 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're joined by Faramaz Madavi. He is the Senior IT Group Director, Cadence Design Systems. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. My pleasure, nice to meet you. So tell our viewers a little bit about Cadence, based in San Jose, tell our viewers a little bit about your company, Cadence Design Systems. So Cadence has been a company in the area since about 30 years ago. So we make software to enable semiconductor companies to design, test, and build chips. So most technology that you see in Fries Electronics, it has some Cadence solution in it. So you guys have a lot of legacy in your IT. Talk about the Nutanix relationship. So our journey with Nutanix started about three years ago. I had actually explored Nutanix at a previous company. I've been with Cadence three and a half years. So I liked it, but there was really no opportunity to do much at that time. The company was very new at the time. But at Cadence, we identified some opportunities to explore Nutanix, and it's been a great experience so far. We actually are running a lot of our critical business applications on Nutanix, so we're all in. What was the door opener for you guys there at Cadence? What got them in? The overall architecture looked good in a presentation level. So it was worth exploring. But it's a new company, new architecture. You have to kind of go into it carefully. So it was a matter of identifying opportunities that were maybe not production, not super business critical to start. But as time goes on, you build confidence and you do more and more. So today we're using Nutanix, as I said, for business applications. We're using it for VDI. A lot of our Zen desktop instances are running on Nutanix today. We use it as what we call tier zero. So a lot of our shared services, you know, DNS, Active Directory, those sorts of services are running on Nutanix. So we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. So I always like to know how this actually helps you and your company, people do their jobs better, more quickly, more efficiently, more productively. Can you sort of walk us through what life was like before Nutanix and what life is like now in terms of the staffing and the overhead and the support? So I would say there's a couple of different, you know, big benefits. One is we're in a cloud era, right? So a lot of companies are looking for workloads to move to the public cloud and we're no different. We're constantly looking for what makes sense in the public cloud, what makes sense on-prem. So from a support and skill set standpoint, it's very important to be consistent. Basically have the same support model for both on-prem as well as public cloud. So that's one big benefit that Nutanix offers because the same skill sets to support, let's say, AWS environment is the same as, you know, the Nutanix support environment. The other critical thing is just like any IT organization we're challenged with limited resources, you know, doing more with less. So the ease of administration, ease of support, just the inherent reliability of the technology allows our staff to, you know, sleep more at nights and, you know, work less often during the weekend. So the overall support overhead has reduced significantly. So that's, those are the biggest things I would say. Those are two very important things. Those are the two biggest things that we went into this, this engagement with. But, you know, we are pleasantly surprised that performance has exceeded our expectations. You know, you know, I did expect reliability. I didn't quite expect this level of performance improvement. So that's been excellent. So again, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it just given that experience. You said the staff sleeps well at night. How have they reacted? What are some other anecdotes from the staff? Freed more free time? Is it management, playing? What's the, what was some of the feedback from your team? Well, I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like they're not working yet. Yeah, that's not quite the scenario. But, you know, I would say it's gone from a crazy environment to something a little bit more humane. So, I think not only with the staff but just across the company, you have those who are who kind of buy in and go into it positively and others who are more reluctant. And that's no different with the support staff. So I think just their own confidence level and, you know, their desire to do more with Nutanix as increased as they've had more experience with it. It's interesting, I did a panel yesterday with some customers from Nutanix and Mr. Mix, a big bank, mid-sized company and a good big corporate kind of IT. And it's very interesting. The legacy, where there was more legacy, there was a lot of these dependencies and they were looking at time frames for pushing stuff out like eight weeks to two months. I mean, two hours. So they went from eight weeks to pushing any kind of rule propagation or any kind of new stuff, eight weeks to two hours. And that was a huge number. Are you guys seeing anything around in terms of performance on the time side with Nutanix? What are some of the things that you're getting benefits-wise, operationally? Well, the more we do, the more cookie cutter it becomes. So each migration is easier and faster and so on. And that also has to do with confidence, right? The very first critical business application that we moved to Nutanix, the level of testing we did was insane. Now it's less so. For multiple reasons, that migration experience is much more efficient, much, much quicker today than it was early on. You know, one of the things we hear too, Rebecca, was, you know, Nutanix is a new vendor. You mentioned new company. They're 10 years old, so still new relative to the bigger guys. Getting it pushed, getting it through, getting it approved by executive confidence from the executive management around, wait, what's this new company? What's the benefits? All kinds of gyrations of approvals and sometimes politics and legacy kind of factors in. How does that work on your end? How did that go? Getting Nutanix through? Was it a struggle? Was it a challenge? Well, take us through that. So as you mentioned, the fact that it's new technology, new company, that has its own set of challenges from some application owners and executives. You know, why take the risk? Why not do the same thing we've done, you know, always. So that's one big challenge. The other was there is a tendency, especially early on when Nutanix was selling it as an appliance as opposed to license only. There is a tendency to view it as a hardware solution and it's exactly not that. It's the exact opposite of that. It's purely a software solution. That's where the value is. So it's very easy to get trapped into that hardware discussion where people will kind of compare with servers and storage versus Nutanix. So you have to kind of change that mindset and show the real value that hyperconvergence provides. The ease of administration, the high performance, reliability and so on. And then as you make that argument and convince more and more people, again, you have to start small and expand. But that was some of the main challenges, I would say. When you're talking about the migration experience and you said when the first business critical application, it was a long time we tested it. We really worked at it now. We have a bit more faith that it's going to work out. But can you talk about some best practices that emerged in terms of how to migrate and migrate well that maybe other companies could learn from Cadence Design Systems? Well, I would say the best practices aren't unique to Nutanix. Any migration process has various phases in terms of planning, testing and so on. And I think just having that discipline, a well-documented, consistent process so that you're not starting fresh every time there's a new migration initiative going on. But I think Nutanix makes it easier just given the, especially the Prism Management tool. But I would say it's not particularly unique to Nutanix. IT organizations just need to be well disciplined in the migration process. One of the things that you mentioned, software, which is a great point, that cultural shift, it's not a hardware box and there's probably all the best practices around evaluating hardware. Software is becoming more and more central to IT. How do you see IT evolving? Because you've got cloud right on the horizon, you've got public cloud, benefits there are clear. If you have green field, you have legacy stuff, you've got containers, containerization happening as a trend. Lift and shift versus evolve the life cycle management of apps and workloads are now under a new kind of view with software. How is IT changing as a practitioner in the field? How do you look at the evolution of how IT's going to change? So my side of the house is the infrastructure and operations side and they tend to be historically kind of manuals. Different network administrators, storage administrators, system administrators, that is all changing and all becoming more developer skillsets, scripting, automation, things of that sort. So I think that's the biggest change that's going on in IT today is kind of changing the skillsets and kind of viewing it as a full stack as opposed to just storage or just network. So having that holistic viewpoint, having that ability to develop automation that works across the stack, I think that those are the changes that traditional infrastructure groups need to adapt to. I was talking to a customer yesterday and he was a young guy, I think he was in his late 20s and I'm saying to myself, you know, 10 years ago he was in high school or college and so you see a new generation coming up where they gravitate towards DevOps. Right. And so they get that, so they don't have that dogma that, whoa, we went with this vendor so they kind of have this new thing. Any observations that you can share on this younger generation coming into IT or new talent that's coming in, that's developer oriented? What do they like? What's the work style? What do they gravitate to? What are some of the tools they like? What's the mindset? So I think they can teach us to be honest. We have, you know, the older folks like myself have a tendency to look at the way things have always been done, right? So having that fresh viewpoint is great to kind of come into it with a DevOps mentality, you know, off the jump. I think we should kind of welcome that and take advantage of that. You know, for Cadence in general, we are a pretty mature company in terms of our personnel. We don't have that rapid turnover of our team members. So we're trying to actually, you know, we welcome that new talent so that we can kind of get that DevOps mentality in-house and kind of mature it ourselves. So we're in the beginning of that journey. How do you work together? Because I mean, you're not that old, first of all. But this is the time where we have multiple generations together working in the workforce, these digital natives that we were talking about and the people who get technology so innately that grew up with it versus the Gen Xers, the Boomers are still there, the Gen Ys that are emerging and graduating now. How is it a challenge at Cadence to get all these people working collaboratively, productively together? Well, Cadence is an extremely technical company. And I'm referring to our customers, you know, they're all double E, you know, masters and doctorate engineers. So it's a very technical environment. We try not to really focus on the technology actually, but to look at, you know, the business objectives. You know, what are we trying to achieve? What problems are we trying to solve as opposed to, oh, here's a cool technology, how can we use it? You know, the mindset is a little bit different. We're looking at the business side first and then using technology to solve for those problems. So once you have that focus, regardless of your experience, your age, your background, you work together, you know, to achieve that end goal. What do you think about the show? We're here at Nutanix next to Anaheim. What's your verdict on so far, the content, the positioning, your customer? What's next for you guys? Yeah. I see a very loyal customer base on what we've found. People love the product. What's next? What do you think of the show? I'm very impressed. I wasn't expecting it to be this large. You know, I went to a local smaller version that was in the Bay Area last year. That was pretty impressive too, but this is amazing. I like it because, you know, IT leaders get sales calls all the time and we kind of get bombarded. So the tendency is to ignore those. This kind of gives us a chance to, at our own pace, kind of see who the key partners are up to Nutanix, look for opportunities and meet some of these other vendors. So it's been both educational as well as kind of entertaining, you know. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Farmers, for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. My pleasure. Good to meet you guys. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of Nutanix next here in Anaheim coming up in just a little bit.