in place today that we're monitoring all of the meters and the performance of those devices, so we're looking to IoT to help us get a better picture of that at an aggregate data level. Okay, so we started up the stack with the applications. Let's come down a little bit and tell us about your infrastructure. What are you using today? How long have you been using it? I'm sure Winslow's in the mix there. Oh, Winslow's absolutely in the mix. We've moved from the traditional data center where they had a lot of servers and racks and moved to a VBlock and VXBlock with a VxRail and our disaster recovery center out in Chicago, and we did that because we had all the traditional problems of maintenance and patching and licensing and everything, and we never really had to deal with any of the power and heat and energy problems. We're up in Maine, so we don't have an issue with cooling, but that was a challenge for us, having to manage all that stuff, so we worked with Winslow and Dell EMC to figure out how do we get into the hyperconverge to move away from all those server for administration and management, and we did that project a little over a year ago, implemented a little over a year ago, and we've seen tremendous opportunities and for how we provision equipment and how we manage that need for the applications, standing up new environments, virtualizations really helped us with it. Yeah, so did you roll out the VXBlock and the VXRail together, or were those two separate projects? They were slightly delayed, so we did the VXBlock first, and then a few months later we did the VXRail. Okay, so the VBlock and the VXBlock after it been around for a number of years, you know, eight, 10 years at this point, VXRail's a little bit newer. There's some people out there that are like, oh wait, HCI takes over the whole market. Tell us why each of those solutions and, you know, was it an application price thing, what, how did that go? Yeah, we looked at it, it wasn't necessarily that we were in any position where we had to have this massive return on our investment, right? We built our business case around disaster recovery. We, our data center, our primary and our secondary were in the same town, you know, so we had all those elements of disaster recovery that were a problem for us, so when we looked at the solution, we wanted to be able to replicate our data more effectively, get away from the traditional tape backup models, and really help provision the equipment as quickly as we could in the event of, you know, disaster and get ourselves recovered business continuity was. So it was a financial decision, obviously, that we had to, we had, the thing had to pay for itself, in which it did, but we didn't spend a lot of time really kind of honing in on it has to be an ROI and a payback. It was really about performance and disaster recovery. So is the VX block in the primary and the VX rail in the secondary? That's correct. Okay, really cool. Any, you know, what would you tell your peers as you, after you've rolled this out, any learnings that you had, or the things that you'd go back in, you know, adjust or tweak? No, actually we had a really incredible experience working with Winslow. They were able to help us work through all of our, any of our production issues very quickly. We did replication through Zerto, so that's moving our data very efficiently and my IT team feels very confident that should, and we're doing a test later this year, but should we have a production incident we'd be able to recover. Lessons learned, you know, I think it's more about planning your work, you know, making sure that you get your activities planned and that you're looking at the operational performance of the applications. Great, all right, Russ, last question I have for you. As a CIO, how things been changing? You know, you've been in the role for seven years. You've moved inside the organization. What are some of the things that are changing some of the things that aren't? Yeah, so the CIO role, I believe personally, is really kind of gearing towards more of a strategic element. You know, being part of that business, making sure that we're not just providing those generic services of, you know, ping power and pipe, right? We're there for the business to understand what their business processes are all about and how they run their workflows and use their applications on a daily basis. Most of my conversations with my Vice President Piers and business leaders isn't around the technology that's being used. Yeah, they're interested in iPhones and tablet devices, but they're really geared at how do I help them solve their business problems? And that's where IT is really evolving. And the CIO role is doing a lot of that, but it wraps around the teams that you have around you and the strategic elements of the organization. Yeah, and just to follow up on that, do the SaaS applications that you're business using following under you, is there any public cloud in there too? Yeah, we do, we have a hybrid cloud solution. So we do a lot of on-premise solutions, but we have several cloud. And they're growing as needed, but we have a business model that basically says, let's look at our infrastructure internally first. As an employee-owned private company, we tend to gravitate towards keeping it in house, but we have several business solutions that are in the cloud that are providing value. All right, well Russ, pleasure to meet you. Thanks so much for joining us. And congrats on everything that Chinbro's done. Thank you very much. Back with lots more coverage here at WTG Transform 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks so much for watching theCUBE.