 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We are joined by Christo Duran. He is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Tresco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. All right, thanks for having me, yeah. Direct from Namibia, so we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries, and you represent Namibia here. Yeah, I come from far down in Africa. So tell our viewers a little bit about Tresco. What you do down there? Because Tresco is a financial services company firstly. We look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry as well. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years, and we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers. And we've got roughly about 15,000 students all doing distance learning. And of that 15,000, we've got about 80 to 90% of them that we also do finance. Not just for the course material, but also the technology that we finance for them so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources. There's quite a new business unit for us where we dabble a little bit in diamond mining. And we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds. And then also in Sierra Leone, we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. And then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in shared services where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia. And then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. Just to use that. Well, luckily, Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy. They don't have, you know, I walk through the expo floor, it's like, oh, well, how many verticals do you need to go to all of them to be able to learn what you're doing? So give us if you can, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for. And if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. So we're very centralized in Namibia. All our stuff gets run out of one data center or one common area in our air offices. And then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa, and now, of late, we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything. We've got a saying at the office, if it's got a plug-on, it's IT's problem. So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage. Well, now with Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution. So that the spirit systems have now fallen away and we only look after it. Yeah, bring us back to that move to Nutanix. Was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things with a separate science, the separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit of a slum resume and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us. And we decided, let's step back a little bit and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more. And at that stage, hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that. And we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution. Obviously, like everyone else, we started with the community edition, devil eye and a little bit in there. And so now that's actually it's doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. So you've now been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and the relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? Yeah, so challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our businesses are not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans. So it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, because we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from hyper V environment. We said we're going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, deal everything. Let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So obviously we added a few challenges with a couple of our services and service. But other than that, I must say was actually a pretty easy move for us. So it's interesting that you say going from hyper V because I've talked to the customers, oh, there's a savings for moving from VMware. Oh, Microsoft hyper V is all included. And when you're doing Windows, and if you've got hyper V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application. So was there an application change or what was the driver to move? Yeah, there were some of our applications that was very specific, especially on the network driver side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well. But again, it was a reasonably painless move across to Nutanix. One of the things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company. You are getting into new businesses and still continuing and established businesses. How, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? So in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle. If the dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware because you need to adapt to them. When we moved over to hyper V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it, et cetera, et cetera. So what the biggest challenge was for us is to get our dev app guys a quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs. That's not all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already optimized. So it is five, 10 minutes and then they've got what they need. And I think it made us a little bit more agile because we prowl ourselves in being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast. And that was always Trasko's main advantage in the Namibian market. We didn't go through all the other rigmarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way. And by the time that you get there, it's not relevant anymore. Now we need to do something else again. And that brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. So Krista, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix? You mentioned DevOps there. The goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that. But there's some retraining or some moving inside the organization. What's the impact been on your organization? On the customer side, none. They didn't even know we moved over there until we told them okay. But from the IT side? From our customer side. They've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phase approach. So we started off with the community edition where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we can do on it. And then also let's call it training for the IT guys so that they're comfortable and now the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work. Again, being in the finance industry and in the banking industry, downtime is absolutely no-no. And we wanted to get to a point where we say, we're not going to move over production sites, production environments in the evenings from 12 to 4 in the morning because we've all got families. So we rather plan it properly ahead of time. And yes, we did it in, actually there I say in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously. So it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? Yeah, so we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and we're now only in the baby phase where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working. So now we're in the PRC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively. And we now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. And then more closer to the future in the next, I would say 69 months, we're going to take on frame because part of our business scenario because we were in Microsoft was remote desktop services and that was what kept us so lean. Yeah, there's some challenges now with remote desktop services where our dev guys are moving into some Linux and some Kubernetes and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start doubling our hands in frame. For us, the old back was when frame came out that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next, I would say, yeah, yeah, enough. Excellent, well, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Kristo, it was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much, thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .next.