 Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .next conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. René Vanden Bedham is here. He's the chief architect at Round Tower Technologies in Cincinnati, here from Down Under and Chris Skinner who's the NPX program manager at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. You've been here for awhile, but... Three weeks. Three, hey. I just got here. So you're acclimated. Good to go. Yeah, Dave, he's Ohio based now. I said, so you're really excited about, you know, the Ohio, you know, the Cavaliers victory after 50 plus years. Yeah, I've lived there for a couple of weeks. Yeah. That's basketball. Yeah. Okay, so tell us about Round Tower Technologies and what your role is there. Yeah, so Round Tower is a professional services company. They were, they're about eight years old. They're basically an EMC partner. Now we're transferring or pivoting into hyper-converged technologies. And this is one of the reasons why I'm here and one of the reasons I was hired by them. They recently acquired Part Four in Boston. So they're rapidly expanding their business. And yeah, there's not really much more to say. On there is a chief architect of their Emerging Technologies Department. So there we're focusing on DevOps, big data and also cloud technology. So that's my specialty, obviously. So the question came up in the keynote this morning is, have you ever heard anybody say, I love my VMAX? I was asking student how do you actually have an example where somebody actually did say that. So we have a lot of customers who are passionate about EMC because it's an ecosystem that is very established and has provided a lot of stability, but they have to pivot also, obviously, with VxRail, et cetera, to hyper-converged technologies. All right, well, I'm sure we'll come back and talk about that. Yeah, Dave, I mean, actually, you know, think about like, you know, brands in IT that people love. It's like, I remember VMware used to have the iHeart, you know, VMware bumper stickers, you know, Chris, you've got there. At this show, you know, the biggest applause was actually when we're like, kind of, you know, we're going to make vCenter invisible. So, you know, this crowd, I don't think they'd be getting the glowing buttons of the bumper stickers there. They have to give them back. So, Chris, how about MPX? What's that all about? You guys got the shirts on? We do. The Nutanix platform expert is exactly that. It's a program designed to cultivate and certify the top-level IT enterprise architects in a hyper-converged, web-scaled infrastructure world, like René himself. And it's designed to, you know, obviously take it to that next level, that top, top level of these IT professionals that are out there that are out selling design solutions and architecting design solutions. So, Chris, could you explain, how does the hypervisor fit into that discussion because, you know, it reminds me, Nutanix actually has a ton of VCDXs. Yeah, they do. You know, work in there. Yeah, so what's unique about our particular program, NPX, is it's unique in the sense that it's the only enterprise-level architect certification that is hypervisor-agnostic, actually. Our NPXs can defend, well, the NPX defense is done on two different hypervisors, either Hyper-V, VMware, or AHV, our Acropolis hypervisor. But it's one of those unique certifications in that it's actually vendor-agnostic when it comes to hypervisor. So the objectives of the program are to broaden the ecosystem. Exactly. And to transfer knowledge, talk about... It's to identify those individuals that are at the expert level in our industry that build design solutions for these huge Fortune 1000 companies that are out there and build a hyperconverge on Nutanix platform in their infrastructure and corporate environments. So it leads to faster adoption, more business? Exactly. Happier customers? Exactly. So what do you have to go through to get certified? So just back to what you were talking about earlier. So the objective of an NPX certified individual is the ability to deliver complete solutions for the customer that relate directly back to the business requirements. This is a common problem with a lot of projects, right, what will happen is they'll deliver a solution for the customer that's very piecemeal. It really doesn't consider the entire enterprise how everything fits together. This is particularly important for very large deals like you're talking a million plus. If you don't have an enterprise architect that increases the risk of the solution failing. So Nutanix is investing very heavily in making sure that we have the professional services in place, partner, and also within Nutanix to make sure that we deliver complete solutions to Nutanix customers. So what do you have to go through to get certified? So, the first thing is you have to be MPP certified, which is the Nutanix professional platform professional. From there, you have to build your document set, which is your submission, which includes the entire design plus all of the supporting documentation. You submit that, that gets reviewed. If your documentation is at the right standard, then you'll be invited to defend. The way the defense works is you have 22 scoring areas and where you need to show expert knowledge is in Hypervisor One, Hypervisor Two, because obviously there's three to choose from, and also the Nutanix platform and the partner ecosystem as well, plus the entire enterprise. So all of the silos, including IT service management, et cetera, you need to be minimally qualified there. So you're kind of creating a new role. Yeah. It's been done before, right? Cisco has had some great success doing that. Yes, VMware has had their BCDX. VMware, so is that kind of the model? Yeah, it's similar to that model. We like to believe that the MPX is a couple of ticks higher than that for the simple purpose that you're actually asked to defend against two hypervisors as opposed to just being very vSphere specific or very Cisco specific, that kind of thing. So it does add another layer or dimension to the difficulty and therefore some expert level knowledge needs to transcend beyond just that particular vendor. So it's very important, but to kind of piggyback a little bit on what Renee said also is that it's by invite only. So it's one of those things where you actually have to submit a design, a full-fledged customer design solution and then we actually review it to choose whether or not we invite that individual come and in a very PhD-ish like fashion, defend it against a panel of experts. So I was talking to a guy the other day, you get older, you put on Likering, you start riding bikes, you know, that's what we do. And so in the town I live in, there's a lot of bikers. So I said, yeah, yeah, the guy was telling me, we bike in Harvard sometimes. He said, great, I live in Harvard Mass. I left the bike with you guys. He goes, well, we only invite people in who can keep a 28 mile an hour pace. And I'm down around 16 on a good day. So I said, oh, well, okay, that's good, enjoy it. So my point is, my question is, what do I have to do to qualify for that? You don't just invite anybody in, right? Yeah, we don't. You've got to be, you know. There's an application process, you obviously on our website, you can go and you can choose to apply it. As Renee said, there's some minimum requirements. We're looking for individuals that have, as a baseline, have done that MPP certification, which is just to kind of set a baseline level on it. But we're also looking for individuals who have fully documented design plans that they've actually gone to a customer and implemented a full on design solution. So it's very well documented. It's been proven. They've actually done the implementation and they are the chief architect or chief individual on that process. So it's somebody who's actually achieved these outputs. Demonstrated a proficiency for creating that content. Yeah, so part of the application process is you need three references. There's a number of essays and resumes that you need to provide. So you're being vetted by your peers, basically. And when you submit, if your documentation is not at the right level, because we're talking about 22 scoring areas and the actual defense is only four hours, four hours is not enough time to cover every single area verbally. So this is why the submission is so important that you prove your expertise on paper. And let's face it, any engineer that delivers a solution, he could get hit by a bus the next day. You need to have continuity with documentation. It's a pretty high bar. It is, and how many NPX certified folks are out there? So I'm glad to say that we did in a Nutanix defense just this past weekend So there's like three? No, we got, no, no, there's total of 10, but we've got our second non-Nutanix MPX now. When he's one of them, he was our first. He's now a partner of, obviously, a round tower, but we have our second NPX that is a non-Nutanix MPX, which is ultimately what we want to do. We want a branch just beyond the companies. And Chris, what's the cost of the program? How often do you have to kind of reapply and what is the maintenance of that? Fair question. So there's currently no cost on the MPX. It's time investment, right? Which needs to come not only from the individual, but the supporting organization that's putting that candidate forward. But from a pure dollars and send standpoint, there is no cost to doing this program. Again, it's by invite only and as long as we can, we'll keep it that way as well. So Renee, I got to ask you as a service provider, you know, EMC partner, we love EMC. We've seen them grow up as a company, I mean, amazing company, a lot of respect for them. But with that growth has come a lot of complexity. Complexity in your business is cash, right? I mean, you provide these services and now here you are, you're bringing Nutanix in, which is all about simplification, removing that complexity. One might say, well, wow, isn't that going to hurt your revenue stream? Isn't that going to hurt your business? You just being proactive and skating to the puck. Talk about the philosophy there, if you would please. Yeah. So the world is changing and any customer who is competing with their competition, who is using traditional three tier infrastructure, and then you have your competition who's competing with hyperconverged, web scale technologies, et cetera. At the end of the day, if you don't transition, you're not going to be able to compete with your competition. And then you'll end up being a dinosaur blockbuster, you become non-relevant. But you're continuing to your relationship with EMC, is that right? Roundtower, absolutely, yes, that's 100%. So that's going to be interesting. You're going to bring Nutanix in to fill holes in the EMC product line and portfolio offering. And that's going to piss some people off, I can tell you right now. Chris is laughing. So there's political sensitivity, obviously. Roundtower is primarily a EMC foundation solutions provider. There internally, a strategy is being worked out how we can grow the rest of the hyperconverged space with Nutanix and SimpliVity. So there's something that's in progress. Well, you know, Michael Dell's doing the same thing though, isn't he? Yeah. Right? It will be very interesting to see how once the Dell acquisition occurs, how the Dell XC partnership with Nutanix goes into the VCE ecosystem, how it appears. Also with Dell networking infrastructure versus Cisco. What does that kind of look like? I'm not sure. It'll be very interesting. A lot of people are predicting the whole thing will melt down. We haven't, we've been saying all week that these things, first of all, it's taken a while to get here. You know, it was really only announced about a year and change ago. And so it took a while for that to whole Dell OEM deal to get going. It's going now. It's clearly going. So these things tend to hang around for a while. So our prediction is it's going to hang around for a while. Renee, I just, you work on emerging technologies. Things like, you know, big data and DevOps. Does that interact with the hyperconverged stuff that you're working on? For sure, absolutely. Yeah, so when you look at, so for me DevOps is more about people in process than technology. When you're moving to continuous integration, continuous development, that's really you're taking the modern tool set and applying that to what you've already achieved with DevOps, people in process. It's about improving the throughput of work through your organization. Normally DevOps and agile methodologies, you would be applying to your core business, where you're earning your money, where you require the highest release rate of features for applications or whatever business that you're selling. And it's about competing with your competition, right? So that's where, yeah, it all goes hand in hand. But there is a technology component to infrastructure as code, is there not? Or is it really technology agnostic? So here's the key thing. If you're moving towards agile methodology and you wanna go to containers and microservices and all of the buzzwords that are out there at the moment, you need to make sure that from a people in process, well, people is the most important thing. If your organization is siloed, right, and fractured and fragmented and you have people not cooperating together, it will be the equivalent of me delivering a Ferrari to someone who is in the desert and needs a four-wheel drive and they've got no mechanics to support it. It's basically an expensive boat anchor, right? So people in process is the most important thing. You get that right and then the technology follows. And the MPX program is a lot about that as well, making sure that people, process and technology are all fitting together. People is the most important thing and that you're delivering solutions that actually fit your customer because all of our customers are snowflakes. They all have different ways of doing things, right? So you need to make sure that whatever solution you deliver actually matches the customer. And you're saying start with the two Ps and then fit and then the technology will take care of itself. Absolutely, yes, yes, exactly. 100%. Yes. All right, Renee, last question for you is your business, your customer's business is changing quite dramatically. Yes. Where do you see the business in, let's say 24 months time? How would you summarize where people are going? So, this is a very good question. So hyperconvergence is not going to go away. In my opinion, Nutanix is the leader of the hyperconverged space at the moment. You look at the announcements today around the Acropolis ecosystem. They are building in so many different features that make it easy to deliver cloud out of the box with the Acropolis ecosystem. If you try to do the same with other technologies that are on the market at the moment, there's a lot of professional services in there to try and build a solution that does the same thing. So, what I think will happen is you'll see large enterprises and medium enterprises start dipping their toes in the water once they find how quick and easy it is to use Nutanix infrastructure and other hyperconverged technologies, they'll start moving across. The main thing is they will be wanting to get the ROI on their current three tier investments. So, Chris, if I could ask the last question for you, of course we expect you're going to be expanding the program, you get more people. What about, you know, Nutanix positioning themselves as the enterprise cloud company to, you know, cloud architects, you know, those kind of pieces work its way into NPX, some other sort of certification. Give us kind of the roadmap on the search going forward. So, with regards to NPX and the enterprise cloud, I mean, obviously we want to evolve the program and keep it going as new technologies come into play. We'll make shifts and changes to the NPX program as well, but at the end of the day, we're still looking for that top tier, less than 1% expert level IT architects to learn and build hyperconverged web scale infrastructures on the Nutanix platform. Great, well gentlemen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Congratulations on getting the program off the ground. Good luck. And hopefully come back next year and give us an update. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Dave. Anytime. Thank you, Stu. Everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from .next at the win in Las Vegas, right back.