 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. Welcome to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's production here at the AWS Public Sector Show in Washington D.C. I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this week will also be Dave Vellante and John Furrier doing a day and a half worth of programming. I've covered lots of Amazon ecosystem shows and happy to welcome to the program first time guest and first time on the program, Dan Fallon, who's the director of Public Sector Systems Engineers at Nutanix, Dan, great to see you. Thank you, Stu, happy to be here. All right, so you and I have known each other for a number of years, I've been at every dot next actually that Nutanix is at, really most of the time at Nutanix, we're talking about people's data centers but we've been watching how Nutanix really went from everybody, that hyperconverged term that we threw out but now the messaging is around enterprise cloud, the portfolio has definitely expanded as have the partnerships. Give us, Dan, why Nutanix is at this show and a little bit about your role at the company. Yeah, yeah, so I lead our public sector technical groups, systems engineering so we have all our government business state, local and federal, rolled up into one group. So I'm based out local show for me in the DC area and this is our second year attending the Public Sector Summit. So last year it was after our calm acquisition we really starting to step into the space of I would say solving the cloud problem for organizations and blending your on-prem environment into your public cloud. So that was kind of our focus last year when the marketing team and we kind of get together and figure out what shows we're at. We're like, let's do AWS, it's kind of a new one. We're like, all right, we'll be good. I would say it was a hit last year and then this year we made some additional acquisitions announced at our large dot next conference and really focusing on beam and cost optimization. So Dan, I remember a couple of years ago people would knock on Nutanix. They're like, ah, they're just VDI and really they only work on the government sector. It's like federal is like a big thing because they can get to a certain price point that some person can sign off on and we're like, government's pretty impressive segment. You look at the show, I hear we're expecting about 10,000 people, which is typical for these regional shows, but this is more than that, the public sector. So tell us a little bit about your customers and love to hear you talk about what use cases they are and how they think about cloud and look at Amazon and look at Nutanix and how that fits for them. Yeah, yeah, and I actually just heard from our director of marketing here that it's approaching 14,000. So they're blowing out the attendance. Yeah, I mean, definitely government is unique. That's kind of why we have it divided into a vertical. Nutanix was very early on in the federal and unlike a lot of startup small companies, instead of running away from the additional security burden and the compliance requirements, the leadership, Dirge and Siddish leaned into it. They said, all right, let's build out our federal team, let's go out and do common criteria, compliance, some certifications that cost a lot of money. So they really leaned into that and helped the organization grow in federal and that kind of came our beachhead and then obviously Nutanix has just grown around the world since then, but across public sector, really a couple of different verticals, they actually combined the government units about a year ago now. So I'm getting more and more familiar with the state and local business as well as education and you can kind of look at those as three separate verticals and then my kind of background is federal. I've been here doing contracting consulting work for the federal government and now at Nutanix and so they all kind of have a different spin in the federal government since we're in DC, start there first, really big focus on data center optimization and cloud first mandates. So I get into discussions because there's really a larger conversation to be had on what is cloud, a lot of people see it as a destination but it's really, they have scorecards that they need to close, consolidate data centers and part of that involves moving to the cloud, part of that involves just refactoring their on-prem and could be hyper-converged, just really getting to a better optimized state in their on-prem data center. So. And one thing I like is when you talk to customers, they don't get into these arguments over like, well what is a private cloud? What is the, how do I measure these public clouds? They're like, yes, I have a cloud strategy and you're right, the government has certain, here's the criteria we need to follow, here's the services you can buy. I'm sure they've got GSA contracts for lots of different things that they can buy off of but Nutanix has a tool that you're talking about at the show called Beam. Why don't you explain how that fits into helping customers understand what applications they put where and how they manage their entire infrastructure? Yeah, yeah and I think whenever I get into those conversations with cloud, I always like to understand why cloud, why are you moving into cloud? A lot of times it is higher level mandates, there's a presidential memo, there's a new, so they're laws they have to follow in terms of optimization of the data center. But if you peel it back, there are agility and getting rapid time to market. But the cost is a big thing and a lot of times because of those mandates, the cost kind of has to be a second factor and they, so it might end up being more expensive because they're not really taking that into consideration, because they're being told to go. So when Nutanix launched Beam at .next, I really see it as a very good play in the public sector space because I hear agencies kind of get the bill after the fact. And then they have this shock of like, well our budget for cloud spend this year is going to be eaten up in our first couple months based on this first bill. So with Beam we have a lot of governance and cost control but also the budgeting aspect, which I think will be huge in government because they have a fixed budget, they're really, they're not as used to doing things OPEX, they're very CAPEX minded, so the cloud spend, they kind of have to change how they're thinking and Beam gives them that budget analysis so they can say, all right, I'm going to spend this much a month and do the allocation and break it down. Yeah, it's funny. For people that don't work with the government, they always hear like, oh, well they spent $100 for a hammer, they're overspending, but in my career I've worked with government and you get the calls at the end of the quarter, which is like, oh my gosh, I actually haven't used up my budget and I better use it now or yeah, I won't get it next quarter or next year. So cost absolutely a key concern. Drill us in one down level as to what kind of thing, how does Beam help them? You said, understand, optimize what they have as well as plan for the future. Yeah, yeah, so they're, you know, Beam hooks into the public cloud providers as well as your on-prem stack. There are a couple different views. We've already refactored it into the nice Nutanix UI so you have the same look and feel, but you have a couple different views. You have the cost visibility view, so your spend per day, per month, per year, and then you have an analyzed view so there's a spend efficiency view. So you can actually get a quick visualization of, am I getting the best value out of my cloud contract? And this is really common in government. They'll cut some type of ELA or longer term contract, but if you're not using all those credits or taking the best benefit, you're not getting your ROI. So the spend efficiency will help in that aspect. There are, you know, that Beam goes beyond just visibility. So you have ability to do one-click cost controls. So maybe, you know, change things from spot to reserve instances. You can also drill down into the subservices. So, oh, that's costing more than I thought. You know, is it my NAT service or my low balancer service? Like which exact spot is taking all that cost? And then the budget allows you to build cost centers within your org. So build out and, you know, charge back is hit or miss in government. Sometimes it's way up at the top of the command, but sometimes, you know, we are seeing more and more orgs and especially on the service provider and Fed integrator side. You know, common scenarios, government contract awarded to a Fed integrator and they build out a private cloud and need to do charge back. So that's another big aspect of Beam. Yeah, it's so funny. Remember, you know, just few years ago, it's like, oh, well, public cloud, it's super easy and super cheap. And like, well, when you actually dig into it, well, it's different, is I guess what I would say. It's simple, isn't necessarily what I would say. And cost depends on what you're doing with it and how you do it. So we talked a bit about federal. You were telling me off camera that you were seeing a lot of the sled customers here. So give us a little insight as to what are some of the concerns? What are some of the real things that, you know, that segment of public sector looking for at this show in front of the ecosystem? Yeah, that's one reason we love doing this show and it's a great spot that brings together because state and local so regionalized, you know, 50 states and then all the different counties and cities and a lot of them attend here. I, you know, kind of just gotten into public sector when this show happened last year and I met a lot of our sled customers here for the first time. So it's a good, you know, bring them all to one spot which is rare in state and local. It's a lot more regional conferences. So the challenge with state and local is because it's so regionalized and then you really have four verticals within state and local. You have the state business which is kind of mirrors federal and more large enterprise. Some states are adopting cloud first strategies. Some states are kind of still figuring it out. So some states are a Miri and Fed government and they have this kind of cloud first and trying to figure out how to make that work. And then at the local level, you have the county and cities and very, very scattered on their approach. But there are, we have some significant size counties that are using Nutanix with things like Cloud Connect to back up into AWS. And then I'd say higher ed is probably the most forward-leaning in terms of their cloud usage. A lot of higher ed pushing aggressively into cloud actually where I used to work Maryland University of Maryland aggressive push there. So they still have a lot of fragmented IT on-prem though. They have different orgs, business school, engineering school with their own kind of little IT phyptomes and then you have central IT trying to standardize and make more public cloud usage. So they have a lot of the same challenges of a big enterprise where they need to kind of get that visibility and cost control across not only their on-prem but also as they move into public cloud. Yeah, Dan, one of the things I've loved when I dig into whether it's the federal government or even the local government, how technology and IT are helping drive innovation. We often don't think of, you think about government just mired in bureaucracy. Wonder if you have any customer stories you can share about fun and interesting things people are doing on top of the infrastructure, transformational type of activities. Yeah, I mean I think kind of the buzzword maybe of this year seems to be a lot around the IoT and machine learning. So it's still a lot in the pilot phases but Nutanix we announced Project Sherlock at .next so kind of our approach to really a Paz IoT at the edge. So Paz machine learning at the edge. And we actually just deployed our first customer on the commercial side a week ago. So still early days but I would say the interest at the state and local level is huge. That smart city initiatives, self-driving car initiatives and just the data is overwhelming. So they're planning ahead. Some of them are pretty far along but there's obviously starts and stops on where these initiatives are going but the amount of data and it's all dispersed and just how to get their arms around that how to control that. And then in federal there's a lot of requests for machine learning out at the tactical edge. So we have our soldiers forward deployed, how do they take their imagery and analyze that and not have to wait 24 hours for someone to come back from the main data center. And that's real life saving game changing for them to be able to analyze it right then and there and also big in disaster relief scenarios. So being able to analyze, I was talking to one customer we had at a CXO round table last week at our local dot next event and they were talking about after the hurricanes in Puerto Rico is how to analyze like where's there even power? Where's the water good? And overlaying all that on imagery but right now that's like 15 different sources that they were trying to pull together into one system. So a lot of challenges like that people are trying to address. And I love that, Dan. And I think you hit right on it. It's data at the center of it. How can I leverage it? How can I get new value out of it? I've talked to some government agencies that are like, how do I transform how we do parking in a city? I have the data, we have some sensors. Oh wait, we can actually make an app. Sometimes it's partnering with the commercial side and business, but other times it's government just driving these for it. All right, Dan, want to give you the final word. We're just kicking off the event but give us final takeaway for Nutanix AWS here at Public Sector Summit, what you want the takeaways to be. Yeah, well, we're here both days. I encourage everyone to stop by and talk to Nutanix and really, Beam was just launched. So the great thing is it's our first SaaS offering which is obviously a mind shift for us but you can demo it just by signing up. So it's kind of traditional we've been in the infrastructure market where we get customers that are like, oh, I want to try it out and we have to ship them a system or they have to download software. Now it's just, oh, go sign up on the SaaS offering. So I think that'll be a great new delivery vehicle for Nutanix and I think as we kind of shape our ecosystem of not only different ways to consume with ZyCloud services being being SaaS but also different capital models in terms of the way the customers purchase. I think that's another big driver around cloud is how the finance side consumes IT. So I think it's great to see, we're kind of expanding, blending into the AWS ecosystem as well but tying it all together so people can manage everything from one spot. All right, with Dan Fallon, pleasure chatting with you this morning. Help me kick things up and absolutely the diversity of technologies, how we are going to purchase things, changing quite a lot, everything from modernizing our data center to SaaS application. The thing, I remember at .next, I said modernize the platform then we can modernize the applications on top of it. So working through with customers through there has changed it. All right, we have just like Dan said, day and a half worth of coverage here on theCUBE. Of course, check thecube.net for all the recordings as well as all the shows we'll be at. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.