 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Now your host, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Okay, we're back here at .NEXT, the conference, the Nutanix conference, first ever Nutanix conference at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. Is that how you say it? Fontainebleau, it's spelled like Fontainebleau. Dave, you can do the Italian, you can do the French. It's a fantastic show, just under 1,000 people here in the inaugural conference, a lot of energy, a lot of clapping in the audience today. Bob Love is here, he's the director of IT, at Bottom Line, Boston based. Good to see you, Bob, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, guys. So, you're getting your weekends back, you got time to watch the patch. It's right, it's right. Tell us about that story, where did that originate? The inflate gate, is that what you were referring to? No, no, please, we're Patriots fans all here. So, let's change that subject back to... We didn't do it. Yeah, yeah, so part of the reason why I get my weekends back is because of the most disruptive and liberating technology that I've used in the last 10 years. And that's the Nutanix platform. It's a technology that has given me high availability back and ease of management. And for me and my teams, that we can actually take machines in and out of the clusters, we can perform maintenance on them at any time of the day or night. And we choose to do that during the day, by the way, so that we can go back in and have our weekends and enjoy our families, which is a much more pleasurable experience than being in and patching systems. So, tell us about Bottom Line, what's the company about and what's their story? Sure, so Bottom Line is a financial services-focused SaaS provider. So, we're a software as a service organization. We provide websites and banking locations for about 800 banks and credit unions. We do payment networks for online payment systems. So, if you join our ecosystem, you can have automatic payments sent to your vendors. It's, there's a variety of other services that they provide to corporate systems for legal and healthcare as well. So, we're spread across a wide variety of industries, the primary focus is in financial systems, and now we're starting to spend a lot of time and energy doing security work for those companies as well. How many people are you? We're a 1500-person organization, and we're actually based out of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, not out of Boston, by the way. Oh, okay. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. Tech companies in Portsmouth, that's right over the border. Okay, so, you essentially building your own IT infrastructure as a service, you're providing that service provider. So, tell us about the infrastructure. What's the plumbing look like? Sure, sure. So, today we have two primary data centers in the United States, and we have two others in the UK and other parts in Geneva. We're, for the most part, hosting all of our customer infrastructure there. We also have a significant footprint in IT and our corporate services, like for all of our back-end things that we do, that keep the company running, like email and link and instant messenger and video conferencing. Those are the areas that I've actually started to focus in on and using Nutanix technology to try and stabilize and grow. Now, how long you been at bottom line? I've been there for three years. Okay, so, when did you bring Nutanix in? Did you oversee that? Yes, I did. Okay, so, give us the before and after. Tell us the... Sure, the first use of the technology was with the VDI. It was our virtual desktop infrastructure where we were delivering desktops to all of our developers who are located all around the world. So, it was a great technology to be able to send them the entire desktop to do their work on in a secure fashion. Nutanix gave us the ability to do that in a very scale-out fashion. We were able to... The workload for that virtual infrastructure was a nice fit. And that was our first sort of putting our toes in the water for Nutanix. We worked out great, so then we've now taken it and we've grown it to all of our core back-end IT infrastructure. Can I ask Bob, when you decided in Nutanix, who else were you looking at while we're some of the decision criteria there? That's short. We looked at our Brownfield build-out that we have today. We're a company that's been around for about 20 years. So, a portion of our organization is based on growth, is based on mergers and acquisitions, and we like to call them combinations. Those combinations that we do can pick up a wide variety of infrastructure from other organizations. And we like to standardize on things, and we need to do it in a very rapid fashion. So, actually, you don't know what you're going to get when you're actually walking into a situation like that. So, it could be a variety of infrastructure. So, what we like to do is come in and we come in fast and we use these devices to blend a standard across all of our sites. And, again, in our back-end corporate infrastructure, we've got legacy products like enterprise arrays from EMC, NetApps, you name it. We have just about every storage array known to man, and we're basically trying to standardize and consolidate down to one vendor, and that is no excuse. So, we'd love to talk to the practitioners so we can get the real story. And one of the challenges that I think people have, one of the things the industry does that's not good, the vendor community is, they will take a brand new shiny product and they'll compare it to a five-year-old, 10-year-old architect you say, we doubled performance, so you damn well better double performance if it's been that long. So, I'm trying to peel through, and figure out, Bob, how much of what Nutanix, relative to what you had before, is sort of the architecture, the newness, all the things that we're hearing about today, and how much is it that you just had older products being replaced by newer products? What's really different? It's definitely, we're a very cost-conscious organization, and the operational money that it takes to run a data center that has 50 racks of servers that require cooling and electrical and security around that is a significant number. When I can take that, and a brownfield build out like that, and I can bring it down to like four racks, and I can pick those up and move them around anywhere in the world, then I've just made us a more efficient and agile organization, and that's a significant hit to the bottom line for us. So, no pun intended. When you do, yeah, talking to your CFO, when you do a business case, so it's relatively straightforward, I would think, to make a business case of, look, here's what we're doing today, if we do this, we can save a bunch of dough, consolidation, cut power and cooling, and I presume to see if I was going to say fine. I'll leave the technology decision to you, Bob. You figure out which technology best, which vendor, that's fine. I'll write the check if you're going to guarantee or commit to saving that money, fine. When you, as an IT practitioner, make that decision, I presume you look at a like-to-like comparison. What I'm saying is you look at new products versus new products, not new products versus old products, and I wonder if you could sort of take us inside, you don't have to name names, but if you want to, that's great, in terms of when you were doing the comparison three years ago, what did you see? So it attracted you to new products. It's a great question, and Nutanix was the most attractive of all of them when I looked across the spectrum of providers in this space because they were actually the owners of the tin, or the hardware, as well as the software that sits on top of it. They were fully integrated and they were consolidated. When I looked at some of the other vendors, I mean you could look at EMC, you could look at VBlock, for example, or some of the other providers that have similar alternative solutions. What they are is really just sort of, they're playing catch-up with this organization because they built it from the ground up. And the way they did it was, unlike anybody else where they blended the SSDs with your traditional slower drives, your SATA disks, so that they had a great story for that performance requirement that is always hitting the top of my request for my desk, is that everybody needs performance, but they don't need it all the time and they don't need it every day. But when they need it, they need to know it's going to be there. The Nutanix platform was the only one that could guarantee it all in one block. It was a great story. So it was the integration? Yeah. You talked about your availability improvement. We heard the Gartner guy this morning say that 40% of the unplanned outages are due to human error and the other 40% are due to coding, 80% is human. So don't make changes, is the message there, but you got to make changes to stay competitive. So is that really where you got the availability hit? Yeah, it was part of it. The Nutanix story, when they simplify the stack, when I take out four or five different vendors that I have to worry about vulnerability patches, things of that, and all that complexity goes away, then my SLAs go up and my uptime goes up because I'm able to achieve a simpler organizational approach to the way I manage that. So I take the human factor out of it. Yeah, gosh, Bob, you bring up a hugely important point is the upgrades and the migrations. At Wikibon, we say that, conservatively speaking, you spend over 30% of the budget of storage over the lifetime of it by just doing those migrations, moving stuff in, moving it out. They said that's, storage has been, that seems to be what they spent a lot of their time on. They do. And the patching, I mean patching's so difficult and when you do it, how do you do it? You know, what's the Nutanix environment like? Is it truly just a pool of infrastructure, do you add, move, change, always upgraded, much more seamless? So they'll tell you the story about the one click upgrade. We've been through three of them now and it actually is that simple. So I'm very happy with what they've done and they continue to improve it. And some of the road mapping that they're sharing about increasing the performance and the high availability is going to get even better. So I think what it does is it frees up my guys to do higher tasks now. They're no longer running around worrying about vulnerability patches at the switching layer or something like that. They're actually thinking about automation and orchestration, which is going to save us even more cost efficiencies down the road. Yeah, so huge point there. Some people are worried that you make some change. Oh, I'm going to fire my staff or bring in new people or just, the only thing that matters is the virtualization admin and everything goes. It sounds like you've just moved some things around and adjusted and add more value back to the business. Exactly, exactly. The same people, the same very bright people that I like to work with, are all doing different things too. And it's a wonderful experience for all of us. I was just, one of the things that we say is really tough on IT is you never get rid of everything. So there was a quote in the morning video. I mean, you were quoted in the keynote for getting your weekends back, but there was a customer that said, raid groups, configuring raid groups is like dead. I got rid of it. What tasks did you get rid of? I mean, have you gone back to your management and said, here's all the things we've done better and here's all the things we're doing? How are you a hero internally now that you do Nutanix? Sure, it started with, like I had mentioned early on, the high availability and being able to take my critical systems, like my email systems. I can take them out of an N plus one model. I can work on it during normal regular business hours during the day. I can patch it and push it back into the cluster all without affecting the flow and mail and the services, those key services that helped the company grow. That's how I've become a hero because prior to the Nutanix platform being there, things were done the old fashioned way. It was a legacy architecture that required, those six or seven different vendors all had to be addressed on an individual basis and we're in the financial space. So we have very strict change control and we have very limited windows of time in which we're supposed to be able to take things offline. And we have to coordinate that with our customers, which is very important. So now we've taken out all of that and we made it irrelevant with the high availability model. So you would normally do a major software, when you do a major software upgrade, typically best practice would be to shut down, right? Is that correct? In the old days, yes. Well, the old days weren't that long ago, right? Yeah, it's true. And there were some vendors that would do things to allow you to sort of upgrade on the fly, but it was dangerous business and one that was not recommended. So you're saying that's now your standard practice. Yeah, and it has to do with this platform mostly, because we've been able to take that to the next level of SLAs and high availability. And we can stand behind them with confidence, whereas before it was not always that confidence wasn't there that we could keep those services up and running at a four nines up time. Now you're a VMware shop, right? Correct. So what do you make of this? Stu and I have been talking today about, let's see if a VMware awesome company, they're just phenomenal ecosystem, but as they get bigger, other people try to come into their space, they're going into other people's spaces, they're being very careful about where they go and very, very predictive. It feels like Nutanix is saying, damn the torpedoes, we want to go a multi-cloud, we want to make storage invisible, we want to make virtualization invisible. So it's interesting, a little friction there, but what do you make of that as a customer? What do you want to see from VMware and Nutanix? So I think that friction that you're describing is going to be good for the customer, it's going to be good for bottom line, it's going to be good for all of us who are consumers of those resources. Is that competition breeds best of breed? It'll breed what we think is going to be a better hypervisor, it'll make VMware stand up and take notice, it's going to make them hopefully maybe be a little more cost effective in what they do for the licensing perspective of their tools. When it comes right down to it though, I asked my guys and myself, if I compare what are the key features of their software that we use every day from VMware, and I say, can we get it from an alternative hypervisor? And the answer is yes. So why pay that VMware tax when you don't have to? It's a really legitimate business question. Are you using the Nutanix hypervisor? We have not started yet. Acropolis, with the announcement that we're hearing this weekend is very exciting. But you're interested, you're leaning, you're going to find out more. Yeah, very, we're taking some really close looks at it for some very specific business uses. So you essentially don't want to pay for function that you think you should get it for free. You're happy to pay up the stack for value, but is that a fair statement? Yeah, it's pretty common sense. I think that's one of those things that my father taught me back in the day. If you can get it for half the price, then why not? Well, I buy the cloud if the milk is free. That's right, that's right. Okay, let's see, what else is going on? How about cloud in your world, public cloud specifically? Using public cloud? I mean, you are a public cloud provider. Yeah, we're more of a private cloud subscriber for our customers. Data privacy is a big challenge for us in this space, especially in the financial world. We have a lot of sensitive information, bank account information, you name it. So public cloud's a swear word? So it's not, it's not. It's actually something that I think eventually will be a part of our future. But until we can get there in a very secure and strategic fashion, we're going to take our time. So Bob, we've been talking about kind of the ecosystem building out here, and there's one new company, Rubrik, that you've got, you've looked at some, testing out, tell us a little bit about what brought you to Rubrik, and why you're looking at them. Sure, Rubrik is a very interesting company. I mean, it caught my eye when we first looked at it because it had the similar story of hyperconverge and simplicity and ease of use, and it took a lot of the science project out of a backup story. Our enterprise backup solutions, just like our computing solutions before we started implementing Nutanix, had a lot of complexity. They had storage networks, they had targets, they had media agents, you had software licensing, and you needed an army of people to run it. And it took you a month to stand it up and get a good backup of that environment. Now the Rubrik story is new. They're hyperconverged. It looks a lot like the Nutanix story. And if it works out, and if they can mature, and they can give us those feature functionalities that I'm hoping that they can deliver on, I think that they could be a really viable backup solution for us. So we were talking offline a little bit. What's interesting, I think I told you, I've been writing about this for years and years and years, David Floyd and myself. The time machine for the enterprise, that's kind of what they're all about. That's a great analogy. And is there a synergy with Nutanix, or it's just sort of birds of a feather in this modern world? Yeah, it's interesting because I know that, I've heard some Nutanix, is this a space that they want to get into? Could it be? I mean, it seems like it would be a logical play for them as well. But the blending of these two technologies together, I think they're filling a gap right now from a product roadmap standpoint that they don't have. So I think that's where Rubrik is a very attractive piece for us. So when you think of your clouds, am I right you essentially have one cloud, right? It's a private cloud. It's your private cloud, and you don't have multiple private clouds that you're trying to sort of manage or do you? Yeah, we have different clouds for different audiences. So and it all depends on, we have segmentation requirements that keep our corporate infrastructure needs to be very different and separate from our customer-facing stuff. So this idea of being able to move between clouds, is that attractive to you? Absolutely. And how often do you actually do something like that? So some of the information that we learned about Acropolis these last few days are going to be very attractive for us to be able to take advantage of. You would do it more if you have that capability. Why? What's the motivation for moving those workloads? Bottom line is actually a big Microsoft partner. We're actually a gold partner with their development team. So we do a lot of our customers run a lot of their software. So if we're able to integrate, and there are a lot of them are starting to go to their cloud, whether it be Azure or Amazon. So if we can do better and tighter integration work with those products, and it means going to the cloud to get that testing and that work done, then we'll be going there. It won't be all in the same sort of VLAN segmentation. We'll have to make sure that we have it properly organized. So Bob, I'm curious, has the container discussion come up in your workplace? Do you plan with it, doing anything with it, or is it out in the future? Yeah, it's out in the future for us right now, yeah. What else excites you today? The number of announcements, the erasure coding. What'd you make of that? It's going to be a great performance uptick. Really, you're looking at it from a performance standpoint. Yeah, I don't understand. They're going to connect their resource mapping and what they're doing there to achieve some of the technology. I attended one of their key sessions today. It was fascinating. One of their engineers have got a way to optimize that file system in a way that I think we're only just beginning to see. So I think the performance is going to go north from here. So it's not a typical object store type of approach that you'd see. It is not that, no, not what I learned today. Yeah, that's me too, and right, it's new. We just heard about it this morning. And the file system, the native file system, what does that mean to you? The distributed file system? Well, essentially the file-based as opposed to block-based, native, going after NetApp. Yeah, it's a great play, and we'd love to take advantage of it in our VDI infrastructure that I mentioned to you earlier. Being able to present to those users a home folder, which would be great. Today we don't do that. We're all of our VMs that we're presenting and sending to all of our users around the world. They're thin and they're not with any home folders, but that would be a great feature to be able to have and be more persistent. So Bob, give us a little insight as to your activity here at the show. You've been hitting the sessions, you're doing small meetings. How's the technical content here? You've been to VMworld in the past. How's this lineup? This is one of the best trade shows I've been to, actually, it's quite impressive. And for their first one, their first big one like this, it's really, I'm very impressed. So I think it shapes up or it compares very well with some of those other big ones that I've been to. Great, is that just the breadth of content, the access to the engineers, what's the? Some of the sessions that I've attended today have been extremely informative. Some of the engineers who were presenting are impressive. There's a gentleman by the name of Josh Rogers who's from Australia. He's actually one of the architects that helped me put together our exchange on-premise platform on Mechanics and we're running it at globally. I was able to actually do a little bit of a co-production with him today to talk to other customers about putting their email systems on that. Just wonderful. Can I go back to my product discussion? If you must, sure. I know, am I boring you? I just love to get the practitioners feel for this. So you're in the audience today. You see the keynotes? Did you catch the keynotes? I did, yes. So the loudest clap was when the person was doing the demo, I forgot his name. I think it was Binny. Was it Binny? Was it Binny? Was it Binny who's doing the demo? Yeah, they did it in the containers and stuff, yeah. Binny created 100 VMs. Yeah. Like that. Yeah. Were you clapping? I was. I was like, did he really just do that? You want to talk about why that excited you so much? Well, 100 VMs. That's the automation and orchestration piece that I mentioned earlier. That's the higher function that I need to get my team to. And today we're running around patching switches and we're working on updating windows machines with the latest security updates. Those are the things that they're not getting to that could add more value to our company and make us more agile and efficient. And he's doing it one person with a click of a mouse for 100 VMs. That's fascinating to me. What'd you think of the UI? It's very, it was beautiful. And one of the things I've heard this weekend is simple is genius. And that is a simple and elegant interface. And were you using Flash, obviously? Yeah. How are you using Flash? So we're actually sort of, they have a unit called a 9,000 series unit that's an all flash array. And we're looking closely at that as one of our potential solutions to help us with a real big database issue that we're challenged with. So, but we're also using all of the smaller flash arrays in the SSDs obviously inside of all of the other blocks. It's for hot data. I kind of think one of the things that we've found with talking to practitioners in the Wikibon community is that they're basically taking space efficient snaps and then they're data sharing. So in conventional disk, you've got to have multiple copies and you need multiple spinning disks to support them because of the performance issues. Yeah. With Flash, what people are doing is they're sharing the same infrastructure, multiple copies, live data essentially. Yeah. So the developers are working on fresh data. Is that something that you could see as adding value to your organization? Does that make sense to you? I guess it's going to depend on the use case for bottom line. I could see it in some cases. I'm not sure if there's a large footprint for it. How do you serve as developers today? I mean, what's your DevOps situation? Maybe talk about that a little bit. Sure, sure. Today it is, as I mentioned, VDI is one of those places that we deliver virtual infrastructure to our developers around the world. They also request VMs on a moment to moment basis. So being able to respond to those in an agile, in automated fashion, and even in a self-serve fashion is my end goal, really, is to be able to give them the ability to go in and spin up and use the crud to be able to turn on and destroy their own VMs when they're finishing and return that compute and storage back into the repository. I'm sorry, Bob, I just thought of something. I'm just curious, are there any environments that Nutanix doesn't fit in your environment today? If I look across the organization, across all of the businesses and all of the core services that we're supporting, I can't find one. Can't find one because they are, they're agnostic about their approach and doing, whether it be the hypervisor or the storage or any of the underlying infrastructure. It's a good fit for everything that we do. What's on their to-do list? What do you want to see from them? I want to see site-to-site replication over a wide area network. And I need them to bring down the millisecond response time. And they currently have a step in that right direction on their roadmap. But I think they need to go, when they can get it to the point where I can replicate my data all the way across the oceans, then I'm all in. How are you doing that today? We're not really. We're stretching DAGs here and there for exchange, but we're using application layer or software solutions from various vendors to achieve that. And VMware's not playing a role there yet? There they are. They could play a role there, but again, I hesitate and I balk at the price tag. That's a barrier for you, right? That's a headline. To use those higher-level licenses to get some of that feature. Sure. Good business. Pat Kjelsinger has a good future, I predict. I think I have a loyal customer base, and that's like Veenad Kosla said today. Most IT practitioners, you're a rare breed, Bob. Most IT practitioners aren't going to take risks, right? They're going to do what doesn't get them fired. You are of a mindset of, hey, it gives us competitive advantage, I'm going to go there. That's what I'm sensing from you. Yeah, well, I get that support from my executive team. The innovation is one of the things that they impress upon me, and they make it a requirement of my daily job. I look at Nutanix as one of those opportunities to innovate. And you're from Boston, so you're ballsy. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. It was great to meet you guys. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. Right after this, right dot next, in Miami, this is theCUBE. We'll be right back.