 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of WTG Transform 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage where he discussed the specter of cloud. Rick Allen, who's the chief technology officer of Winslow Technology Group. Rick, great to talk to you. Thanks for having me Stu. All right, yeah, thank you for having us here. So, we're talking about this whole cloud thing, and you and I have been talking about this for a couple of years. Give us your viewpoint. You talked to a lot of customers. We can talk about architecture, but the average customer, when they hear cloud, there's some puffy things up in the sky, but what does it mean to them? Sure, yeah, so I think one of the things that we're advocating as it relates to sort of starting that cloud journey is to do some homework ahead of time, make data-driven decisions, and we don't want you as our customer base to get into a situation where you're kind of backed into a corner, right? Where you move something and you decide you need to bring it back or anything like that. So, we're a big advocate of running some analytics and making some intelligent decisions. Try and start with that low-hanging fruit where you can kind of ease your way in and the stuff that doesn't require replatforming and get your toes in the sand a little bit before you weigh it all the way out there. Yeah, so if I step back for a second, I guess from a customer standpoint, one of the things I liked in your keynote is so many times we think about technology, it's like, oh well, it's a new server, or it's something I swipe a credit card and I go using the cloud. Cloud, really we need to think about the operating model because it's the policies and the people that are as important, if not more important, than the, okay, what's the price per CPU and things like that. Right, right, yeah, and one of the things that we talk about a lot is that when we're talking about cloud, we're not talking about a place, we're not talking about who owns it, we're not talking about any particular public cloud provider, we're talking about a way of doing business, a way of bringing your services to your internal customers and a way of kind of transforming your IT infrastructure to more efficiently consume those resources, right? And that's a change in operating model, that's a change in sort of way of thinking, not just from this whole cloud thing, but also towards delivering IT more as a service. Yeah, and you spend a lot of time talking about applications, which I really like, because I'm an infrastructure guy by background. When we talked about virtualization, when we talked about converged and hyperconverged, a lot of times we're talking about boxes and cabling and networking and things like that. The role of infrastructure is to run my application, the role of the application is to run my business. That's the big theme we've been hearing for years is IT, your role isn't to be this thing off on the side or dollars in headcount and all that are important, but if you don't serve the ultimate business and what they need to do to keep us running, we're all out of business. Right, yeah, this whole transformation is all about aligning those business requirements with IT and starting to deliver services that are tailored towards what the business needs as opposed to what I can offer or what my capabilities are, right? Those need to be more in sync and that's what this whole operating model is all about, is aligning those services to the business and creating the infrastructure so that the business can consume it more easily. Yeah, and you gave some really good pointers. I want you to give us your customers because when I heard things like, oh, well, let's say I'm using a public cloud. Well, I need to understand how availability zones work and how I spread things out, which if I'm used to HA on VMware or your hypervisor of choice, some of those things, I got used to it because things work, they were built for the enterprise. Now it's distributed, but you need to think about things from that application level a little bit more. Right, yeah, and so that's something that we're trying to educate our customer base on is as we move forward and as we start to move workloads into various clouds, public, private, what have you, we have to start considering some of those availability aspects that today we don't even think about, right? Almost everybody who's still sitting in that traditional infrastructure, they're all having their availability provided probably at the hardware level. They have multiple controllers and clusters and all this stuff, so they drop an application into their environment and it's already going to have pretty good availability. When we, as we move forward, we have to start pushing that availability up the stack and thinking about it more at the application level. And so when we're deploying workloads into different cloud environments, we may be responsible for providing our own high availability, and that's something that in some cases requires a fair amount of expertise to get that architecture right so that we do have the same level of high availability out in these cloud environments that we have in our on-prem infrastructure. All right, so Rick, inside your customers, who are the people you're talking to that kind of get this? We live through the transformation of like, well, the storage guy was doing this thing, we need to kind of have the virtualization person own more. Cloud Architect has been a title that's been expanding quite a lot over the last few years. Who are you getting at the table? Who's making these architectural decisions when you're working with your users? Yeah, so we feel like it's something that we have to get the entire team on board with. It's something where it might be an initiative that we start to address with the CIOs and the IT directors, but it's important to get the entire organization's IT staff on board with the transition because each one is going to have a part to play and sort of moving forward into that IT as a service sort of organization. Great, so when it looked at some of the things that WTG is doing, obviously Dell EMC, Nutanix, VMware, your biggest partners, what's kind of the big push today from the majority of your customers and what are some of the more advanced customers getting excited about? Yeah, so I think you listed off those partners and when we look at them, a common theme there is adding this built-in sort of cloud interoperability, connectivity and feature set. So when we're thinking about all the characteristics that we look for in a cloud operating model, we're seeing things like self-service portals, things like the ability to measure multiple tenants and things like this. And so what we're seeing across all those partners is more and more of those features come as parts of the infrastructure solutions and that's reducing the burden on our customers to be able to deploy something that operates in that cloud sort of IT as a service offering. And so some of these customers are getting really excited about that capability to right out of the box, deploy a self-service portal, deliver these capabilities straight to their internal customers without having to do a bunch of development or build complicated systems to deliver them. So it's a self-service portals, it's the built-in cloud connectivity to be able to archive things and send DR out to third-party service providers. So those are some of the things that our customers who are on this journey and maybe they started last year, the year before they're moving forward, those are the sorts of things that they're starting to deploy now. One of the big challenges when we talk about this rather dispersed world we're moving towards, you spent some time talking about SaaS. Absolutely, SaaS is the biggest piece of, if you call it public cloud, some of it doesn't live in one of the big clouds, can live lots of places. Data, data protection and security are something that no matter where I go, I need to worry about that. There's no way, actually in your definition, you're like, oh, if I do SaaS, I don't need to worry about the data. No, no, no. You need to, I think you took somebody's slide there. But there are some people that, mistakenly, oh, well, I ran on a pass, I don't need to worry about security. No, you do. Containers, any of these things, data protection, my data and security. I need to worry about that everywhere and that brings a whole new set of challenges. Yeah, and so you make a good point because, for example, on the security side of things, it continues to be just as much of a concern as it ever was, but it's an entirely different way to think about it, likewise with data protection. It's just as important as it ever was, but it's an entirely different way to think about it. One of the things though that I thought was really interesting about security is that when I'm talking to these CIOs and IT directors across our customer base, in the past, if I go back, rewind this thing three years, they would say, I can't go to the cloud because of security, right? Now, we're a little bit more mature in our cloud understanding and starting to transform a little bit, and they now that list that as one of the reasons they want to move to the cloud. And I think that was one of the most startling sort of realizations as that shift in Mindshare. Yeah, absolutely. We actually did some surveys. There was a big survey we were attached with called the Future of Cloud Computing, and you're right, if I hadn't dipped my toe in, I was worried about it. But once I got there, I realized I kind of looked inside and said, oh my gosh, what did I be doing? Interesting analogy I've paired sometimes is that autonomous vehicles and things like that, I'm worried about the self-driving or even the braking or things like that that's challenging. Have you looked at most drivers? Most people, oh my gosh, they're checking their tax, they're doing all sorts of stuff there. It is a bit of a mind flip as to how you think of these things. Doesn't mean it changes overnight or that there's never silver bullet night day, but it's some of these viewpoints that we need to change and take a little differently. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great analogy. I'm probably gonna steal that. All right, Rick, what's exciting you these days? You're a CTO, you're here, there's a Boston area. I'd love if you've got anything about cool things in the area or just cool tech in general. Yeah, I think, and I addressed a lot of this in my keynote earlier today, but I'm really high on an analytical approach to a hybrid cloud. I wanna start to get customers thinking about how we can make this a transition as opposed to just jump it right in the deep end. It doesn't have to be this big jarring event as we sort of transform. This is something where we can take baby steps and start to move ourselves forward. And so we're getting really excited about those technologies that allow us to integrate our existing infrastructure with various other cloud services, whether they be platforms, infrastructure, and software offerings. Things that allow us to take the investments that we already have and sort of integrate and make use of these cloud services that we know can deliver value to our organization. That's what we're most excited about is getting more out of what we have. Yeah, you mentioned analytics. I mean, here in Boston, you had in the opening video, there was some of the, I think of the Boston Dynamics robots, right across the river here in the area. When I talk to people like in the storage world, we talk about intelligence, but their eyes light up because we've been talking about intelligent storage for decades, but no, no, really, now, with all the cool technologies that we can get, we can really put this in here and it's not about getting rid of the admins, it's about really supercharging and be able to deal with, we've got way more data, we've got way more devices, we've got way more things I'm going to have to do, so we need some help with all of these machines to be able to pair the machines with the people to make them be able to do their jobs better. Yep, yep, couldn't agree more. All right, Rick Allen, pleasure to catch up with you, and thanks so much for having us here. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the content here and all the shows. We'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching The Cube.