 Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Christian Peterson, who's the CEO founder of Zentura, a service provider based in Denmark. Christian, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so tell us a little bit about, you know, what led you to create the company a little bit about your background and then we'll get into it. My background is from Citrix. I'm a Citrix consultant from back from the ages with the windframe and all the old stuff. And in 2006, I founded Zentura with the focus on Citrix consulting services and all the stuff around Citrix. And quite fast, we saw the trend in the market to become a service provider. So we started up with some of our on-prem customers and moved them into a traditional hosting virtualization platform. So did you start as hosting with certain Citrix services that you were offering to your customers? Walk us through kind of that progression. Yeah, our product is something we call Business Cloud. It's a branded Citrix platform and it's a full service platform for our customers. So everything is around Citrix. The connectivity to our platform is Citrix-based. Yeah. Okay, and how big do you have multiple data centers? How many customers do you have? Give some of the speed and feeds. We have two data centers and we have roughly 3,000 people connecting into our site on some customers. We are mainly focusing on legal and accounting customers with special demands for 24-7, yeah. Okay, and all of your customers are in Denmark, correct? All of our customers are in Denmark. Some of them have branch offices in the UK and in Germany and one in Russia. Okay, so why don't you bring us up to speed as to when did you start looking at Nutanix? What led you kind of down that path? I'd like to understand a little bit about kind of the problem statement and the criteria, what led to that, yeah. In the beginning, as we were at Citrix house, then of course we started with Sensor, that made really good sense for us because it was a Citrix product. And quite fast, it became really complex. And the development of our platform was quite fragmented over the years. So we really needed to, I've seen Nutanix at Synergy from the beginning and I saw on the keynote where Mark Templeton roll in a block of Nutanix notes just doing VDI and I said, okay, this is VDI. And what really was a huge game changer for me was when Nutanix introduced AHV because I really liked many of the concepts about putting the whole stack into the cluster. You don't rely on external management. You don't rely on that many components. You don't have a SQL as a backend. We were evaluating a lot of stuff, a lot of products. How we could simplify our current environment because we had huge issues. Yeah, so your Citrix client, were you running Zen before or what was your environment before? Our existing environment was a mix. We had eight clusters, some of them on Zen, different versions because the upgrade path, it was a pain, it required a lot of downtime and we only security patched and critical patches. We didn't do major release upgrade because we have so many issues with it and some years before we introduced Nutanix we switched half of our stack to VMware because that solves some of our issues because they have a good way of handling and migrating data inside their own platform but quite fast the cost became an issue for us because the cost is, as a service provider, of course you just pay in bits and you pay per usage but still the cost was just going sky high, right? Okay, so it was HV, was that the catalyst to get you to Nutanix then? Exactly. It wasn't kind of a hyper-converged or it definitely wasn't VDI, it sounded like. Oh, the thought, I'm quite old in this field and I really liked the idea of having a Zen and all things and I was not easy to convince this was a good idea. Like in the past when people were switching from regular computers to a Zen, everybody says, oh, I want my data on my computer. Trust me, I worked on a lot of the early Zen stuff for all that out at Wikibon, we actually created the term server-SAN which was all of the functionality and things that you loved in a Zen. We're just going to do it on the servers, really, what that is as opposed to Nutanix started out, oh, there's no Zen, I'm like, no, no, no, you're going to scare off all the people that used it. That was also my biggest concern, it really was. But when Nutanix started with the VMware, we did a business case on it and it wasn't feasible because we still had the VMware licensing cost and also now we have the Nutanix licensing cost and it was not easy to create a business case because the customers, they don't care what we put underneath because they only look on cost and if I add something to my stack, then I only add some cost and maybe I can do something a bit more efficient but that's it. Okay, so have you swapped the floor now with EHV everywhere or what was that? We did a full turn replacing everything, all legacy, we did inside our business, we did a survey with all our employees and said, okay, instead of doing just the business case bit by bit and how you do normally and compare licensing cost and all that, they said, okay, we want everything in this business case, not only products. So all the consultants went up with the main issues were all the complexity because it was not easy. We had people on network, we had people on storage. So we always had to ask another one if you want to provision something and the sales guys need to go to the tech guys to say, okay, do we have enough storage for this and what about the IOs and yeah, there was a lot of issues with this and also working at night and all the change windows and doing all the storage teachers moving workloads because customers were unsatisfied on this platform. We can move it to the new platform. We had so many issues with this. So we actually ended up just, we discussed internally says, okay, if we're going to do this, then we are going to do it 100%. It's not just putting Nutanix on site and move something. So internally in the board we discussed and says, okay, it's now or never because this is going to be our window of opportunity to grow and expand. So we discussed and we agreed on a total replace, everything, network is everything. So we switched all our existing infrastructure and migrated all the legacy workloads on to Nutanix in a four to six months timeframe. And we didn't have extract at that time. So it was quite manually. Yeah. So obviously you're here. So it went okay. Take us through what did you learn four to six months is not a short period of time. So looking back, what lessons learned, what would you recommend to your peers to make things even better if, what would you change if you had to go back? What I would change that I didn't do it before because it would have made sense. Actually, we had quite new equipment. We just bought a new sand one year before that. It wasn't even old. That was an issue. But the cost of the existing, even though we had bought it, the cost was getting too high. We were using too many hours on maintaining this. The best time to do this would have been a year ago, but the second best time is to do it now. Don't push it off for another year. Exactly, exactly. And what, yeah, that was, we should have done it before. But I don't think Nutanix was mature for this at the moment, but now, one year before this, I was actually convinced. So, you know, AHVs, you know, there's, I think they're approaching about a third of customers are using AHV now. You said it's mature now, you're happy with it. What, you know, what more do you want to see out of AHV? You know, where would you like to see them continue to, you know, add features of maturity? Yeah, as a service provider, of course, AHV have some limitations compared to all of the other stacks because multi-tentancy is a big requirement for a service provider. But we have taken it kind of another approach to it because they have all the APIs, so we can just do it ourselves. We have all the APIs exposed. Right now, we are working on a billing model because in our business case, it was not only IT, it was also the management and all the accounting and all the other things. If we could optimize those, the whole business case would look even better. So we're working on a model where the system automatically builds the customers and everything, send status reports to the customers. So before they get an invoice, they know if they want to change something because our solution right now is fully managed. So it's fully managed from our side because we have some issues with the multi-tentancy stuff. And what management stack are you using today? Is it in-house or, you know, what are you using? What? Management stack? Management stack, in-house, yeah. Yeah, okay. Pretty typical for a service provider. It is, yeah. Yeah, have you looked at some of the management tools from Nutanix or, you know? I'm paying a lot of attention on calm because it really makes really, really good sense for us. Okay. When will, what does it need for you to be able to consider it even further? I need to play with it. I need to try it out. I've only seen some sessions. I also saw it last year and I've been following it closely. But from a slide to getting in production, it takes some time and I really need to play with it. It looks really amazing. I mean, most service riders have spent the time kind of building their stack. So, you know, going from, I've got it. Exactly. That is challenging. But now we're really moving and we can see how much time we use on a day-to-day basis. I think we cut the time to one-tenth of what we did before. We had a lot of things for managing infrastructure and doing changes because if you have a really fragmented solution, then you have a lot of people you need to involve because he knows best about this cluster and all the differences in this cluster. And that was also one of the biggest pains. And also the Nutanix strategy to just, as I said to all the employees, this is the final migration we are gonna do ever because now it's ribbon replaced. And now we can see in the past, we used the senior consultants for expanding clusters and adding new clusters and doing network and doing a lot of stuff. Right now we moved it down in the chain and so it's a regular support guy. He can put in a note right now and he can do the expand of the cluster. We do it in a regular service window. Now it's not an extraordinary service window, nothing. All right, so Christian, you're so happy with the Nutanix. You're not only a customer, you're also a channel partner. Exactly. What led to that? What services were you already offering for there and what led to you look to move down that path? We saw a lot of synergies because we could also, we could extend the enterprises and their use cases. We had Nutanix and if we could sell Nutanix to some of our customers, maybe we could do some replication and DR for our customers as a service. Now Nutanix, of course, is moving towards XI but that's our idea and we already have some customers signed up for disaster recovery as a service on our A3 platform and that made really good sense. And also we did a lot of work in certifying all our employees and why don't we, we have spare time now. Why don't we use our knowledge and sell this product? It makes really good sense. And what I really also like about Nutanix is there's not a one size fit all because everybody needs, somebody can go public and somebody go private. And we had a lot of enterprise Citrix customers because we have a small part of our company also do Citrix consulting because that's our background. So we had a lot of potential customers there. Yeah, so we've watched over the last five years. There was real tug back and forth between VMware and their service providers. They tried to, you know, it was VCloud Air, you're going to be a great partner. Oh, wait, you know, we're going to do it ourselves. Wait, we're going to do partner program. Oh, wait, Amazon and a couple of big ones are there. How's Nutanix as a partner for service providers? You mentioned XI, is that something they'll partner with you on or is that something that they're competitive on? And how do they, how do you look at that? Because the main difference between, if you see all the other cloud providers and if you see VMware and the other providers, this is one stack. It's still the same, it's still the same. And you're not going to have to create a lot of stuff to adopt this. It can be quite easy for us. We also see, I see there's a possibility for us to of course sell this, we can be a reseller. We can just have one account and we can provision the customers' VMs in the cloud. So it creates, it sets us in a very better, much better position than we were before because if we team up with Asia or some of the other public cloud providers, we're not in control anymore. And it really, you can't, it's easy to deploy and it's easy to work with if you know how to do it. But it's not that easy. Yeah, all right. Well, Christian Peterson, really appreciate you sharing with us everything that you're doing at Dintura and your customers love to hear the insight into Denmark and what's happening there. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage up here from Nutanix.next 2017 in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE.