 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Utaskar, and this is Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in London, England. Always happy to have a customer on the program and even more, but we've got a CIO, the ones that are sitting in the hot seat. Bob Brown, who's the CIO of Information, Communication and Technology with Manchester Gove. Thank you for having the show in your home country and pleasure to talk with you. Great, thanks for letting me join your panel today. So Bob, I've been an analyst for about, coming up on nine years now, and the role of the CIO is something that just gets looked at under a microscope. It's how's the role changing? Is there a future for the CIO? Does everything just go away to the CMO take it? Who takes your budget? So, I'm sure in your world, things are nice and mellow, you kind of sit in a comfy chair, everybody comes and asks you for things nicely and throws money at you, did I get things right? That's completely at the different end of the scale of where my business is, completely untrue. There's no comfy chair to start with, let's be honest, right? Our business is 24 by seven, so in the context of what most people think of local government, we're providing critical services that are fundamentally helping our entire 600,000 residents of Manchester to interact with our council services and they need to do that at a time that's convenient for them. So it's constantly evolving, constant challenges and inevitably in public sector life, financially hugely difficult for us to balance the books. Bring us inside, you've got 600,000 customers. Are they all stopping you at the local grocery and being like, hey, I need this done or this isn't working right? What are some of the big things that are impacting you? What's happening in your space? Yeah, okay, well look, we've got 7,500 colleagues that work at the council and we're supporting 600,000 people, nearly 600,000 people that live in the area and they live in the area for all sorts of reasons. Some of them are part of the digital transformation that is going on. Some of them are moving to the area because of the economic buoyancy that we have within the region. I think outside of London, Manchester is the place that people want to be and they're seeing a big explosion of new jobs and innovation, we've got big brands, Google are there, Amazon have just launched new services that they're bringing, 600 new high quality digital jobs into the area. We've got Microsoft there. This is an enormous digital economy that's constantly evolving and inevitably those people that are studying at our big universities want to live and work in an environment that is conducive for their personal development, their career direction, but they live in the city. They want to be using services in a way that is more modern than ever before and they want to take the experiences that they've perhaps had in different cities and different countries and know that they can get those and beyond in Manchester. And so if people, I'm betting they have different expectations now. So it used to be you go up to an office, you get a ticket and you ask your question, right? I'm assuming that experience has changed as well for Manchester, for the government. So servicing your customers in a more digital way, basically? Yeah, very much so. Look, I've been at Manchester City Council now just over three years and in that time I think it's true to say that the services were quite where they needed to be. There was some element of investment that was needed and we've had to pull really a good transformation approach together. We've had to upskill many of the team. We've had to look to attract some new people with some new experiences into the group and we've had to fundamentally change the relationship between what was the technology function and somewhat isolated from frontline business into it being a critical enabler of transformation for our entire council. That's really what we've had to do. I love that, Bob. You kind of teed up the digital transformation story which has been at the heart of a lot of the discussions we've been having for the last couple of years. I wonder if you could help us walk through that a little bit. What have you done kind of on the foundational platform infrastructure layer to change? What's happening on the applications on top of that? And then the people side, of course, as you know, immensely important that you raised. Look, in our world, I think it's helpful, I think, to firstly set the agenda and our agenda is predicated on service and availability of our services being our number one priority. So therefore, any downtime, any lack of availability, any service failure has a core direct relationship impact with the people who are using our services. When you work in local authority terms, some of your others may be aware of this or maybe others are listening to this today, we're not dealing with inconvenience factors if services fail. This isn't an ATM card not working to give you 20 pounds from the hole in the wall. Whilst that's hugely frustrating, I get that. In my world, if certain services aren't available, we're not helping some of the most vulnerable people that need our services to work. We could be making decisions that affect their lives. We could be making decisions that are also helping people to process, unfortunately, those that have passed away. Our coroner's service, the critical service that we provide at the council. You must remember we're dealing with truly the lives of the people who use our services and those that not just that emotional connection that we therefore have as residents really extends beyond technology. Technology for me is an enabling function for us that has got to be always available. Hence why we make some of the decisions that we do around the core infrastructures that we have. So for me, the core infrastructure is our foundation level of which we build our reputation, we build our services on, we build the reliance that we have as an organization. Our use of Nutanix as a technology enables us to be able to build greater levels of resilience also. So that if we do have a failure, the reality is that our user base will likely never know it's happened, only my team may. But for us, that foundation level gives us the ability to then start more strategic conversations with our business. It's very difficult to have a strategic relationship about change when you fundamentally can't provide the core service. So you've got to start there. So tell us a little about what is your use of Nutanix? How do you use it? And how does it improve that foundational level to actually deliver those services to your customers? Well for us, our journey started about six months ago and we're already transitioning, in fact, nearly getting to the end of the first stage of our journey of transitioning into the hyperconverged infrastructure, which is critical for us for many, many different reasons. Our fundamental business case was around our ability to be able to clearly change our whole dynamics around resilience, but also reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the number of servers that we have to power. So our power consumption has changed. We're already delivering on some of those business case values in a very, very short place of time. So for us, the ability to pick up our infrastructure and be able to now put that in a new environment has created already a significant change for our organization and one that we can build on. Okay, yeah, Bob, since it's so recent, give us, paint a little picture, kind of the before and after. Did it reduce the amount of people that needed to focus specifics on infrastructure? Did you have to do some reskelling? You said you've done some changes in personnel and hiring and training recently. Help us understand. Yeah, look, in our case, we've needed to look at a technology enabling us to be able to demonstrate and deliver on our core strategic objectives. So for me, our data center is very much about how we house and how we service with keeping our data safe and secure and always available. That enables us to be able to also support some elements of our social value. So for us, the ability to be you working with a partner who are absolutely strategically aligned with what our strategic direction is as an organization is fundamental for us and our ability to be able to therefore then no longer need some of those personnel who are providing day-to-day services around the data center because those skills now can be used elsewhere within my service. We've got a situation where we can now be confident that the resilience of that new infrastructure is such that we no longer need to have an individual babysitting those services now where that technology enables us to be able to do it automatically. All right, you mentioned that you're finishing phase one. So maybe can you step back and whatever you're allowed to share a little bit of what is the phased approach? You know, where do you go with Nutanix and the surrounding solutions with it? Well, look, our use of Nutanix and our ability to be able to partner with what is clearly a recognized Gartner Magic Quadrant Top Right organization enables us to be able to get access to some further elements of innovation. The difficulty in the public sector of having an R&D function is, frankly, it's impossible. Our relationship with our partners is how we leverage, frankly, innovation and where we get some of that from. So the first stage for us was very much about getting some of the core foundations there but beyond that, it's about how they can help us also unlock other elements of our strategy of goals and objectives. And one of those is about how we can use our new relationships in Manchester. We have devolved budgets from central government enabling our health colleagues and our local authority colleagues come closer together for us to share information, share data and for us to be able to make even greater richer decisions about the care and support of people. In some cases, that is going to enable us to be able to use assisted living technology that's going to be housed and run in our new data center environment that is going to fundamentally change the way that we provide healthcare services in the future. That's a real strategic aim for us. Yeah, how does IoT fit into your future plans? I don't know if it's tied with, if you've talked to Nutanix about what they're doing there but it's been something I found a lot of government similar to yours are looking in that space. Look, I think IoT is inevitably something that people like me have to consider and think about. I guess I would say that IoT is at one level a whole bunch of individual devices that work on their own platforms that don't talk to each other. And in the healthcare space, that ain't going to work for us. That's just not going to be, we've got to have a platform by which those that are providing the healthcare services using technology that's deployed in a patient and now a resident scenario to fundamentally change that dial from as providing what is a reactionary healthcare service in being much more proactive. So those data sets have got to come together and that ability for us then to be able to use that data to help us do predictive analytics in the future and for us to be able to stop the ability for somebody to get so ill, they have to go back into the acute care scenario is crucial and that's again for us is how we think IoT has to, for us, develop a relationship with our various partners who discreetly provide those services by bringing those things together and that's where I think our relationship with new tanks will help us unlock and really discover how we might be able to manage that and deliver some of those things quickly. So one of the things that you do as a CIO is think about the hybrid cloud strategies, right? So you're talking about these separate data silos that you and your partners have now. So what is your strategy to combine those data sets or open them up so that you as a government can actually leverage that data from, no matter where it runs, no matter where it is stored? Yeah. I think we're at early stages of our data strategy for the council. We certainly have a federated business model that is evident for all to see and most local authorities are somewhat similar. I think the challenge for us in the future is going to be how we unlock the power of the data that we capture and the relationships that we have today. At the council, one of the key strategic objectives of the next few years is for us to deliver a new customer relationship management function. That will fundamentally enable us to change the way that we are structured internally, the way our organization responds to the way that different interactions are going to come. Roughly today, about 50% of our interactions with our customers, with our residents of Manchester are through a digital channel. That means there's about 50% that have a different experience and we know we need to change that. So for us, by really having a strategic vision in terms of where our data strategy needs to be, is it going to enable us to think about that technology that's going to enable us to get there in the future? All right, Bob, last thing I want to ask you is, it sounds like you've got a lot of moving pieces. If you could go to kind of the vendor ecosystem, so not just Nutanix, but other companies work with, what could they be doing to make your life easier? Look, I think that's a double-edged sword, right? I think the first thing is, as a public sector, we've got to learn to how to get the best from our partners. I think we've got to also create that situation where our partners meet with leadership on a regular basis and that they've got the opportunity to then talk about not just the contracts and the SLA and the regular series performance stuff, but much more beyond that. I think as a public sector, we've got to open ourselves up to having those conversations more. And I would like our partners to push us to deliver that, if I'm honest. I had our partner event yesterday. We shared a lot about what's going on in the city, a lot about the challenges, but it's true to say today that I'm probably one of, if not the only local authority doing that. I think I'd like more local authorities to be doing that and I'd like our partners to be pushing us. It's true in that environment. I saw yesterday, Nutanix mixing with people from Google, mixing people from Dell, mixing with people from other brands. For them to be able to also recognize how they can collaborate to bring solutions through to us. Bob, I really appreciate you sharing with our community what's going on. Congratulations on what you're doing and wish you the best of luck. Many thanks. Great to talk. For you, Piscar, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in London. Thanks for watching theCUBE.