 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. We're back, John Forster is here. He's the transitional services program manager at Fitness First and he's Natalie Dress. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks very much. Thanks very much indeed. So you are a change agent. Yes, very much so. That's the role where I'll go into the business, have a look at their IT. Does it fit? Does it suit to what the business is trying to do? Where's it holding it back? And where's it doing really good stuff? And then see, right, how can we take that and really move it forward? And that's the role which I do and that's the role which I really enjoy. What is Fitness First? What's the business owner? What's Fitness First? What's driving it? Fitness First is, it's a gym company. They run really nice clubs. You go in, you get fit, you get healthy. They home run clubs across 16 countries. They don't have anything in the States but they have everything sort of going east from there, let's say, all the way around to Australia. So it's an industry which is very fast moving. It's an industry where there's massive demand of, we want information and the customers, the members to say, they're always working out. So they want that information and it needs to be slick and fast and great. And a very competitive industry. I mean, of course, a lot of that business is still social, young people go there to be seen. They want to meet other young people but increasingly that business has become sophisticated in terms of self-help, online programs, was videos, et cetera. Beach body and all crazy stuff like that. So how has that affected the business, changed the competitive dynamic? The way it's changed is that you have to be in that market. Like you said, you have to have the app on the phone so you are constantly doing some exercise exactly as you said. So if you don't run fast then you very, very quickly fall behind because it's an industry where if you want to change club there's got to be a reason to hold you there. So John, you talk about moving fast for a way too long infrastructure and specifically storage has really been an anchor on companies moving forward. What are you seeing in the infrastructure space? How does that fit into your line of work? What am I seeing? If I take fitness first as an example, when I first went there and I looked at what they've got it was the classic three-tier, an awful lot of physical tin and an awful lot of people having to then look after a lot of physical tin. So you're paying most of the IT department to make sure that the light stayed on and it just ran instead of what can you do with it? So the big change I've seen is that move away from thinking about what's there and just using it, using it and using it quickly and a massive shift towards everything is virtualized, everything and I think we've moved hugely down that road. There's still a long way to go but I think that step change is now being made and that to me is really exciting because you can do things quickly. Yeah, even we talk about virtualization. Virtualization when it was first rolled out broke a lot of some of the other pieces of the infrastructure with the software-defined meme is what once again matching infrastructure to be able to enable those virtual environments. So bring us forward to what you see as the infrastructure impacts on what happens. The real infrastructure change I've seen is that it's really nicely working together. So you have the various parts of that infrastructure and you can just treat it as one. So you're not running at the speed of the slowest part. We can upgrade the servers, we can upgrade switches, we can do all of that but we're held back because the sand can't deal with that level. So the whole thing runs at the speed of the slowest part and that is just, it just kills the business because they're screaming out to say do things quickly and you're going, we don't have the infrastructure to do that. But with this move to this hyper-converged, to take the phrase no one seems to really like, you just move to being a unit of compute which you can then just go and use instead of saying how does this tie to this and how does this tie to that and have to have lots of engineers to make sure each separate part works and even more engineers to make sure it all works as a single unit. If you're just going by a single unit, you just take all of that away. So what's the business impact and how do you measure that? Is it, I mean, obviously if the users are happy that's one measurement but you go further. How do I measure that? In terms of speed from someone having an idea, someone having a concept to be able to build that, test that, give that back to them and say right, there it is, you can now use that quickly. So it's that speed of concept to actually being used. So let's say in the old days that took a hundred units of time. As you move to this hyper-converged infrastructure for the digital age, I can throw in that buzzword. How many units of time does it now take? Oh, that's a good question. I reckon you've probably taken that down to 10. Down to? 10. I think, I think- 110th of the time. It really has come down that much. So infrastructure was that much of a gate? Yeah. For the elapsed time from- That much of a gate. Inception of idea to production. Yes. Well, Dave, I mean, the metric we've heard for the longest time is what? You know, you're spending 80 to 90% of your budget and time keeping the lights on. Exactly. So if we can bit flip, you know, flip that on its head. Exactly. You know, that's a 90% reduction. Yeah. If you think, if someone wanted to do something, it would be, right, raise the paperwork, go and buy some more physical tin, get it delivered, get it plugged in, get it wired up, get the operating system put on it, then start to use it. All of that first part of time is dead time. It's dead wasted time. If you can just say, spin that up, start using it, pass it to the user, pass it to the developer, and you can do that in an hour. Yeah. John, I'm curious about your input. You know, when we talk to users, one of the most interesting things about kind of this transformation is, okay, what happens to operations? You know, how much is it retraining? How much is it? Oh, hey, I've had, I had a Nutanis customer, I talked to it, a great story, said, you know, I've had this security project sitting on my desk for two years, and now I can actually do it. Do it. So, you know, what are you seeing? What happens in the operational side of things? When I first worked with the team at Fitness First and said, we're going to bring in this new architecture, and they were really, they were fully involved in it. You know, it wasn't a case of turn it up and plug it in, and there we go. You know, they were fully involved in it, and there's a number of them that said, how is this going to affect my job? Because I'm the guy who used to keep the lights on, and with this, it keeps its own lights on. There was another guy who said, well, I'm the guy who used to build the servers, and now you're going to press a button. What's this going to mean to me? And I said, it's going to mean you're going to have a far more interesting job. And I sat down with the one by one, you know, and said, look, what did you not like about your job? Not what you did like. What did you not like? And he says, well, it was slow, and no one really liked us, and all those classic things to do with Oskill IT. And he says, well, what if we could take those away? Let's list those things, in fact, we can take away if we move to just hyper-converged, totally virtualized, and do things quickly. And of that infrastructure team, no one left. The guy who used to check that the tapes had backed up last night, and it was basically just running, he is now a trained DBA, and he is an excellent DBA. So you're saying no one got fired? No one got fired. So, and that's a concern of a lot of practitioners, and it has been for years of, oh, if I do this, it's going to eliminate my job. I must say, across the whole IT team, there was quite a large reduction in some areas, because it just wasn't needed. There was just no need for those type of roles anymore. But for the core team who looked after the core infrastructure, they're there, but their roles have just changed. And when I was talking to one last week, you know, he said, I'm a bit bored doing this. And I says, what? He says, I'm having to build servers. I said, yes. He says, well, it used to take me quite a while, but I actually could just do all these different parts, et cetera, et cetera. He says, it's about half past 10, and I've done about six this morning, and I've finished the, I think, 19 he had to build by about lunchtime. And I said, and that used to take you, he said forever, but I've just got different type of board now because I just press a button. But at least I know it's only going to take me a few hours and I'm going to do real work again. You just built the next Nutanix commercial I heard. It's like for the IT people that, you know, set aside, you know, a day or a week to do this, we're really sorry you've got a lot of free time. Oh, I know, I know. And it really was that. And I said to the guy, I said, isn't it nice to have a positive problem? So, Kim, let's talk about cloud. How does kind of public, private, hybrid cloud, what do those mean to you? Where did this fit into the discussion we're having? I'm a firm believer in this private cloud, public cloud, it's cloud. It's where are you going to put that service, that application or that data? So it's in the best place for what the user wants to do with it. So that could be on-premises, it could be off-premises. As far as the end users is concerned, they shouldn't care and they shouldn't know. And one thing which again, which we've done at Fitness First is to say, right, is this something which we want on-premises, on a private cloud, or is this something which we want to have off-premises? So some of the applications we've gone, that's software as a service. We will take that as software as a service. So they used to run their own exchange, they used to run their own, looking after office and so forth. That is in Office 365 and off it went. On the website and so forth, it's right that's got to sit in the cloud. Let's put that on Azure because it works very nicely. We can do work on-premises and we can just push that up. So all of the development can be done nicely on-prem and then we can just publish that up and the users are just using it. So it's really looking to take away that sort of line, make that line as blurring as gray as possible and just like, where's the best place for it? So we're now looking to have some applications where we're going to have part of the application running on-premises, we're going to have some middleware running probably on-premises, so far it is. And the other half of the application is actually running in the cloud. But it runs as one seamless application as far as someone is actually using it because that was the best place to put it. Yeah, I mean as an industry as a whole, I think a lot of people are still grappling with what goes where and how. Especially something that spans between them and is broken up. We haven't talked a lot about microservices at this show but applications are being built a little bit differently and there's considerations that have to be. And again, if you can, the other great thing about going down the Nutanix route is that everything becomes very standardized, very modular, you know, so you can say, I know what I build on-premises, we'll work with something which is software as a service, we'll work with something which I've decided to host on some infrastructure as a service, sitting in Azure or sitting on AWS because they'll work together. And you're right, it shouldn't matter where it sits. What's going to give the best value, the best bang for the buck, but also what's going to give the best experience to someone using it? Howard Ting used the term cloud inspired earlier today and I think he used it as keynote and maybe use it on theCUBE, use it on theCUBE. And Stu, you and Brian talk a lot, Brian Graceley talk a lot about cloud, not being a place to put applications and data. I mean it is, but it's about changing the operating model. The user shouldn't know where it is, who cares? Reasonable people can debate where it should be based on cost and other factors, maybe compliance, et cetera, governance issues, but in terms of the real impact on cloud, the premise is it's about the operating model. Do you buy that premise and how has that manifested itself in your organization? Do you mean the operating model in terms of how the business works? How the business works, how people spend time, what they spend time doing, looking at infrastructure as a piece of software that you can communicate with through an API? Yeah, and you just draw and you use it, you need it. Have we seen a difference? When we've moved some applications up to be cloud hosted, either integer or taking Office 365 and so forth, that has enabled so many people in the business to be able to work anywhere much more easily. So you reduce down the size of any footprint which you need for an Office and so forth. So we've closed down some of the admin areas. We closed down one of the whole offices which we had in London, because it's like why are people traveling in to use something which you can use, not just sitting at a desk, but you can use it anyway. You truly can use it anyway. Here's an iPhone, it's got all your email on it and your calendar and everything else. We've moved to using SharePoint so you can get any documents. So it's changed that business model because it takes away the physical boundaries of having to be in an office. And if you think, if you're taking away the physical boundaries of people working in an office, you're taking away the physical boundaries of where your applications are and where your data is. You can flex, you can move, you can meet anywhere. You're not tied back. And I think that's certainly changed the operating model. And I think the great thing is, so many people in the business have picked that up and ran with that model so quickly. I was saying, so I can just work here and I can do this and if I do want to go to the gym at lunchtime, it's not a problem because I can catch that time up if it's something which needs to be in for someone in the morning because I can get my data anywhere. I can work anywhere. Well, the interesting thing about what you're saying of fitness first is that you have used existing skill sets and advanced them, applied them in new ways. You've taken all this stuff that used to take weeks where the 100 time units down to 10, you've taken those 90 time units and have applied it to new skill sets. You gave an example of somebody who's become a DBA, whether it's Ops Dev or Dev Ops, it sounds like that's permeating into the culture. Oh, it certainly is. We've been working with a very good third party actually in order to help move the business down that route. So again, to speed things up, to give you an example around that is we have a lot of the development is now done offshore because they're skilled, great people, who can do that. And there was an issue which needed to be sorted out and they couldn't get hold of the guy who would normally build them a test environment. They managed to get hold of me in a hotel and said, you know, because they're about six hours time difference and said, we'd really like to sort this now. Have you any idea who we can get hold of? And I said, to do what? I said, we need to take a complete copy of the production environment, put it in a very secure place so we can find out what's going on. And I said, oh, I can do that. So I logged in, I logged into all of this infrastructure which I couldn't see, I could just see a nice front end. And I went, click, click, click. We had a chat for about two minutes, less. And I went, okay, if you're logging in using your normal credentials. And he went, oh, it's done. I said, yeah. Three clicks. It was just to be able to build a server, build exactly that same version of the application which was running in production, not the one we had coming down the pipeline, exactly that one, with exactly that data. As of, I think it was out by about five seconds, the data, you know. And it was so, it was so satisfying. It's a powerful example of transformation. Yes, yes, and that before was, okay, get a copy, get last night's copy, copy it across, put it against the code. Is that the same version as the code running in production? I'm pretty sure. Validate that. Gone away. And it must have been easy because I could do it. So, John, we talked about some of these transformational changes down at the kind of admin level of the changes. Can you bring us up to the C-suite? Infrastructure so long, I don't want to make change because I buy on fear, I buy on risk. How do you get the CIO and CTO over that? Is this ready for production environments? Obviously, there's a couple thousand people here that think so, but what's your experience been? My experience of it was, it was selling to the CIO, to the CFO of, where's your pain point now? Now, let's not mention the word in your time, so mention the word hyperconvergence. Where's the pain? This is, well, it's slow. We have to plan three, five years ahead. So we always overbuy. And then once we actually want to come and use it, it will be out of date. So the CFO is saying, yes, you need to make my costs much more predictable. I need to know as far as possible how much it actually is going to cost. Trying to turn around to the business and say, what will you want in two years' time? Who knows? Who knows? You know, you look back two years and you look to now and you think, my word, you know? So to be able to plan ahead two, three, four, five years, you just can't. So if you can have something in place which can flex, which can say, I need some more servers. If it's a virtual or a physical, again, who knows? It's just a box they can go and use. So that's how we sold it to the CFO saying, we can give you much more predictable costs. And also, we can give you much more predictable costs of running IT overall. Because we've reduced down how many different moving parts. We've reduced down how many suppliers, massively reduced down the number of suppliers. So again, there'll be less paperwork coming in. There'll be less admin coming in just to make sure everything's okay. And he said, well, that's what I'm looking for. What did the CIO want? He wants to be able to move quickly. He wants to be able to be honest, sit in a meeting and it's not him holding anything back. That's what he wants. And also, he wants to be able to then have the confidence to be able to turn around and go, we can use technology to do this, not wait to be said, can technology do something? We're now turning that around and say, well, we can do this and we can do that. You know, because with the speed of technology, there has to be someone as well to say, this is what's possible. This is what's really possible. And again, by being able to spend more time understanding what's possible and trying things out because the team can do that instead of keeping the lights on, changing the tapes. You can drive that much more through the business. All right, well, we're reducing the noise to signal here. It's all about simplification. Great story, John. Thank you so much for sharing with us. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is Dot Next. We're live from the wind in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.