 Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer. She is the Director Cloud Product Management at Tier Point. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, I'm very excited. And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at Tier Point. Thanks, David. Yes, thank you. So for our viewers that may be unfamiliar with Tier Point, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do and give us an introduction? Oh, absolutely. So Tier Point is a managed services, data services and co-location provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States. And we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers in their digital transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they need solutions and we can offer them those solutions, right? So we manage all of that. So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything? Absolutely, yeah. And where does Nutanix come into play here? So Nutanix is a part of that cloud services, really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment, really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance. So that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, Tier Point, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components. So again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward and taking that burden off of IT. And Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers at the end of the day. How about the technical challenges you guys had with before Nutanix, after Nutanix? What changed? What was the journey like? How did the door open up for them? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think overall, we as technologists work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume. But that is challenging, right? You know, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies. And I think one of the things that we really see as a huge value for Nutanix is they've got a very complete platform across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that. And so for us, that's very exciting. It's very intriguing. And something that really helps us be efficient and also our customers be efficient. So digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much on theCUBE in general here at this show. What are you hearing from customers? And what are sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? So we recently had a customer who their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right? They have a great amount of comfort. But over time they can see there could be some cost savings in Nutanix with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? He said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we're consulting through their transformation. And they're starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition we're going to help them get there, right? We're going to help them change if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right? We're going to help them do that. Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean, obviously you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like operating this? Because you've got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you've got latency challenges around moving to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still got to store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge of the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company in terms of how you operate? Great question. So it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves, but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about Tier Point is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value ads. And so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on ramp into the hyper scale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, co-locate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyper scale environments. And then there's the middle. The middle where we provide a layer like Nutanix that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them. It's in our data center. It's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyper scale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting when people saying, you know, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I want to just use Nutanix, got their own hypervisor. The AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers. But you guys have probably a lot of customers who want to roll their own or have to bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that? Does that fit into the value proposition? Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor maybe being irrelevant. Like it's obsolete. It's not something to be concerned about. And I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that. You're being nice when you say that by the way. A lot of people are saying that. Well, a lot of, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right? Because, and Tier Point helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome? What are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right? Then it is necessarily not important. It's more commodity now. Yeah. And we don't want customers to have to focus on that, right? Because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business. And so the less that they have to focus as an IT organization on the maintenance and management of infrastructure and even up the stack towards operating systems where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. Okay, what's the playbook for doing that? Not being a drag on the business? Because that's what it wants to do. But they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? The playbook is really being a part of that business discussion. And when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table. And again, is thinking about how can we drive savings or cost cutting? How can we enable transactions? How can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated? Am I dealing with old boxes that I have to replace? And do I have power and cooling problems in a data center? They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. What you're talking about really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about? They obviously can think about more than just the maintenance and do I have the storage and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these sort of business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role to really help the business transform. So I think that oftentimes IT people feel like they're just technology. I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this. But what their exposure and their natural interest lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, how do these things operate? What have I had experience with? And when they have a seat at the table and they're making it with the business decisions, they have value to add there. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion. I mean that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists. And so that's part of, we've gone through this at Tier Point, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate so that they're helping us move the business forward, and not sitting behind the keyboard isolated from the business itself. I was going to ask you about the skill gap, because one of the things that comes up as the shift that DevOps is happening with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable, so it's not a drag on the business. Changing roles are a huge thing, because new techniques essentially, the values they enable, new things to happen, the result is consolidation. So it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do, so people will be like, whoa, what do I do now? So, but the benefit is people shift. So the IT ops role has changed, is what was trying to get it before, the operations. What do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. Well, you do see a consolidation of siloed technologists, right? So this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away. And again, we've done this at Tier Point, we've kind of mixed those roles, right? Educate the staff, but from an additional education programmability, somebody to be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role versus having a separate development team working on that, it's going to be really important as companies evolve, they're grouped. I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Perl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting. But we all know in IT, it's always change and it's always learning. I mean, you got into this, right? So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers over time are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. So talk about the relationship with Nutanix. How, what's it like partnering with them? They've got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Uwepec, our enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner-centric, they're partner-friendly. What's it like working with them? They're fantastic, I mean, absolutely fantastic. From Go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right? You've seen some of this. And so our customers brought Nutanix to us and as we began to see this trend and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources. They've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners. So that has made it easy. We're another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa. So it's kind of almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in? I agree with it, they're very hardcore, loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits. So they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, right? You put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there. And that promoted scores 90. But what if new people were like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities? When is Nutanix a good fit? Because you've got to balance it all for all your customers. Yeah. Depending on what they want to do. Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, you know, for us, it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers. I don't know that unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation, it's really like, look, this is a solution that's going to provide you the capabilities. And again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship. And as PJ mentioned, Nutanix is invested very heavily, not only in the partnership, but also developing this platform and solution for us. So it's been- So you guys could provide it if no one asks, just provide the best solution? Absolutely. Right, and that's the key, right? I want to ask you a question about geographics. So I'm based in Boston. John's based in the Valley. You're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, I mean, we may just come to this with our East Coast, West Coast biases. And I'm just, what does it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the Heartland? I mean, you can feel part of the community. Oh, absolutely. I mean, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right? So from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to- Great barbecue too. Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. I mean, you also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoors. I mean, it's kind of surprising, honestly. But we have a main technology center also in Raleigh, North Carolina. So we are split between the two. We do a lot of flights. W-W-E-C is out there. R-R-T-P, yeah, the research triangle park in North Carolina is a very big tech hub. So that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaboration and partnerships there from the business side. But also that Raleigh tech hub on the East Coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there. And like a lot of come- Nutanix actually is right there down the street. Well, I want to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's just going to UNC, so I'm going to find some excuses to get down there. That'd be great. It's a tear point show. That's right. A couple of interviews. Yeah. Any time. Any time. Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. Yeah, we really enjoyed it. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE.