 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. And we are back live here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands this week. Day one of three days of coverage here on theCUBE. I'm with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls and this is really kind of the John segment, if you will. John Grieco and John Siegel with us. John Grieco is the CTO of the University of Vermont Health Network. John, good to see you, sir. Thank you, thanks for having me. You bet. And John Siegel, VP of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. John, pleasure to have you aboard as well. Glad to be here again. All right, let's talk about the university, if you will. I mean, I can imagine health, obviously, critical data. What's your data center environment like and how's Cloud playing into that? Yeah, right now we are a seven hospital system with seven data centers managed by seven different IT organizations. So the role I have is really how do we take those- You still have hair too, by the way. I do, but every day it's getting thinner and thinner and I'm going to be able to tell what these cameras I have. What we're trying to do is really start working as one cohesive system. Give the patient the same experience as they travel through our system and how do we do that with technology? And what we're trying to do is really simplify and standardize everything we do. Consolidate and centralize our data centers. So we're going from a seven data center infrastructure growth to a two data center platform, one in New York and one in Vermont. But most likely over time pushing as many of our workloads to the cloud, really creating a triangle where you have your private cloud that has rigor and resilience with our clinical, most critical workloads, closer IT shop and we leverage a lot of the non-trivial, non-value ad applications into the cloud. Yeah, John, you throw out a term private cloud. Can you help define for us what that means to your organization? Absolutely. It's just like a public cloud like Google, Amazon or Microsoft Azure, but you're doing it in your local data center itself. So what we're doing at the University of Vermont Health Network is we're trying to make our private cloud that's local in our data centers act and become more of a private cloud look and feel. We understand that many of our users are leveraging the public cloud even in your home use. So how do we bring some of that into the private data center that we own and manage, but give our users to look and feel of that public cloud? All right, John Siegel, you chuck it a little bit when I said private cloud. It's one of those things we debated for a while. We don't need to get into semantics, but underneath Dell EMC provides some of the, you know, the infrastructure platform for those. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to, you know, what are you doing there? Yeah, as you know, as we've talked about before, cloud is an operating model, right? Not a place. And I think John, and what he's done at the University of Vermont Health Network really I think shows that. And it takes a change agent by the way too, not just technology to do that. I think, you know, he's making it sound easy, but he can tell us a little bit how he's done that, but it's a combination of technology, how you modernize the infrastructure, but also what are you doing to actually transform that organization to deliver IT as a service, right? Because it's not just a plug and play, you just plug in a new infrastructure product line and then boom, it works, right? It's not that simple. Absolutely, we want to really put a lot of our IT talent into what I call above the value line. And in my business, it's closer to the bedside. The new IT is really enabling the business to provide in my business better care. So how do we get them out of the data center per se and into the business to enable what they do each and every day? The way we do that is really standardizing on a ruthless infrastructure like block, rack and rail and on top of that, automating everything we do with NIT from a workflow perspective. Give me an example of a real world example. You're talking about the patient experience. You have seven hospitals, seven data centers, seven sets of patients, if you will. But are you talking about as people migrate from maybe from one healthcare facility to another, something's not going with them? Or what exactly are you trying to improve in terms of real life care for people that this migration didn't let you facilitate? Absolutely. On one of our converged platforms, we're running a vendor neutral archive and it's going to allow our patients, anytime we have them scan an image, it immediately goes to a central repository where any one of our hospitals can then take a look at that image. And what you're going to see over time is specialize in our seven hospitals into certain treatments. So if we have a radiology department that we want to send some of our patients to, we want to make sure they have the data and are reading that data before the patient's there. So the ability to take the image once and read the image while our patient is in transit to get that care. So when they arrive at that hospital, we are ready to take on that patient and immediately provide them the care they're there for. Running on one platform, sharing that platform across our seven hospital system. And so what currently happens? So what's the situation now for a patient? Right now a patient would get an image in one hospital, travel to the other hospital, and the image will not be there. We would then retake another image at that hospital and go through the same exercise. So not only as a patient there when they don't want to, but we're going through repetitive questions and the answer. Same song and dance. And the outcome is a negative patient experience, which we're avoiding through IT. Yeah. You threw out blocks, rails, and racks. I recognize those as the Dell EMC products. What is hyper-converged infrastructure? Converged infrastructure. How does that impact what you're doing? And if I saw right, you use some of each. So how do you sort that out? How do you integrate those pieces together? Really what drives is the requirements of the applications you're managing. So we do a deep dive with the applications we take in, and we decide based on the requirements of that application, which of those three platforms run the best? What I've seen is a lot of our critical, mission critical have to keep up 24-7, 365 workloads. We are leveraging the VX block for a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of those medium to low-end workloads on rack or rail where we have the ability to really scale out quick and dynamically with those smaller type applications that are many in size, where we're trying to standardize with our clinical ones more on our block. So really the application requirement drives where that application sits in our environment. All right, so John, how do customers like John manage that environment then? I mean, we want things to get simpler, and even if they've got some various products of yours, how do we pull them all together? Well, as you know, I think the promise of converged and hyper-converged is to simplify IT, right? And I think this is what you're seeing here. So a lot of it is automating everything, or at least helping to really simplify everything from deployment to managing the entire infrastructure as one, as well as sustaining it and for lifecycle managing it as one as well, right? And actually simplifying the upgrade path, which I think that can be the most time-consuming thing, right? But that's the promise. I mean, the promise of converged infrastructure 78 years ago when we came out with VxBlock or VBlock at the time, it was about how do we get help customers like you get out of the infrastructure business day-to-day, the mundane business, if you will, so you can spend more time really up-leveling your staff to do other, more business-critical, mission-critical tasks. Is that fair? It is, we have to. I think we're being asked to move the needle within the business. As Michael Dell says, the business strategy really is the IT strategy. And for that to happen, we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business. And that's usually at that application layer, not at that infrastructure. We want to leverage our partners like Dell Technologies and their technology to really run the business for us while our IT is more in the transform and informative, innovative, and gross of that business. I loved you started out with the seven data centers and the seven and seven and seven. What's the after state? How does your IT team look at your operations and your technology? What we're doing is we're trying to create one shared service model. Even though we'll have people sitting at the seven hospitals, we are all working in unison. We're all leveraging the same workflows, the same technology, the same skillsets. So in essence, we become a dynamic IT shop that I can leverage wherever there's a need. I can take IT personnel from one hospital and have that move to another, and it's the same look and feel. Just like the experience we want to give our users, the same look and feel as they travel, we want to do the same for IT. One logical shared service vision of a department that offers services to our hospitals that they consume, all like for life. And John just touched on this. You was talking about the mundane, right? And removing that and letting you basically, get a little more creative, but take on a different set of challenges. So how do you work with your staff in order to get them to change that mindset so that they can shift because it's not just you at the top, you've got to plant this vision for people to know I'm taking this away from you. This is what I do. Well, no, but we're going to take what you know and we're going to let you do something else. But you got to get them there. So for people maybe watching that share that challenge, maybe, what would you say to them about how you've done that? Well, as John mentioned, you need a change agent, you need a champion, most likely at the senior level, that's going to really ride through this journey, through the ebbs and flows of the challenges you have to deal with. And when you look at people process technology, as you mentioned, changing the mind of a person is probably the hardest thing to do up to three. But what we're trying to do is really change one mind at a time. If I can change one mind at a time, persistently as a champion of where we're going and answer the why and the awareness and the desire of someone wanting to go on that journey with us on behalf of that patient each and every day is how we're going to do it. Case by case, opportunity by opportunity, mind by mind, we will eventually get them to look at what we're doing and understand this is where I want IT to be. That's how we're going to do it at the university. I think the University of Vermont has the right guy for the job. John and John, both of you. Thank you for being with us here. We appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Yeah, good luck down the road. Well, that's it. Wrapping up our coverage here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us for day one. We are back tomorrow. Days two and three live here at the Sands until then for Stu Miniman and the rest of our CUBE crew. Have a good night.