 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We are joined today by Steven Rosenthal. He is the senior product specialist at QTS data centers. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Welcome, thank you. So let's start by finding out a little bit more about QTS based in Kansas City. What do you do? What are you all about? Yeah, so QTS is based in Overland Park, Kansas. We have our operations base and actually right outside of Atlanta in Swanee, Georgia. Where actually I'm from. And we have 16 data centers across the United States, about six million square feet of data center floor. We cater to everybody from hyperscalers, the hyperscalers of the world that everybody I think knows about. To enterprises, to federal customers. We have product lines that cover again, hyperscale, co-location, private cloud, which I think we'll talk about today, and managed services around that private cloud offering. I know Stu is dying to talk private cloud with you, but can you just tell us a little bit about how you fit in precisely with the Microsoft ecosystem? Yeah, so we fit in because we will offer Azure management. So for customers that will, you know, have workloads up on Azure, we can help manage that. And we also have dedicated connections through our connectivity products that will get you to Azure from our data centers. So that's how we kind of fit into this ecosystem. All right, and just to geek out on that one little bit, like when I talked to a lot of service providers, things like AWS Direct Connect and Azure ExpressRoute are one of the things we're seeing just massive adoption on being able to take my own stuff and plug it in or use services from the public cloud. Do you offer all of those? So we have AWS Direct Connect in our Chicago data center that we can cross connect to you, to that via our other data centers. We're also utilizing the software defined networks as packet fabric and Megaport to get you those to those direct routes into Azure and AWS. Okay, great. So you do have the way to, because the discussion has been for a few years, it went from hosting to service providers and like, oh wait, public cloud's the enemy. And now I think we've matured a lot. It's like, yes, of course there's competition there, but as Satya Nadella and Microsoft say, look, we're going to compete against people. We're going to partner with a lot of people. And of course, your customers are using everything. Yeah, I don't think it's just a line. We definitely partner with the public cloud offerings. It's not if you can't beat them, join them. There is a workload for public cloud. There's workloads for private clouds. And we can get into that in detail, but there is absolutely a partnership that we can have there and not a competitive partnership. Yeah, and actually, let's bridge that discussion over to the private cloud discussion. And I'll give you the one that, there is no answer for it, but how are customers sorting this thing out? How are they dealing with it? What do they put where? How do you help them with that discussion? Yeah, what we're finding is customers are, anywhere from all into public cloud to I'm kind of just dabbling in it, maybe putting my toe in it. And we can go in and help them kind of along their cloud journey. So because of the integrated product set that we have within QTS, we can help you from just being a co-location customer to kind of dipping your toe in a little bit with some public clouds, getting you that direct access via AWS Direct Connect or via software defined networking, helping you manage that. But there's workloads out there that customers just want to know where their data is. Where's my data? When you go to a public cloud, I'm not saying it's not safe, it's not secure, but we all know there's issues that sometimes they go down and there's customers for compliancy reasons, for whatever reason they have, they want to know my data is in Swanee, Georgia. And due to the private cloud, and we know it's always there, we can provide that to the customer. Do you think that that customer anxiety of where is my data will always exist for certain clients? Or do you think we will actually get to a point in the cloud computing evolution where people feel really secure? I think if you look over the last few years, people are a lot more secure today than they were three years ago, two years ago, or even one year ago. So if I had a crystal ball, I think people will get a little bit more comfortable, but I think customers in finance, healthcare, healthcare, they're all going to really be nervous about where that data is. So there's always going to be that need for that, certain workloads I want here. The rest of it, yeah, we can put up in public cloud, but I want to know that this data resides in this data center. Yeah, governance and compliance obviously is going to play into that. So let's talk about the private cloud a bit. In our research, we started a few years ago, we said what customers need is true private cloud. And we said that because cloud should really be an operating model, and the public cloud really set the bar as to how I consume, how I manage, how I don't have to get in some of the pieces. So to do that, you really need to modernize the platform, maybe bring us through your journey as to how you've seen it versus just kind of, I had a bunch of servers in Iraq, versus kind of what, how do you define what is private cloud for your environment today? Yeah, so at GTS, we define the entire stack is dedicated to a customer. That's everything from the Nutanix hardware that we use, and we decided to use as our infrastructure base for this, all the way up through the Cisco 9Ks that we support, everything is dedicated to that customer. So there's no multi-tenancy at all within that. So there's no noisy neighbors, there's nobody next to you that you might not know what they're doing. Our journey started about a year ago, maybe a little bit more, where we saw that, as everybody probably did, the evolution of the customer going to that true hybrid model, that not everything is going to public. They, again, not to repeat myself, but there are some workloads that stay within the private cloud, and they needed somewhere to put that. Customers also were looking for more of an OPEX model than a CAPEX model. We can host that for them within our data centers, provide all the data center services that we provide to our Colo customers around duplicate power, and the security that we provide, and allow them to host that within our data centers. So that's what we're seeing in our customers, and that's what's really driving that. All right, when Nutanix positions to the enterprise, it really is about that simplicity that they can offer. Service fighters often have different metrics, and as to how you determine what led you to the Nutanix solution, how does that fit in your overall operations? Yeah, honestly, we did, I mean, for lack of a better term, to bake off. We looked at competitors out there, but Nutanix, by far, they have a right to be in that Gartner Magic Quadrant, because one, their support is just excellent, that we have found from them, everything that we needed from them, they were right there in helping us. Up until now, and we don't think they're going anywhere either, right? Nutanix has been one of our best technology partners that we've brought on board, and we see the benefits of the hyper-converged environment, allowing us, you talked about people want that cloud experience, the cloud experience is, I want to be able to swipe my credit card and have a server running in five minutes. That's not what dedicated private clouds are, but they might want it less than 30 days, less than 60 days. Having hyper-converged there, we can provide that to the customer, get them up and running in a matter of weeks, not a matter of months, with their traditional architecture. One of the things we're hearing a lot at this conference is the importance of having the right kinds of partners and making sure that there is a lot of trust embedded in the relationship. You just described choosing Nutanix, having this bake-off, how else do you walk through the process, can you walk our viewers through the process of how you choose the right people that you want to do business with from a business mindset standpoint, but also complimentary functionality? I think a couple of things, one, we obviously look at the technology. Technology for us is, if not number one, it's up there as pretty close to number one. Does the technology meet the needs of our customers? Can we provide the service with the service level agreements that we have in place? Around our host of private cloud, we have 100% SLA around that, so we want to make sure that we can meet that for the customer. So the technology has to be there. Then outside the technology, the support. This is technology, technology is going to have issues. If we can make sure we have the support to back that up, so if a customer or we have an issue with the infrastructure, we can bring that back online as quick as possible. Then we look at how closely they can do co-market with us, especially Nutanix. We do a lot of things co-marketing with Nutanix. We put on panels within our data centers. We've been doing this for the past, almost a year now, with Nutanix ourselves. Maybe we'll have AWS sit on it. We'll have Cohesity sit on it, and bring in customers or prospects into our data centers and have different topics around there. So all of that kind of mixed together provides a really good partnership for us. Great. Steve, we talked a little bit about how Azure on the public cloud fits in. How does Microsoft fit in on the private cloud discussion? So most of our customers are running Windows. I mean, that's really where it fits in. Of course, currently our host of private cloud runs VMware as a hypervisor, but most of the customers are running Windows as they're operating systems. Oh, absolutely. I mean, still, even from the early days and still today, with the application sits on top, Microsoft has all the business apps up there. Been a lot of announcements at the show, Windows Server 2019, talking about a lot of the shift to kind of SaaS. How are you seeing, is that still a big driver for your customers? Kind of the generational shifts of Windows and what about the changing workloads? I'm curious how those impacts are going. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the changing workloads definitely drives our business. And as you pointed out, a lot of those are going to either Office 365, going up to Azure. We're getting a lot more customers asking us for Azure these days, and I don't want to put AWS against Azure, but we're at the Microsoft show, obviously. We're getting a lot of customers that are driving their business up to Azure. And to be able to support that within our community is really important to be able to support that customer. So, we are definitely seeing that drive towards those type of workloads. You're an industry veteran. You've been in IT for 25 years. I wonder if you could talk about this point in time that we're at now. It feels like an inflection point, but maybe I'm wrong. I mean, can you sort of paint this point in time in the greater context of the cloud computing revolution? I think hybrid's the word, right? I know it's a marketing word. I know a lot of people use it, but I think it really has hit today, where you have companies that say, hey, we're all in on public cloud, and I think that's a great marketing term. But if you really look at all of their workloads, they don't have everything up there, but even if they have 90%, 10% of their workloads are legacy applications that they would have to rewrite to be able to really work in the public cloud. And these applications are running just fine where they are. They don't want to touch them. So I think that hybrid model is where we are today, and it's only going to grow. Yeah, I mean, Steven, I'm curious. We watched for a while, public cloud pulled on the data center apps, but now we have the edge out there. You talk about IoT, you talk about what, you know, machine to machine type technology, going to push things back out, you know, not going to be in some central location. Is that having an impact yet on your business? You know, how would you play in some of these IoT and machine environments? Yeah, I mean, we are constantly looking at the new technologies out there, especially, you know, autonomous cars. It's something that we are looking at very heavily and they require, there's something like six terabytes of data that gets passed back and forth between that car and whatever service is running that car. And that's got to be somewhere on the edge. But I think if you look back at how people were defining private cloud a couple of years ago, how are people defining edge is very different and over the next year or two, we'll get more common, you know, how people are defining edge computing will become a lot more common. So we're looking at how do we plan that market? Do we have to, you know, have data centers closer to the edge, wherever that edge is, in cities that you typically don't see data centers, you're probably going to have a different type of data center within that city to. Oh yeah, absolutely. The edge is very different if you're a telecom provider versus an enterprise, you said that data centers is going to be a pop, is it going to be something in a wireless tower or is it somewhere that supports it? It's all going to be, you know, something that just fits on our wrist at some point in the future, right? Yeah, it's going to fit right there. Check on my data. So getting back to the cities that you don't necessarily think of, I mean, you're a cutting edge tech company based in Kansas City, the Heartland. Right. How do you find it difficult to recruit talent? Because frankly, even the companies in Silicon Valley and Washington and Boston, they're having trouble recruiting talent. Where do you come down? I think it's not only recruiting the talent, it's keeping the talent, which, you know, QTS is very good about keeping the talent. I think if you look at our attrition rate, it's probably some of the lowest in the industry because we have a culture that people want to stay in. But even though our headquarters are in Overland Park, Kansas, again, really our operation headquarters are outside of Atlanta, Georgia in Swanee, which is probably just about 30 miles north. So we have Georgia Tech that we can pull from. You have Emory that you can pull from and you have the entire Georgia University system. I don't want to leave anybody out that we can pull from. And we have data centers around the country, even in Silicon Valley, we have Santa Clara, which we can pull from the Silicon Valley individuals. Dallas has a lot of tech companies, so we're not just pulling from one market. We're pulling from 16 different markets across the country, which helps us a lot, not just to dry up a single market. You said that QTS has a culture that people want to stay in. Microsoft is touting its culture as collaborative, inclusive. Describe QTS's culture. Our culture, a lot of people ask me that and it's like you got to live it. It's very, very family oriented. I know a lot of people say that, but we live it. We care about each other. Nobody walks around going, it's not my job. Everybody is there to support the customer. We are very customer focused. You can see that in our NPS scores. Our NPS scores are very high in the industry. Probably some of the highest out there. And that goes back to just how we take care of our customers. And we look, it goes back to your question about what do we look for in partners. Nutanix probably has a very high NPS score. And we want to make sure that our partners are treating their customers as we want to treat our customers. Great. Well, Steven, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit.