 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. And we're back. This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE. I'm here with Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman. Keith, I don't know about you, but one of the things that really excites me when I get to come to events like this is talking to the users, talking about the practitioners, what they're using, how they're using it. And so I'm really happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Brett Ruth, who is the server, storage, and virtualization supervisor at BKD. Brett, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so BKD, I know you're big in your field, but there might be some people out there that aren't familiar with your organization. Maybe just give us the thumbnail of the company, how long you've been there and your role there. Sure, BKD's the number 12 accounting firm in the United States, 36 offices, net revenue, $564 million, tax audit, corporate finance, wealth advisors, technology services, that's BKD in a nutshell. All right, and your role in the organization? My role is kind of the server supervisor. I have a team of seven CIS admins who report to me. We take care of anything from the Windows server to Linux server to our Nutanix environment, our VMware environment, our Iceland storage environment, and all the applications that live on those. All right, so Brett, you know, one of the things I'm sure you'll find, your stuff doesn't change, you don't have acquisitions to integrate, you don't have new technology be thrown all the time. I'm sure every year they just say, how much more budget and how many more people do you want? Exactly. So what, bring us in the reality. What's your world like? What are some of the big challenges kind of, I say first, if you can, from just kind of the industry standpoint, and how does that impact what you're doing? Sure, so BKD is a growth firm, so we look at business acquisitions when we can. We look at those, we actually completed one not that long ago in Chicago, we expanded there. So in each one's always different, and different technology, some of those acquisitions are a couple servers, some of them are completely cloud-based, some of them are mixed in between. So having a platform, when we settle on with Nutanix has kind of helped be able to make those integrations a little bit easier. But no, every year, budget cycle comes around and what's the initiatives the firm wants to do? And every year it's different, it's fun, it's challenging to have different and new things we have to tackle every year. So when choosing these platforms, one, quick question around the organization, not a bunch of knowledge workers, how many, what's the head count? Around 2600. 2600, so you guys in your IT organization, you work for the being counters of being counters. So they understand ROI, TCO, when it comes to selecting these technologies, how much pressure are you under to do less with more and prove that you're doing, I'm sorry, do more or less, improve that you're doing more or less? Sure, and that comes up during the budget cycles. I mean, there's a large amount of time that's spent of what's next year's initiatives, what does that server landscape look like? Does there a new product that comes out that requires a head count increase or not? Or is it a new application we need to stand up? And every year that comes around and the questions come, well, maybe the firm didn't have a good year, maybe the firm had a better year, so the budget gets adjusted based on that. But more times than not, if the firm recognizes that putting money into IT does nothing but help the business grow. So as long as we spend it wisely, we usually can get accomplished. All right, Brett, so I want you to take us inside, I hate to do it, but the budgeting thing, because one of the promises of, you said you're using Nutanix, used to be, okay, this year, oh, it's time for the server refresh, next year, wait, no, you don't have any server budget. We're doing some storage add-ons or things like that. You might get some budget here or there if you need it or if there's emergency, but you got to justify that. The promise of a pool of resources should be, well, I'm consolidating a number of pools and therefore I should be able to be more agile, more flexible on buying in smaller chunks rather than bigger chunks. What's your experience been on that purchasing from that relationship with the finance side of the business? Sure, so when I started at BKD, I've been in there about five years. It was a traditional three-tier architecture when we rolled into it, and the firm was growing at such a rate that we were running into those physical limitations of the hardware, and it's never a fun game to go ask the CIO an unbudgeted sand purchase. You know, I could do that a couple years in a row and it gets harder and harder to ask those questions, right? So we finally came to a point as a company of we need to do something different. And through a research project I had, and you know, and my team all had to do to accomplish it, we landed on Nutanix and landed on a hybrid converged infrastructure, and what we can do is we build those quote unquote Lego blocks. So now there's not a big giant purchase of a sand or a new set of UCS chassis or whatever the product might be. It's a, I know this quarter I need this amount of nodes or I know for this project I'm going to need this and I can just build and add on what I need to. So it makes the budgeting and those unbudgeted purchase a lot more easier to take. So much of the messaging from day one, day two, it's aimed kind of at you, you're on the ground, you have to deal with not only the engineers that implement the technology, but also the executives that approve the purchases. So a lot of the messaging here has been for you. How have you received it? And what's your impression of VMware's messaging around take your favorite topic? Right, a lot of cloud talk's been happened here and a lot of dev ops has been talked about here and way to improve that. And Bigity has an internal IT development team. So a lot of those things that I can take away here and try to see if I can help our dev team however I can. A lot of the messaging is just seeing where the industry's going, not just VMware, but everyone on the solutions floor. I mean, that's a lot of my time here is research and seeing what projects that I know we have to complete in the next fiscal year or two and then what products are out there I can just buy. All right, can you bring us into your application portfolio? What sits on the Nutanix platform? What doesn't? Here you said you got a scale out NAS platform also. You talked about some developers there. I'd love to understand how you figure out what goes where, where you are in building that out. How many nodes you have if you can share? Sure, yeah. The ISLON is six nodes in each data center. The Nutanix is 26 nodes in each data center. We're probably 99.9% virtualized. I mean, the only thing I think we don't have virtualized is we still have a physical domain controller outside of both just from sheer. If everything is off, I have one point I can get back into, right? But exchange, SharePoint, our SQL is all virtualized. The ISLON is really kind of the unstructured file pool that we can put, map drives, we can put blob storage from our SharePoint environment, lands onto it, flat files from our SQL land onto it. And yeah, everything runs on our Nutanix. Okay, so going into that developer relationship, you know, Nutanix, I've talked to these guys before about their ideal of being a cloud company. So developers, when they hear the term cloud, how, what's the impact of you on your role when you have Nutanix, a cloud company, and your developers asking for a cloud? Sure, it's a, it's an interesting question because, you know, we try to phrase it as, BKD, we now have an internal cloud. We have an enterprise cloud, you know, with the term private cloud. And we can provide those instant resources to DevOps when they need it, depending on if they have a new set of QA boxes that need to be stood up. But, you know, there are, there is some projects and that we're looking at of, you know, is it AWS or is it Azure or is it Google's cloud of, or the things that make sense to go out there versus keeping them in house. And those come up as a, as a, as an e-basis. So DevOps. DevOps. So, when we talk about DevOps, what are the pain points that you guys, because that's a big topic. Do I go all the way as far as Netflix? And DevOps, all the things that we say? Or what have you guys targeted to say, okay, here's where the value at is in an enterprise? Sure. I think we're still, that's still one of those things that our development team's looking at. You know, I think it really depends on the application and what the business is looking for. I mean, there's, there's been some products that internally that the team's released that, you know, makes sense to stay on-prem. The next project I find out a month for now might be something that's perfect for the cloud. And I think they just take that on a kind of case-by-case basis. All right. Brett, you've got a, you know, portfolio of partners that you're working with here. What's on your list of to-dos for them? You know, what are you looking for from the ecosystem to make, you know, your life easier and help? Sure. Always looking for stable code releases. I think any engineer would love stable code releases. You know, for the most part, everybody gets that. We're always going to have issues, but. Anybody want to call out for not giving you stable code releases? I can say everybody, because, I mean, that's, everyone will do that. But, you know, I think it's continuing to improve the product, continue to make it, you know, it's that do, you know, do more with less, right? So, I can't have, you know, two or three dedicated people work on the virtualization environment. They have to be multi-skilled. You know, and my, you know, my team that I have, you know, my sevens, this admins are all great. You know, probably some of the best guys I've worked with. But, you know, they, we all have to wear multiple hats, even, you know, sometimes maybe we don't want to. So, having those products come into the environment that make it easier for them, and then just seeing how those code releases come out to just make our lives even better. Yeah, just, just real quick, can you say whose hardware your Nutanix is on? It's Super Micro, it's from Nutanix. It's the basic thing. This morning in the keynote, got a big laugh talking about some of the co-opetition that goes on just between Dell, EMC, and, you know, and VMware, and some of their partnerships. Some of your partners get along better than others. Is that something that impacts you, something you think about at all? It's definitely being a Nutanix guy coming into VMworld this year has definitely been an interesting experience. It's, they're, they're, yeah, it's that co-opetition that happens between the two, but, you know, at the end of the day, I still have servers drawn. I have an environment to maintain for BKD, and, you know, if I need something done, I know I can go to them, and they'll help work with me on it. So, the show floor, the share of VMware, just as massive as it's been all the way. VMware, it's all about the ecosystem. How important is this large ecosystem to your independent, your everyday operations of your environment? Sure. I mean, it's the, never know what the next project that comes out or the next scene the business wants to do or the next act of vision comes up. Maybe there's a product that I don't have in-house that needs to take care of it. And then having, having this many vendors that I can go and talk with over these, these couple of days has been great because it's, I go back, I can now go back to the team and go, man, I didn't think about this, and this product would help solve that or two months from now, something comes around, I go, oh yeah, I talked to these guys and go flip through the business cards and the paper stuff we take home and, you know, and call them up. I love, yeah, I love that, even as a Nutanix customer in the VMware, the co-opetition that you still find value in the overall. Oh yeah, absolutely. Brett, any of the, you know, either announcements or kind of new things coming out in the market, do you think catching your eye, you said you were bringing that back to the office? The, you know, I, forgive me, I can't remember the name, but the, the, the malware kind of virus scanner that VMware, that they were talking about, the power it was talking about yesterday, that kind of really was a, that being able to use that AI to figure out, you know, at a base level, what, what Militia code is and isn't was, it was being awesome game changer, if you know, it works out how it looks to be. Yeah, absolutely. No shortage of new things to, to, to look into, Brett Ruth, BKD, really appreciate you sharing your viewpoint, everything going on inside. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you guys. I hope to catch up with you some time in the future. For Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE.