 Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to be joined by Wale Chawarib, who's with Warba Bank customer from Kuwait. Thank you so much for joining us. No problem, anytime. I mean, thank you very much for the hosting. Okay, so first set us up a little bit. Tell us about Warba Bank. How was the company, how large? Well, Warba Bank, basically, bank, which is seven years old now, the bank has been coming up into a very challenging market, small market, full of banks. So the bank has set the strategy three years back, is to go for digitization of the retail banking journeys, focusing on the core of the investment and the commercial banking. Okay, seven years, et cetera. I've interviewed some banks that are a hundred or hundreds of years old, very different when you talk about kind of the digital disruption that's going on. Before we get into a little bit, just tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with the bank? Well, I've been working into the IT industry, especially in information security for the past maybe 17 years. I've been handling the infrastructure roles for the past seven years. And I've been working into a financial sector, information security consultation, doing penetration testing, ethical hacking, secure checks, configuration, networking. This is the background for me. Okay, and you have infrastructure and information security management. Exactly. So security, of course, from a bank is pretty critical, but are you, so in IT is what it is? How do you fit in the organization? Right now, the information security is the number one top priority for the old financial sector, wherever they are, never, not in the Middle East only, it's everywhere. The attacking landscape and the implementation and how complex the infrastructure has gone makes the information security now very challenging. So basically, it's one of our key roles to secure the financial sector infrastructure, especially in World Wide. Yeah, can you bring us inside a little bit? I mean, you know, ransomware, of course, is on everybody's lips this year. Oh, this is a lot. You know, Geroz and Nakino this morning was talking about hackers and the like, so what percentage of budget gets spent on security and what are some of the main concerns that you have? Well, if you go with the international trends and the surveys, information security is taking most of the budgets for the IT right now because the, as I told you, the landscape of the attacking has been rising very much. The people have been very much aware about information security and news that are coming up every day. So basically, enterprises now are allocating a lot of budget for information security, but it's a bit challenging when it comes to banks in the size of World Bank. The priority for the information security, the priority for the cost effective solution, this is where you have to do the most effective choices when you are doing the implementation for technology. Okay, bring us inside, tell us a little bit about kind of your IT environment. Understand, looking at, you were the first customer of Nutanix in Kuwait, had been looking at them before, so what did it look like before? And, you know, how come? I mean, before, it's not us only, it's everybody. It's everybody who was implementing the traditional way of implementing infrastructure, servers, storage, different technologies, complex networks. And that was the way till we joined World Bank. Things have been changing, we're looking to different strategy, digitization, and hit the market as soon as possible. Demands make the infrastructure information security something that need to be evolved, actually, in the implementation of the technology inside financial sector. So that's why we moved to a cloud-like platform where we have all of the flexibility of implementing workloads as much as we can, expanding it east to west, south to north. I mean, it depends on where do you really want to put your workloads, so with that direction, Nutanix have been looked for as a vendor from a strategical perspective. They were going into the same direction where everybody's looking at, and whenever we started to look at like the expanding of the infrastructure on the cloud level, they were there. So that's why the Nutanix have changed the infrastructure part when it comes to the implementation of infrastructure inside World Bank. And tell us about Nutanix expansion into your country. When did they get there? What kind of resources do they have? Well, we were the first customer in Kuwait. I think we are also the first later customer in the Middle East. The implementation was very much scoped because the technology was not really tested at that specific time, so we scoped in a very minor scope, tested, successful, then we started expanding that to go all the way to cover the infrastructure. Little bits and pieces still there, but I mean, we're going into the direction properly. Yeah, so how many nodes, what's kind of the scope of your environment? We're speaking of almost 30 nodes. How many clusters, how do you break that up? It's kind of three clusters mainly. So the implementation was being segmented properly, security adapted because I mean, when it comes to information security and we combine all your infrastructure in our boxes, security get more complex. So basically this is where you have to structure even when you are implementing hyperconverged infrastructure, you need to be very careful when you do segmentation for that. Okay, so you've been pretty aggressive rolling this out. My understanding you're a beta customer for testing. You've been, you know, talked to other you know, potential customers out there. A lot of announcements came out kind of 5.5. Were there certain pieces that you were super excited about that you were kind of ready to roll out production? Maybe just talk a little bit about that. Well the thing, the keynote today was talking about the 5.5 version and the rolling out of new software basically integrated inside the Nutanix platform. For us, we are beta testers for most of it. So basically there was nothing much new about it for me especially or for World Bank because we've been testing that right now into our environment. We've been collaborating with Nutanix about the bugs, what need to be fixed and stuff like that. So I mean the, I think pretty much the strategy of the 5.5 and today we had a one-to-one meeting about the coming strategy again. It's very much aligned with, if you are going for digitalization, the strategy is aligned. Were there any special features in 5.5 that you know, jumped out at you or just is it the whole platform? Well the com is very bit interesting. The micro segmentation, implementation of the security of the infrastructure is very much interesting. The expansion for the insights inside the infrastructure because I mean that specific thing if you look for other vendors who can provide the same services basically it need third party integration and you'll see some other people are looking at infrastructure. I mean Nutanix, when they look at it they said okay we provide everything so why don't we give that? So they give the insights where you can do the production for the machine learning for the server performance. This is pretty impressive. All right, well what you talked about going forward what more, what are you looking for for Nutanix either new functionality or kind of expansion? Well I mean the now because we are beta testing the com and this is the first stage for the DevOps implementation getting people in the automation era. Basically this is where they need, I'm looking for from Nutanix to start implementing, to start getting stacking the DevOps cycle, the application life cycle management right from the provisioning till the application production pushing the deployments rolling it back, I mean I'm expecting that this is to happen maybe like in two years that's supposed to be it. I mean with the vision I can see that has to be it. So you mentioned micro segmentation is there anything else with your security hat on? How does Nutanix make things easier for you? Well basically when they start working on data trust encryption that makes a lot of leverage for the information security because basically in a standard implementation once data has been rested on the disk now you need to secure it, you have to apply your encryption and you have to see the comparability with the hardware or the software. I mean these people have been integrating the data on rest encryption along with their framework so basically you don't have to get into all of the struggle when you're looking for data trust encryption. Even during the data transfer encrypting the data has been there so I think the 5.5 is going to make a big change. Okay well you told me that this is the second time you attended the other European show in Vienna last year. What brings you back to the show? What do you get out of it? If you tell your peers that haven't come why should they come to an event like this? I mean the change, the thing we've been seeing in last year, the implementation and the vision and when you look at the, this is a post like 365 days and when you look at that 365 days you'll see a lot of people planning and they can see the strategy and they're moving towards it, they are achieving. So that makes the, I mean last year I've seen people they're almost like 750 people they were planning for. They were doubled in the last conference. This year I was amazed with the number of people who are attending the keynote size, the kind of customers, the customer base who came from the Middle East with me because I'm part of them. So I've seen the people are coming to see the strategy and the implementation of that company. So that was really impressive and that's what makes me looking forward actually to see what's next. All right, well it is dot next. Well Farab, thank you so much for joining us. Have a great time with the rest of the show. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at Nutanix dot next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.