 Live from Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the Cube. Covering VTUG's New England Winter Warmer 2016. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with wikibon.com and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's broadcast. We go out to all the tech shows, help extract the signal from the noise. This is the VTUG 2016 Winter Warmer at Gillette Stadium. Had a great day of keynotes, lots of interviews here on the program talking to practitioners, talking to end users, talking to Troy Brown of the New England Patriots. Have to say as a Patriots fan, it was pretty amazing to do that. Helping me join the last segment of the day and we'll do a little wrap up too. It's John White, who's the VP of Product Strategy with Expedient, who's a service provider. John, welcome back to the program. I talked to you at the Juniper show last year, so thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks for having me, appreciate it. All right, so John, it's your first time coming to the VTUG, I believe. You know, what was your impression so far? It took me 10 years to get here, but I'm glad I got here on a nice even number, so always remember how many I come back to. I thought it was fantastic. We had a table here and we had a breakout session as well and we had a lot of great conversations with people. I think the keynote by Microsoft set it off, set a great agenda off of the day to get people to start thinking a little bit differently about their career, what they're focused on. You know, I was just really impressed with it, the organization of the event, and other than that being in Gillette Stadium, you know, for me personally, being from Pittsburgh is a little bit tough, but other than that, I've enjoyed my day. Yeah, you know, good rivalry between the Steelers and the Patriots. You know, Troy Brown's favorite moment, oh, returning the punt against the Steelers, so sorry, I know it pains you a little bit, but luckily we've had some fun that day. That's why I carry that terrible towel for some of those games against the Patriots. Yeah, it's not that every football team has had some heartbreak along the way. So I loved your analysis though, I talk about customers here, especially something that started out as a VMware user group, and now we're talking a lot about cloud, we're talking about transformation, both of what's happening in IT and what it means for your job. So, right, Microsoft set the stage, what did you hear today and what are the messages that you're sharing about? You know, where cloud fits, what's real, and what's Expedient Troll there? It's good, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of good things. You know, the noise that I'm hearing is that people realize that they have to change. They have to start doing projects that are an accelerate their business. The CIOs are aligned with the business, and I think really it's a good thing for us, you know, nerds for so long. The business finally needs us, we're not a cost center anymore, and people should be celebrating that. I think that's a great thing, and you know, people are interested in the cloud, I think they're maybe interested in two steps forward cloud, being maybe some of the Amazon stuff that they're working on, or even Google or Azure, and I think that's relevant to their future, but I think there's a stepping stone that they kind of need to handle and do first. So maybe shift that virtualization focus that they have today, and move that into some maybe some sort of private cloud. Whether they're using hyper-converged hardware where at least they're buying it a little bit different, they're still carrying and feeding it, or utilizing service providers, even like Expedient, where we can actually put a private cloud on their premise that they consume in a per gig fashion to kind of change the game a little bit for them. Yeah, so you brought up a great point. The question isn't does IT matter? As long as IT is helping to serve and deliver for the business, there's a great line I had heard over the last year that said too often IT was the group of no, or if they went, they were kind of slow, and we need to get them all to go, so there's tools and ways to kind of move forward on that. So I just want to get your comment. Wikibon introduced a concept called True Private Cloud, and we said that customers are beginning to look at it. Did you see customers, I guess, looking at the advanced capabilities to really manage things for themselves and build there, or where are customers with what they're doing with On-Prem and how aware they are of the proper management and orchestration to get where they need to be, to have a private cloud that looks more like some of the skills of some of the same tooling as the public cloud. I think they're at the point where they've managed virtualization for so long. They've done the upgrades, they've done ESXI upgrades, they've upgraded firmware on SAN. A lot of that care and feeding that happens at night that really, if it goes well, is really a C project for them, right? And if it goes bad, it's an F project, I mean, it's a failure, it's a fired instance. I think they want to finally get rid of that, and because they're realizing that's not core to their business to accelerate their business. So I think they want to stay in that similar virtualization stack that they've been using, but they just want to progress it forward that they don't have to do everything that they had to. So if you look at some of the different integrated systems out there, however you want to phrase them, hyper-converged systems, they're helping to reduce that or simplify that, and I think that's a great first step for everybody as a business, but it's not going to be a giant leap. It's that transition to maybe even hybrid cloud, which is a little bit of a bad term in our industry because it's pretty vague, but it's starting to alleviate some of that pain that they typically have in those mundane tasks and starting to get that off their plate. I think that's going to be a pretty big thing for everybody. Yeah, so maybe John, it'd be good. Can you kind of paint out for us, how expedient it looks at, kind of on-prem the stuff that you guys can do and the public clouds that kind of, that would be some true hybrid that you put this in. What do you offer and what does the cost look like between the choices? Yeah, we've been doing virtualization for quite some time now since about 2008 in production. We started really in 2007 and we kept it in focus towards an enterprise cloud. So we built the hardware all redundant underneath, so N plus two servers, N plus N switching, enterprise stands underneath. We kept it pretty consistent and we've taken that architecture and offered it to people in a multi-tenant fashion where everybody's virtually segmented and we've done it also in a private fashion where it's one customer on that set of hardware. And we now have the capabilities to do that, obviously inside of our 11 data centers, but we can also do that on customer premise as well. So what we're doing is we're actually taking that private cloud, that architecture that we've built for so many years that whole integrated stack and putting it on customer sites and starting then layer things on top of it that are really critical to their business, things like disaster recovery, automation, show back, charge back, things that really a lot of the C level executives are really interested in. And I think one of the main keys that we did there was we were able to make that price between private and public cloud pretty similar so that you don't have to be running thousands of VMs for private cloud to make sense for you. You can start with 20, 30, 40, whatever it might be and that starts to make sense for you and you can do it on your own way. And we see by doing private cloud at the customer's premise a great way to kind of get over the barriers of data governance and the migration that everybody's afraid of. And so we see that as a first step. We think that traditional enterprise IT is going to want to do something like this while at the same time probably increasing how they're using software as a service today, things like collaboration tools, CRM tools, that's going to increase and then hopefully they're going to have all this free time that they can focus on developing applications that are going to help their business. And that's where I see a lot of the public cloud coming into play like Amazon, Azure, Google. And I think that there's going to be a time where we're going to be building clouds to satisfy those needs. We'll always have the infrastructure but maybe we'll start to layer on some tools that provide them better platforms that maybe develop into instead of just building out the operating systems themselves. Okay, so how does disaster recovery play into the role of a customer deciding between really private cloud or some virtual private cloud? So, I mean disaster recovery in our eyes has always been something that's been a goal for everybody. I think I've been talking about disaster recovery for the last 10 years of my life. Everybody wants it, there's always been barriers. And one of the things that we focused on in the last two years, we developed a suite of products called Push Button DR. And when we were looking at virtual customers today, why they weren't adding DR, they said that the network's complexity was actually the hardest part. So until we solved the network thing, that was always an issue. And that's what we did with that Push Button DR package. Inside of our data centers, we can replicate from one site to another. And what we're doing is replicating the firewall as well. So it's actually talking BGP out. So that public IP address that you have, when you fail it over to the secondary site, it comes with you now. And we're doing that as well at the customer premise. So we're failing over that public IP address that's living at the customer site, replicating it over into the data center so they can have that seamless DR plan. So really, all they have to do is push a button and everything's orchestrated beforehand, which allows them to do all the other critical things that they're probably going to have to do. Because they're probably going to have to figure out where they're going to host users, how they're going to get everything, how they're going to make sure the communication systems are up, like the telco systems, the phone systems. So they're plenty busy. We hopefully, we orchestrated and then automated their life a little bit that they could see some business benefit. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about where you guys play from a geographical standpoint? And my understanding, you guys aren't like looking to compete head on with Amazon. You're not building these giant data centers. How would you characterize Expedient? Yeah, so we're like that boutique hotel. We have 11 data centers. They're average probably about 10,000 square feet per data center. And when we fill one up in one of the markets where we're successful in, we go and build another one. So some of the cities have two and even three data centers inside of them. And we actually focus a lot of our efforts on that being that local provider. So for our customers, it's really important that they can go down to the data center and bring their auditors down there and have a general idea of who's supporting their data 24 by seven and who's actually, what the data center even looks like. And that's really important. Majority of our customers are within about a two hour driving distance of our data centers. Okay, can you just share a couple of the GEOs? I mean, I know you've got- Yeah, sure, so we have one in Boston here. We're down in Baltimore as well. Pittsburgh where the headquarters is. Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis and our newest market is in Memphis, Tennessee. Okay, so what about VMware? You guys are a VMware partner. How does that play into the whole discussion and what do you hear out in the marketplace about people talking about VMware versus Microsoft and the public cloud guys? Yeah, we're a pretty big VMware shop. Been on the VCloud Air network for, since its inception, we were a VSPP provider as well. You know, VMware's done a lot of great things for us. I think the whole community and the industry, I think, I don't think I would be here without VMware. And we're happy to support them and run one of the larger clouds in the United States on VMware. However, we are also looking at other technology. We deployed a Hyper-V platform two years ago as we were finding some of our customers who had a die-hard religion between Hyper-V and VMware. And if they're running Hyper-V today, they want to run Hyper-V inside of our data center. So we offered that to them. And what Microsoft has done in the last few years by shifting their focus and going towards a cloud-first mentality, I think they made a lot of headway on their public cloud as well as what they're doing locally in the enterprise. We're all looking forward to utilizing 2016 one day because a lot of things that you can do now with nano servers and containers. So it's pretty cool. All right, so at the show today, you got to talk to some users this session. Any kind of major misperceptions that you've seen out there or surprising questions that you might be able to share with the broader audience? Yeah, we had one that was pretty interesting that he's actually, he works for a company, about a thousand employee company, decent IT staff. And he has an initiative from the executive team to actually move everything to Amazon. And so I asked the question. I said, okay, are you developing these workloads that you need to put out there or is this traditional enterprise IT? And he said it's traditional enterprise IT. He said, okay, why would you move to Amazon? That might not be the best first foray into the cloud for you. And he said a lot of it had to do with the executive leadership wanting to get towards more of that model. So they went to AWS re-invent and they got really interested in getting into that operational model and starting to shift their focus on where they need to play. And I think it's doable, you can definitely do it. I've been playing with Amazon for a long time now. It's a very cool tech. I just think taking traditional enterprise IT and putting it directly into one of those cloud providers, it's going to make for some long nights for you for sure. Yeah, there's definitely certain applications that are great fit today and others that there's a little bit more challenges in getting there. So none of their apps are scaling today and they're not really building them all. So a lot of the benefits of what they offer aren't really applicable to them. Yeah, well, you know, if I just move it there, that gets rid of all my problems, correct? I wish. Unfortunately, I think we've all found an IT. There never is a silver bullet for anything. There is no such thing. I have this theory. We said from a networking standpoint, there's no such thing as eliminating a bottleneck. You just move it. And when it comes to complexity in your environment, you might be able to shift it but you can't get rid of it. So there's certain things that hopefully the vendor community can take off of what you're doing. It's actually something we think is really important from a true private cloud. So expedient from a service provider standpoint or a hyperconvert, you know, deployment should take some of that testing of a stack off of the customer environment, which is, you know, months and months of putting your environment in a sandbox usually to test that stuff out for most enterprises. So it's good to be able to shift but don't just think you, you know, we learned with the outsourcing that I can't just do my mess for less. I need to actually understand the ramifications of doing something for every active motion. There's kind of some equal and opposite, you know, activity or something, right? You always have to trust and verify and you have to make sure that the performance that you expect is actually what you're going to get. I mean, that's the scary thing about moving towards, you know, a big public cloud play is that, you know, you get the issues of noisy neighbor and all those problems. And I think you mentioned the, you know, hyperconverged play versus the expedient. I think that's pretty important too. I mean, if hyperconverged, if you still want to operate it, you just want to simplify how you buy it, I think that's a great play. But if you want to, you know, have a long-term marriage and a long-term relationship with somebody, go into a cloud provider like expedient where care and feeding is now on us, refresh cycles, inventory management is now on us, that's a pretty powerful movement. All right, should give you a lot of time back, right? So any final takeaways that you have from the event here? Things you want to share with the community? No, I hope that more people come out. I think we had a great crowd today, had a lot of great conversations. I would advise you to come out. I think it's great. The technology that we're talking about is very relevant. The IT business problems that we're having is very relevant. And a lot of the vendors here that are having tables are great to start in your journey towards the cloud. Yeah, so final note, it's been a great day here at the VTUG 2016 event. A big thank you to the Harnes and the new co-leaders of the VTUG Chris Williams and Sean Markham. Thanks for all the users that came on, the other participants on the program. John, thank you for helping me wrap up the segment here. So this is Stu Miniman for wikibon.com for the cubes coverage here from the VTUG 2016 Winter Warmer. Thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check out siliconangle.tv for the videos, wikibon.com for the research, and siliconangle.com for the news. Thanks so much for joining us and hope to see you at one of our events in 2016.