 From Austin, Texas, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Dell World 2015, brought to you by Dell. Now your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell World 2015 here in Austin, Texas. I'm Stu Miniman, joined with my co-host Dave Vellante. Fresh off the keynote here, lots of discussion about the Dell acquisition to EMC, the impact it's going to be having to the internal constituents, the customers, and excited to talk also today about what it means to the channel. So we've applied that, proud to have on Scott Winslow, who's the president of the Winslow Technology Group. Scott, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Yeah, happy to be here. Thanks, Stu. Scott, you guys were named again, the top Northeast channel partner for Dell. It's your first time on the program. Can you tell our audience that aren't familiar? A little bit about Winslow Technologies. I'm assuming with your name being in the company that you're one of the founders or the founder. Quite a creative name. So, tell us a little bit about your business. Yeah, we were founded in November of 2003, so we're 12 years old now. We're a VAR and a solution provider, located in the Northeast, but we have insoles in 30 different states now. But we're focused on storage servers, networking, security, virtualization. We've came over to Dell through the compelling acquisition. So we're kind of a boutique storage play, and then with the compelling acquisition in Q1 of 2011, we became a Dell partner for the first time. It's been a heck of a ride. So Phil Soren on Twitter this morning, Stu. Yeah, Phil's a mentor of mine. Yeah, Phil is an amazing guy. So, Scott, I think back, 2003, storage networking was really early. VMware was really early. Cloud was not something we talked about from an IT standpoint. Talk to us, what are some of the key drivers in your business today? Yeah, well, certainly infrastructure upgrades, whether it's VDI, whether it's OpenStack, anybody that's got an appetite for infrastructure upgrades and the services related to it, we're putting together solutions for those customers. So, we've been a Dell partner, like I said, since 2011, came over through the compelling acquisition. We were really kind of a boutique storage play, and with the Dell acquisition, we've become very proficient in the rest of the Dell line, storage, networking, et cetera, and allowed us to really become a full solution provider. So, you started as a storage specialist. Yes, exactly. Well, I'm down to compelling. Right. Pretty bold move back in the mid-2000s, right? We carried the flag for them in the EMC's backyard. Although, again, betting on Phil Soren and company is Larry Asman and those folks, not a bad play. And then they sort of popularized the whole tiering thing. They had mainframe class sort of capabilities down to the SMB, perfect acquisition for Dell. How did you, talk about the transformation into sort of the broader Dell product line, into servers, into other software areas, how did that all take place, and what do you sell today? Yeah, I'd love to tell you that it was a grand plan on our part. I can remember the conversation I had with our channel account manager, Brian O'Leary, at the time, and he said, you are leaving server business on the table. Nobody's doing four or $5 million a year in storage and selling $500,000 a year in servers. We got to get ramped up from a training standpoint. And that's exactly what we've done. So that was kind of how we grew into it. From a customer standpoint, they were yearning for us to offer a broader portfolio and it just became a very nice match. So I remember saying to Phil Soren, find and fix you've got us in here now, Phil. We were paired up with a small little compelling. You supported us so well. And now with the Dell acquisition, what are we going to do? And Phil's advice was jump in with Dell, learn their products, become relevant to them. You know, compelling better than anybody and they're going to need that. And that's exactly the path we followed that Phil gave us probably four or five years ago at this point. But as a relatively small specialist at the time, you must have been sort of polluted by the, I mean polluted is not the right word, but you must have felt that anxiety of the conventional wisdom of Dell channel partners. Dell goes direct. Dell hates the channel. So myths? Talk about, you know, what changed. Well, I think it was a perfect storm. I think Dell was fighting that reputation and what they did to counter that was to put together the best channel program in the industry. Really, you feel that way? Absolutely. Well, it makes it the best. The rebate program, the do more rebate program. You know, we have goals where we've got to hit 50% growth target on server storage and networking. And if you hit them, it can be very meaningful to your business. Providing gear for pretty much free so that we can do proof of concepts. We got a lot of really strong engineering resources at our company. A lot of them were form-end users. They like to try things before they buy. Our customers like to do that. And Dell provided us with, you know, really a cache of inventory, whether it's a force 10 networking or now Dell N series, a compelling FX2 vertex. And we bring it in to customers, show them how to use it. And, you know, it's a good chance for our engineers to work with the end user. So you want to do a proof of concept. But one of the complaints the channel often has is I can't get the gear. I can't get the proof of concept in. It takes months. What's your experience been with Dell in that regard? Well, again, because I think Dell was fighting that Dell direct image and they really had to show channel partners. They were in it to win it. So great do more rebate program. They provided inventory very easily. As long as you can show them, you can go in and win and you're going to represent them. And Dell is looking for three or four things for a partner. They want you to be loyal. They want you to have some really good technical chops to help them win. They want you to forecast really well and they want you to communicate, you know, with them what's going on and work in a symbiotic fashion with their inside and outside sales teams. If you can do that, you're going to be in good shape. And that's how we've grown the company to be, we'll do $20 million in revenue this year. And, you know, when we started with Dell, we were a $6 million year company. And you founded the company? I did, yeah. Founder. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, 23 employees. And I think with the CMC acquisition, we're going to see the same trajectory. Yeah, so really excited about it. So the loyalty thing seems to have got that down. Technical chops. Talk about where you get your technical chops and maybe give us some color on that. Oh, just, we've had former users. A lot of times, it's our best references. So we'd use our end users as references and we'd make sales because they'd say, hey, we're using Compellent. This is how we're using the data progression. This is how we're using the live volume, the remote replication. And when we found there were really good references, when they become available, because you can't be stealing people from your customers, but if they were in a position where they became available, we'd try to grab those resources and we've taken them from the end user side over the vendor side. Even some of our sales people, half of our sales force were former end users. So they're really sales engineers. And what a combination that is. When you can manage a relationship but also have the technical goods. And what's your forecasting secret? Is it to under promise and over deliver? Or is it to just have an intimate relationship with a customer and actually know when you're going to close a deal? Talk about that a little bit. Well, I'm a big believer in under promise and over deliver. That's definitely a term that we use a lot. But I think for us in communicating with Dell, it's just making sure the sales force is updated all the time. We have weekly calls to update the forecast. We have bi-weekly drop-in meetings so their sales team can come in and we just update them in person. We have a team from Northeastern. We do a lot with a Northeastern co-op program and we use those folks as inside sales reps and business development reps. And they can handle those responsibilities. So they're kind of in time. Northeastern's great. I want my kids. My wife went to Northeastern, John. John went to Northeastern. I want my kids to go. We're talking about college ROI. Northeastern has the model down. You get those students, you get them for six months. I mean, two co-ops means you can fill an inside sales position for a year. It's incredible. Strategic advantage. Let's talk a little bit more about the EMC acquisition and what that means for you guys. We've talked to some channel partners who are afraid. We're talking to Cheryl who runs channels for Dell earlier. I'm saying channel partners are afraid Dell's going to come in with EMC and just suck in the customer, do kickbacks and you won't be able to compete with that. You don't seem concerned at all. What's your take on that? Well, my first take was, wow, holy moly. I can't believe it happened. It was everybody's I think. Well, if you look at Michael's acquisition history, you see that he bought Ecologic and Compellant. He didn't buy 3-par. He didn't buy Data Domain. He went more for the billion dollar. I think Ecologic was 1.2. Compellant was under a billion. He didn't go for the 3-par as an Iceland's of the world and the Data Domain. I'm going to try it, but it got too rich, right? Yeah, exactly. And so he went for Apashore in the backup space, not Comball. So when you look at that and I had people say, do you think this is going to happen? I'm like, no way. If you look at the history, he's gotten great value. I think he's kind of been a value player in the acquisition market. And then to drop a $67 billion card with that background, to me, was eye-opening and really surprising. It was a wow moment. I didn't think it would happen. But now that it has happened, and I think the reason it happened is the privatization. I don't think as a publicly held company, they could do it. But I think it's a privately held company that was doing very well, that was paying down their debt more quickly than they had even anticipated. Michael's a bold guy. He's making a bold move. And it actually, it really surprised me. But now we are on board. And so my take on it is, we're the best partner Dell has in the Northeast. We think we're the best in the country. But hey, we're 20 minutes from Hockington. Here we are, guys. Let's go. EMC needs good partners. I know people that work at EMC, they're always complaining about they need better partners. I think we can provide that. We've learned the whole Dell portfolio. We've been studying Dell for the last five years. We know them better than anybody. We can tell those guys about Dell, but we're gonna say, listen, guys, we wanna jump in and learn the whole portfolio. There's a lot of complimentary products there. Pmax, Isilon, Xtreme I.O. There are products that they have that are going to get us as a reseller a seat at the table. I talked to two large insurance companies in Hartford last week, and they said, man, Scott, we love working with you, your team's great, but we never thought you had the portfolio at the very high end. If this thing happens, you're going to have a seat at the table with us for some bigger discussions. So Scott, you know, that's exciting. One of the questions in the keynote this morning is Dell and EMC come together. Yeah. What about the public cloud? So Satya Nadella was on stage talking about the great Microsoft and Dell partnership. Yeah. But many of the punditry talk about how Dell and EMC don't really have an answer to what AWS is doing. So, you know, you're talking to customers every day. You know, you're working with them, selling them lots of infrastructure. Yeah. Where are they with the public cloud discussion and how does hybrid cloud look to them? I think it's a great question. I think, you know, Michael's answer to it was there's 160 million different workloads and we see, you know, 15 to 20 million of those in the public cloud. So it sounds to me like his bet is he's betting, you know, he wants to be the provider to those public cloud providers to be providing that Amazon and Azure's of the world the infrastructure. And he's betting strongly on that other 80% that's the private cloud or the hybrid cloud. I'll go with that bet. So I think that's where it's going to play out. I don't, it doesn't seem like, you know, Dell is going to move in that public cloud direction. If I read between the lines correctly. I'm just saying, going to your customers, I'm sure many of your customers use an Office 365 now and they're all using Salesforce and they're all using AWS in some way or another. So is it trickling into the infrastructure discussions or is it still kind of business users and will stealth IT managing those pieces of the discussion? It's trickling into the discussions, but I think, you know, you've got to look at the overall market and the size of the market and say, okay, you know, we can be a player here and the private and the hybrid cloud and, you know, let the public cloud kind of go the way that it does with the Amazons of the world. All right, cool. Really appreciate you coming on, sharing your perspectives. Okay, thank you. Give me the last word. What should we be looking for over the next 12, 18 months? You got this big EMC acquisition coming on. You got, you know, Stu's talking about the public cloud. What should the observers of this industry be paying attention to? One word, co-opetition. That's what we should be looking for. I mean, watching Tushi and Michael Dell there together was like seeing, you know, Brian Cashman and Dave Dabrowski from the Red Sox in the Yankees are getting together. I mean, nobody knows who the enemy is anymore, right? You know, somebody brought up HP and Michael said, hey, they're a big customer of ours now. They're a big VMware customer. So, you know, everybody is, you know, is this co-opetition everywhere. The Microsoft CEO was on the stage today. They're developing, you know, PCs. They're going to compete with Michael. In that area, so I think co-opetition is the word. It's your called Michael brother from another mother. Yeah, well, VCE too, right? So they're going to continue VCE with Cisco. So I don't know, you know, I don't know who the rival is anymore, like the Red Sox and the Yankees. It's going to get crazy. Yeah. All right, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Keep right there, everybody back with our next guest. We're live from Dell World 2015. This is theCUBE.