 from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018, presented by SiliconANGLE. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Happy to welcome to the program Tom Rasmussen, who's an IT director and an instructor at JATC of Greater Boston. Tom, thanks for joining me. Thank you. All right, so you wear a couple of hats, like many people in IT. Tell us a little bit about your background and your organization. So my background, I come from the electrical engineering, that's my degree, so I used to like to chip level stuff. And then as time went, I got into computers, networking. And so I kind of, my background is in the server side of it, the Novell, the Microsoft days. So, and as I became an instructor, because I actually had a service call to the school, and they said, oh, you know something about computers and networking? Would you like to teach here? And of course, 20 something years later, I'm now the IT director and part-time instructor. Yeah, so I want to dig into both of those. Why don't we start with your IT hat there? Okay. Tell us a little bit about kind of the organization, what kind of things you deal with, what kind of some of the kind of the biggest challenges on your plate. Yeah, so we're the trade school for the local IBW, IBEW in Boston. We've got about 12 to 1500 apprentices in the school, both electrician and telecommunication. And it's a five-year program. And one of the biggest challenges that kind of brought me on board was just the management of the computer systems. They needed someone, they had these computer labs that as the students did things to them, they no longer worked. And so that machine went off and then that machine, and then they didn't have a full-time IT person. So it was like, okay, this weekend, we're going to redo everything. This weekend, we're going to redo everything and so on and so on. And part of me coming on is we implemented a VDI environment where, why you might think it was a cost type thing, but it was really just a management where we could manage the desktop, manage the experience. And we're about two years into it. It's been successful, but it's challenging. Yeah, you bring up a real good point, though. When people tend to go in from a cost savings, a lot of times they'll be disappointed. It really needs to be some kind of transformational, solving some real business problem. And it sounds like you had that well identified. And while there's always a, oh, I got to tune the performance, oh, the networking's got issues, oh, so many devices and what do I deal with and churn of what's going on there. It's changing the paradigm of management. You no longer have, probably you, running around from all of these places, constantly fiddling with all of these boxes to, I would think it would centralize your job a little bit more. And it did. And one of the kind of benefits was, well, we can't use this lab because the machine's not working or it's not up to date or we don't have this software or we can't, we don't have the ability to get it up and running to fighting for the labs now. If a contractor wants to come in and display a new demo, new piece of software, we can put that software on that for the period of time they're there and then take it away. So we're getting much more utilization out of our systems, which benefits us in production and kind of just the students as a whole. Yeah, another challenge I hear a lot from education people is just the wireless infrastructure, how you deal with all the devices, what people get access. Is that running well? Challenges, what are you seeing with just the abundance of technology that everybody walks in with? One of the things that we do have a challenge with wireless and we don't have enough, we're not quite sure where we're going with it yet. Right now we have a policy that our students aren't allowed to bring wireless devices in. But as we're rolling out new types of products or applications, we're seeing like, oh, we actually need that tablet. We need you to bring your work, we need that. And so I see this changing very quickly, which is really going to affect us from the wireless management. We had a code update just the past weekend and they're again implementing some type of, okay guys, let's take a quiz and everybody brings out the phone. Well, they gave out the wireless and they saturated it. So you're like, okay, we're going to fix that one too now. So. All right, let's flip off or talk about the training that you're working on. What kind of classes are you doing? What skill set, what's kind of the, I know there's never a typical student look like. So a typical apprentice would be anywhere from someone coming right out of high school, coming out of the military, just deciding to retool. So we could have a 20 something up to a 40 something. So from an educational standpoint, it is challenging. Some people know things about computers, something they know a little bit about networking. It's a range. I mean, they know a lot more now than they say did five or six years ago. So it's a little easier. From the telecom side, traditional, telephone and networking, those apprentices get a full blown of, this is computers, this is basic networking, this is advanced networking. We're finding that even in the electrical industry that we need to train our electricians to know about networking because the lighting system is now an endpoint. The HVA system is an endpoint. Management of the security system, everything is going to be on the internet. So as I say, there's not going to be a lighting switch. You're going to walk in the door and say, computer, turn on the lights, mood level five. Yeah, or even, you know, we have things like Nest that I don't even have to, you know, a lot of them I said it's going to learn what's going on. Those, all those IOT devices, does that come into the training today or is that still kind of a future? It's starting to come in because it has to, you know. Those devices are there. Our heating system and our building went down the other day and it turned out it was an IP address information. So the joke was don't let electricians near IP addresses, but. Yeah, you know, when I said you've been there 20 years now. Part time. Part time, but you know, what's, we talk about the rate of change and it's, you know, there's always change going on, but you know, it definitely feels that things are changing faster. How do you as a trainer keep up with it? You know, you want to make sure that you're, you know, when they finish their apprenticeship, they're ready for the new job, you know. How do you manage that? So, you know, the curriculum is constantly changing. It's evolving. We're trying to fit more in, you know, in a shorter period of time. You know, I came out of, I just came full time just two years ago. So I was in the thick of things. I'm now focused on VDI and educational resources, which again, is kind of new to me, you know. What tools, what are all these tools? What are the applications that, you know, that work in the educational environment, which is kind of above and beyond the traditional, you know, IT piece. It is challenging. I mean, I read as much as I can and you know, get involved with, you know, places like VTUG and, you know, the other groups. And you can only know so much. I can't be an expert in hardware or software or, you know, services or applications. I kind of have to kind of get in the middle and then hopefully get someone to come and give me a hand, you know. Yeah, no, Tom, very good point. I think all of us know that there's nobody that can be an expert at everything. You set me up for the last question I have for you. What brings you to an event like the VTUG? What do you get out of it? What would you share to people that didn't come this week? I like coming and talking to the vendors and seeing what's available, but the biggest thing I get is just seeing the other me's out there. Just at lunch today, I met a person that comes from a K through 12 school and it turns out that we have very similar systems. So I mean, to me, that was probably the best part of the event there because now I have a relationship. Now, because I am the IT guy, I am the IT director and an instructor and to have those type of resources is really useful and important to me. Yeah, absolutely which is why, Tom, we appreciate you coming and sharing with your peers that couldn't come here, what's happening in your environment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.