 I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE and we're here at the Winslow Technology Group, Dell EMC User Group. Happy to have with us Rick Gowan, who is the CTO of WTG. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. All right, tell us a little bit about as CTO of, really a channel partner for a lot of technology vendors. We talked to Scott earlier about really the solutions that you helped put together. What's your role inside the organization? How long have you been there? What's your background? So I started at the Winslow Technology Group four years ago at this event, actually. Prior to joining Winslow, I was at Dell as an enterprise technologist, came to Dell via Compelent. And prior to that, I was on the customer side, a technology director at a large insurance company down in Hartford. Okay, so obviously Winslow Technology Group started very much with the Compelent, has gone through the maturation of Compelent into Dell, Dell now into EMC. So tell us a little bit about your role, what kind of things do you look at to help pick what technologies and expansion that you go into for the organization? Sure, so obviously Dell has a very broad portfolio and there's just not enough technology expertise to know everything about everything, right? So we have to spend a good amount of time keeping an eye on the market and sort of focusing in our resources on what we want to gain expertise in and what we want to really bring to our customers. So it's a lot about where we feel like these different market spaces are moving and we deal with a relatively specific segment in that our customers fall into a couple of different profiles and we really have that in mind when we're looking at the various technologies, really trying to picture this group of people that's here and what do we think they would get excited about? Yeah, so we're in an interesting state of kind of the industry today. On the one hand, there's no shortage of challenges for storage, storage is always one of those things that we need expertise, we need to fix things, yet on the other hand, companies want simplicity, they don't want to think about it, I'm deploying hyper-converged or cloud environments where storage is in there, so how do you look at that, especially, you know, your background and W2G's background as it fits in the entire picture? Yeah, so coming from Compellant myself and coming from a strong Compellant reseller, we're obviously a little bit biased when it comes to storage. With that said, as we continue to talk to different customers and they come to these inflection points where they've got to make a decision about refreshing a traditional storage environment versus taking a look at a hyper-converged environment, we're finding more and more customers are willing to take that chance on a hyper-converged environment and like you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to the simplicity, a lot of it comes down to a specific skill set that they see you have to have for a storage environment that you might be able to not worry about anymore when you go to a hyper-converged environment. Yeah, storage has always been not only complicated at the individual level but you look at a company like Dell and they've got a portfolio and it's because no one solution can fit everywhere. There's price points, there's scalability, there's feature functionality. How do you look at where we are in the market today? How do you help simplify that portfolio beyond just kind of HCI? Yep, and you've really pinpointed, I think, a big part of the value we provide to our end customers because you see this huge broad portfolio, a lot of different things that do the same thing and so we really try to guide that decision-making process in a couple of different ways. We think that, like you mentioned, there's a different fit. All of these different technologies have their place. No one is right for everyone and there's room for all of them. We don't think that hyper-converged is going to completely replace mid-range storage. We think that there's room for both. Different customers are going to want different things. A lot of the decision-making comes down to, one, where are they in their life cycle of the gear they have? Switching platforms, say, to hyper-converged requires replacing perhaps some storage, perhaps some servers. Where are they in their depreciation cycle? Are those things leased assets? All those different things really come into play so it's not always a purely technical discussion. There's a lot of different things that factor in but we feel like every time it makes sense to look at all the options and a vendor like us, like partnered with Dell, we can provide a solution in the traditional infrastructure that you're used to using today. We can give you the pricing for it and what the implementation would look like and then we can give you the same thing on a hyper-converged infrastructure. Tell you how the implementation would go. Let you compare those costs, talk about the pros and the cons and then you can make a really informed decision and we feel like without taking a look at both and doing some actual metrics-based analysis of the two options, you're not going to be able to make an informed decision. Rick, over the last decade or so, virtualization has really been one of those waves that's driven a lot of the technology discussions we have. It feels like, well, of course, VMware and virtualization are by no means going away. The new wave of cloud in all of its forms, there's containerization, all of these new things, kind of bringing on this next generation. What's exciting you and what as a CTO do you look at and say, oh boy, here we go again, we're going to have to go fix all these problems like we did last time. So two things you said really jumped out at me. First, I hear from a lot of my customers a push to get everything into the cloud. At the same time, I'm starting to see the other end of that curve with things coming back in. I think a lot of our customers are finding a sweet spot in hybrid cloud solutions where we've got an on-prem component coupled with some cloud storage or some off-prem components. We think that's the sweet spot and that really allows us to take advantage of the key, really the key thing for cloud infrastructures is that elasticity, right? That allows us to put our elastic workloads out there and then once they settle down into a predictable sort of state, we can bring them back on-prem where we really want them anyway. So we think we see a lot of our customers settling down into a hybrid sort of scenario. Luckily, whether it's Dell Nutanix, VxRail, they all got great solutions for on-prem coupled with off-prem stuff. The other thing that's really interesting to me is these alternate hypervisors. I love seeing the adoption of options. I think we've seen a marketplace that has been dominated by an 800-pound gorilla for a long time and it's a great, super powerful portfolio. You're basically ubiquitous. I love seeing a couple different options that can bring some actual different business value and making customers think about maybe I don't just go status quo here, here's an opportunity to maybe do something a little different. All right, well, Rick, really appreciate you sharing with us everything going on in your environment and we'll be back with more coverage here from the WDTG Dell EMC User Group event. You're watching theCUBE.