 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. Really excited, we've actually gotten to speak to quite a few end users here at the show, which is always one of our favorite things to do in theCUBE. Joining me, first time on the program, Todd McElroy, who's Vice President and Systems Engineering Manager, Eastern Bank. Thanks so much for joining me. You're welcome, glad to be here. All right, so first of all, how many of these shows have you been to? This is my first WTG event, but I tend to go to several smaller type conferences per year to kind of keep on top of the technology network, and with so much rapid innovation these days, you need to get out there and talk to people and learn little tidbits of information, each one, do a couple of conferences each year, but to the extent of it. Yeah, you said technology's changing really fast, which is great, as my joke usually is like, oh well, you're in financial. Things don't change fast. There's nothing going on in your sleep. What is happening in your world these days? I mean, Eastern Bank is a 200-year-old bank we're celebrating our 200th anniversary this month. Hey, congratulations. We're gonna have a big celebration next week, so a lot of traditional architecture, a lot of, it's a very large bank, it's a $11 billion bank, but very, it has a small community feel as well, and even our team is very tight and very close together, so, but even though we have, it's an older bank, we have a lot of innovation technology going on, in the last few years especially. Yeah, it's one of those things. You said, if I was gonna start a company, or had started a company in the last five or 10 years, well, here's the technology I choose, here's the applications I'd roll out. It's a 200-year-old bank. Walk us through a little bit about the pros and cons of having that legacy, if you will. Well, I mean, we've been around for like, 200 years, and even a lot of the technology we have on premises has a lot of legacy applications, so we have to keep supporting that for a long time. So, we're challenged with keeping those older systems up and running as well as providing new technologies to the business so they can innovate and bring new and better products to the market. So, it's both worlds. Yeah, all right, tell me what's under your purview when it comes to the bank. When it comes to the bank, I manage the system engineering team, so I manage the team that does servers and virtualization, storage, we're getting into the cloud as well, so it's a big push to start innovating in the cloud as well to allow our developers to use services to help them innovate faster and better and that sort of thing. Okay, so in the keynotes this morning, there's a discussion really of hybrid cloud. When you say in the cloud, that tends to make me think of public cloud and maybe some SaaS in there. Tell me what cloud means to your organization. Well, right now, I mean, our cloud footprint is primarily software-to-service type applications like Office 365, we had a major migration to move our email in Skype and users facing applications to the cloud. But we're also trying to expand our footprint into the cloud so we can enable services to our customers, internal customers, to innovate as well. So that's why we're looking at technology like Nutanix, the rate of innovation that they're bringing to market to now allow our developers to be more self-sufficient, provide the platform for them and allow them to innovate and develop on a platform. Both on-premises to keep it secure and as well as in the cloud to keep it secure as well. Okay, yeah, it's interesting. I was actually talking to some of the Nutanix team here and been talking to customers that are doing development, playing with containers, things like that. Couple years ago, if you talked about developers, you'd say, oh, okay, they're building something in the public cloud because that's where it is. Help us understand how you decide, what do I start playing with in the cloud? What, where does the Nutanix fit into that discussion? Yeah, I mean, we're a relatively new Nutanix customer within the last year or two. We started with a small concept to give some of our workloads for the developers to work on. But now we've expanded upon that, it's now become our primary production platform. We're trying to take a lot of our older hypervisor and virtualization technology and move it into Nutanix. So we're trying to grow that footprint because of the amount of innovation that they're bringing with calm and flow and all those sorts of new services that's going to enable us to build a platform that they can develop on a lot better. Great, and from, what virtualization are you using on this? For? For the Nutanix, are you using VMware? No, we're using HV, native HV, yeah. And using all HV? All HV, yep. Okay, were you VMware before? Not at Easter, no. We have a small VMware footprint for specialized application, but the rest of our virtualization platform is Hyper-V. Okay, and you said you're running in production, does Nutanix run all of your on-premises applications? No, it doesn't. I mean, we have a lot of still, physical infrastructure as well, but anything that new is going towards Nutanix. We have some older hardware that we're aging out as those age out and we have to expand new hardware. We're going to go with Nutanix. Yeah, you've got some i-Series sitting in the back, I'm sure, the old AS400s, most banks have, things like that. Exactly, exactly, yeah. Great, and tell us a little more from a cloud standpoint. How do you determine what goes where? Well, we haven't really determined that yet. We're really in the early stages of our own adoption into the cloud, so we're really taking the first steps in making sure we are governing it properly and we're finding the right use case for it. So really, we're trying to find the right use case for developers. We had some meetings recently and we outlined a few things that we could target. So we're really taking our first steps, getting our own competencies up with our own engineers and our developers and making sure we, you know, learning from the people that have already done it and learning from maybe some mistakes that I've made and using partners like Winslow to help us get there. Great, can you speak a little bit about from an operational standpoint? You talked about developers, you've got public cloud, you've got your infrastructure, how do those all play together? Well, today, I mean, System Engineering, my department is really the go-to department when they request a service, request a new server, request a new application to be built. We interface with a lot of different teams at the bank. So we're really the go-to team that is going to help them innovate. They know what applications they need to run. They know they make requests for services. We're trying to reduce the time to fulfillment. So allowing them to have a platform that they can build on, innovate and be more self-sufficient. Yeah, you bring up a really interesting thing. How long people think it will take from when I ask for something to where I get it? Used to be, you know, I put in a support ticket, you know, 24, 48 hours, that was great. Some things, it's like, oh, heck, we're going to have to buy a server or, you know, allocate different pieces. Today, you know, it's, come on, it's instantaneous, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's ready to go. It's ready to go. Talk to that, you know, the good and the bad of that from your standpoint. Well, I mean, that's what we want to be in the business of allowing them to be self-sufficient. Build the platform for them. We don't want to be managing and building VMs over and over and over again. We want to templatize things and allow them to be on their own timeline to be able to develop, deploy, break down. So we're really trying to innovate in that way. You know, I think that's, you know, our job as an engineering team to provide that to the business so they can innovate more quickly. Yeah, love the idea of self-service. The concern always is sprawl. Used to be, oh, I stuck a server in the corner and then I forgot about it. Now VMs pop up and I forget about them all the time. So, you know, doesn't the CFO ever come say, hey, am I really using all this stuff? That's a big driving factor is cost. You know, making sure you don't, you're not going to drive up a huge cost in the cloud. And so I think governance and managing that and using tools and using some of the use cases and some of the knowledge others have been before to help you build that framework so you're not, you know, breaking the budget or what not. And you find the right use case whether it's on-premises cloud or in the public cloud. Great, last thing, Todd, as you look forward kind of through the rest of 2018, any interesting new technologies you're looking at or other things coming down the pike other than celebrating the big 200th anniversary? Well, I mean, it's all, you know, I'm really excited that, you know, the bank has really made a commitment to move towards, you know, innovation and using cloud technology. So I'm really excited to be part of the team that's going to help innovate and drive the business forward in that regard. All right, well, Todd McElroy, I really appreciate the updates here. Eastern Bake 200 year old company driving innovation forward. This has been our live coverage here from WTG Transform 2018. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all the shows we're going to be at, all the replays that we've been at before for Stu Miniman, once again. Thank you so much to Winslow Technology Group, their partners, and of course, all the customers. Thanks so much for the viewers also for watching The Cube.