 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's the Cube, covering .next Europe 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back, happy to welcome to the program a first time guest on the program, you, Piscar, who is the CTO of OGD, your customer of Nutanix as well as basically your service provider. Thanks for joining me. Yeah, no problem. Happy to be here. You give us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with OGD, and what it tells about the company. Sure, so I've been with the company for about 12 years, so a pretty long time. I kind of grew up within the company, I started as a service desk employee, made my way all up to the level of the CTO, but I do have a very technical background, so I'm a VExpert, I'm a VCDX. I basically do a lot of the technical side of our business, and as a CTO I'm responsible for our technical services portfolio, so amongst other things we have an IS platform, which we run and operate for our customers, but I do all the technical services, and also the skillset required for our employees to be in those kinds of roles. So I'm transitioning our company from being a primarily operations-based company into a services-based company, which requires a whole different skillset. Yeah, and just organizationally, is there CIO also, or what's your relationship with the CIO then? So we kind of tackle the problem from two sides, right? So he does the business side of things, he does all the systems that we use to engage your clients, and I kind of do the fundamental technical decisions behind that, so we kind of work and tend them together to provide the services both to our own employees and to our customers, and my role's more of the public-facing, and he's more of the internal CIO. Okay, and how many locations, what countries are you in, data center footprint kind of thing? So we're a Dutch service provider, which means we operate in our country, we're not international, that might come in the future. We've got five offices, we're located in each city where there's a technical university, because that's where we get our employees from, so we hire students, and we basically give them a year to acclimatize to being a professional, and then we picked a really good ones, we'll give them an education, we'll make professionals out of them, which means we're a young company, so I'm 32, and I'm pretty much on the average. And you've been there 12 years, correct? Yeah. Yes, so I've been there, you know, way too long. Like I said, I grew up there, but I'm kind of like the average age for our company, and that kind of makes us unique in the enterprise world, because we do service, the bigger enterprises in the Netherlands, whilst we are a pretty young company ourselves, and it gives us a nice fit with a lot of customers that want flexibility, that want a provider that thinks with them instead of just offering standard services. Great, so do you do hosting, or what services do you offer, and what customers do you serve? Yeah, so we're an outsourcer, which means we're kind of broad in the services we offer, we go all the way from services-esque, skilled or unskilled into the IS realm, the data center realm, and kind of everything in between, so we do a lot of service management, system operations, that kind of thing. And our customers, you know, they used to be mainly either government or schools, or you know, somewhere in the public realm, but in the last couple of years, we've seen a pretty big uptake in the financial services industries, which is, you know, a good learning curve for us, and a great match for those types of customers because they want that flexibility. Great, things have changed a whole lot in the last 12 years. What are, you know, some of the drivers that are, you know, from a technology strategy standpoint, driving your decisions? So we basically decided for our IS platform, specifically a couple of years ago, we were, you know, deciding whether we're going to do IS or not, and we were kind of seeing how the maturity of the technical solutions were compared to what we thought was the right way to go. So we figured, well, we don't want to go with, you know, the older, either build it yourself, design it yourself kind of solutions, and we don't want to go with the older converged systems as well because one of the key principles behind everything we do is we want to automate it. We want to be able to make sure it's repeatable. So a converged solution or a build it yourself solution would require like a team of 20 people to manage and operate, right? So we thought, well, that's just too expensive. Customers don't want it. It'll create some kind of inflexibility our customers are not looking for. So we instead went the hyperconverged route, of course, with Nutanix in this case. And we also put on top NSX and VEM and Exegrid and a whole bunch of products that gave us a solution that's flexible, specifically in the sense that we have complete control of the platform and we hand that back to the customer. So customers are able to create their own networks, create their own firewall, create their own load balancer to walk into the data center with a physical server, put it in a rack somewhere, a color rack and attach it to that virtual environment. So we have customers running virtual machines on top of our environment, as well as physical machines in like the next rack over. And we integrate that with the WAN solution, as the WAN solution, to manage their connectivity as well. And that's the kind of flexibility that's just awesome. So you've got the broad spectrum of offering. Your customers, where are they on that spectrum? Are they more conservative? Are they starting to do a mix of everything? What's the option look like? So what we're seeing is a good question. So what we're seeing is we're primarily matching with customers that are starting their transformation into the digital world, right? So we have our banks, we have insurers that are starting off that transition into the digital transformation. And they're not entirely sure yet they want to hand over all of the control of their environment because they want to innovate fast. They want to make decisions, test it out, get it into production fast like an MVP style product. And that's what we're seeing, where our IS platform really helps because they're able to create projects themselves, spin up a couple of VMs, create the networks, create the connectivity needed for it, and just try out all these new types of innovative products themselves. So did you get to catch the opening keynote yesterday? I'm curious what you think of the positioning that they had is customers want that Amazon experience. So now they can buy it from Amazon or they can do it themselves. I would have to say you probably think that you do something similar, right? Oh yeah, so absolutely. So we're in the enterprise space, right? So Amazon is more suitable for like development shop, DevOps shops. And our IS platform is mainly aimed at the enterprise customer that still has VMs, that still has monolithic applications. So our goal is to kind of marry the two concepts, right? I have traditional applications whether they're monolithic or not, but also give them all the advantages of that one click, you know, the one click experience, the ability to do everything in that environment themselves. And we see that as a true differentiator between the two worlds. So here's a question I have for you, because I looked at what they said and I understand it and there's a great reason why customers do things. But the challenge in the enterprise today is if you look at utilization. You know, we talked, it used to be you were lucky if you were getting 5% to 10%, virtualization, you were like, hey, 10% to 15%, really good enterprise customers, you know, you're rarely finding someone over 30%. What's utilization in your environment? So we actually cap it at 80%. Okay, but what do you typically find? What is your kind of, you know, typical, I don't know how you measure it, rack, row, room, you know, what does utilization look like? So for us, as a service provider, we want to optimize that, right? So we're always looking to basically cram everything we have full of services. We want customers on there. That's just basic economics, right? On the other hand, we want to be flexible as a platform, as a service provider to onboard new customers. We kind of want to make the promise to a customer that they can start within a day. So we need that, you know, that headroom to be able to help the customer start quickly. On the other hand, we do see that, you know, it is never as much or as little as the customer is reflecting. So they'll start a project and they'll say, well, we're going to bring 10 terabytes of data to you. And it's going to be 20 or three. And there's really nothing in between. So it's hard to actually accommodate for that. But having a shared platform, having something that is so scalable really helps us to keep that cost and that risk down, basically. Yeah, absolutely, the premise I was trying to bounce off you is the enterprise, you know, even big enterprises, very few of them are going to be able to get to what a service provider can do, let alone one of the big public cloud environments. How do you guys position and compete against the likes of an Amazon, Google, you know, Microsoft even? Yeah. Yeah, so that's another good question. So what we do again is we focus on the enterprise features, right? So an enterprise cares about availability. They care about performance for specific applications. They care about security. They care about all those kinds of things. So what we did with our platform is basically differentiate solely on recoverability. So a customer, you know, kind of expects a platform to be highly available, to be performant, to be secure. But if you look at the public mega clouds, their, you know, their story on availability and recoverability is completely different than what an enterprise customer is used to. So what we said is we're going to differentiate solely on SLA for the ITO and the RPO. So we go all the way up to one hour or back down to 24 hours. And that's basically the only differentiating feature we have in our platform. And we see customers really liking that concept because kind of they get all the benefits of the cloud. It's not their hardware anymore. It's not their data center. It is all full service, self-service. Although they do have those enterprise or enterprise-y features, right? How did Nutanix fit into the mix of what you do? So what we wanted is a platform that's scalable. So we don't want to buy a big, you know, big box that does everything for us. And then, you know, replace it. And I'm sorry, what does scalable mean to you? So scalable to us really is, so we do a lot of work in the public space. So we have a lot of public tenders. So it's pretty difficult for us to gauge how our pipeline's going to fill up. So one month we might get just one or two customers. The other month we'll get 10. And the size of those customers and the size of their workloads is going to vary a lot. Can you share how many nodes in Nutanix? What do you have multiple clusters? How do you manage that? So what we do have is two data centers fairly close to each other. One in Delft and one in Amsterdam, which is about 80 kilometers apart. And we do basically just trench clustering between them. So it's one big data center, at least from the customer perspective. We run about 85 nodes right now, and we're going to go up to 100 before the end of the year. And that's one single cluster spread between two sites, you're saying? Well, technically it's two clusters because Nutanix works that way. But from the customer perspective, it's all managed as one big resource pool. The customer can set policies on performance and availability and that kind of stuff. But that's basically it. Gotcha. And is that your infrastructure as a service is it built on top of Nutanix? Yeah. Is there anything that's in that piece that's not Nutanix? From a physical server perspective, no. So well, there's one exception. So we do offer a physical colo facility right next to our IS platform, which integrates with the NSX bits. So customers can bring their physical SQL server, their old backup repository, their connectivity, et cetera, et cetera. It's similar to like a direct connect that Amazon has, right? Absolutely, that's where we borrowed the concept. Yeah, absolutely. Amazon does the same thing, it's really good. How about your customers? Do you have customers that bring in or use Nutanix gear, or do you offer that to them or are they just still buying their own stacks? Well, we kind of want them to land on our IS platform, right? So as an outsourcer, we typically don't sell IS as a separate service, but we do it as part of a larger deal, as part of a larger contract, where we also do a service desk, also do system operations, also do all the ITEL processes. So we're not very active in the space of just reselling Nutanix hardware. It happens once or twice. But again, our customers are mainly looking to outsource to us, so they're fine with this concept. So you're a service provider, you have very specific needs, as you said, your growth, your flexibility. How does Nutanix serve your needs for, do they do any special financial packages? Are they their services, spares, things like that? How's the experience for you? Yeah, so the experience is pretty easy for us. So what we do is we just send an email to one of our Nutanix reps saying how many nodes we need. And that's it. So they'll come in within a week or two, drop the node into our data center, and it takes care of itself, basically. And we're working into a system where we have a spare parts depot just outside of our data center, where we can physically take our own server from Nutanix and put them in our rack and just send an email, we took seven servers from you. So you're delivering to your customers something at a utility pricing model? Do you look for that as a customer too, or is that something that you need? Yeah, so we put everything we do into an OPEX model, so we lease everything. And it's just to be able to get new resources into that environment fairly quickly. So like I said, we do a lot of public tenders, and it's very erratic as to when a new customer wants to start when we win a deal. So we need that fast time to market for us to get those resources into our data center. So everything is in lease, we do everything from an OPEX perspective. Okay, Nutanix has been talking a lot about kind of their ecosystem, how they're growing. What do you like, and what things are you hoping to see expanded over time? So the biggest thing is going to be networking, right? So Nutanix is fairly strong in storage and compute, and they're just starting out in a networking field. So as a current NSX customer, it's pretty difficult for me to gauge where they're going. But I'm welcoming the competition in that perspective because NSX, although it is a great product, it's one of the few products in that space. So I'd like to see more competition to have VMware up their NSX game as well. So networking is one of the big ones. And then also the whole backup area, that's still in development. And that's something we're actively monitoring to see if we can optimize that experience for our own data centers. Okay, so you want to give you the final word, just kind of your take on the market, being service provider, Nutanix. So I'd say Nutanix is absolutely on the ride track, right? So they basically created a new market, created a new term. And what I think Nutanix is absolutely doing right is their focus on customer experience. And I'd just like to see more companies go that way to really put the customer first and innovate with customers instead of against customers or competing against each other. You, Piskar, really appreciate you joining CTO of OGD, service provider, talking about how many things are changing, making it easier for his customers as his infrastructure providers make it easier for him and his company to do more. We'll be back with more coverage here at the Nutanix.next conference 2016 in Vienna, Austria. You're watching theCUBE.