 From around the globe, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, the virtual experience. Really happy to welcome to the program. We have a returning guest. Tarkin Mainer is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix in our new role since the last time we had him on the program. And joining him, we have Herman Brown, who's the CIO for the City of San Francisco's District Attorney. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. All right, so Tarkin, help set the stage for us. As I mentioned, we know you, our network knows you, but new to Nutanix in the last year, and talked to us a little bit about this HPE Nutanix partnership. Yeah, as you know, Stu, first of all, thank you for hosting us, you know, great to be here. This is probably who knows, my 50th cube, I guess, over the past two decades, especially the last 20 years has been crazy for us, obviously the industry, lots of movement, lots of change. So let me give you a little context. I'm related to Nutanix, joined the company about six months ago in the capacity of chief commercial officer, a hybrid role with some product aspects, business development, go to market, our club infrastructure, strategic alliances and some of the corporate work we're working on. In that context too, obviously HPE is a very, very important strategic partner to us. As you know, the companies, the two companies have been working together for a long time, but especially the last, I would say six to 12 months, we have this phenomenal relationship around what I call the focused areas of our business, around our digital infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure business, on top of that are solutions from data center, to DevOps and to desktop services in these three specific segments. We built this really interesting, really strategic relationship with HPE with some of our software suites and HPEs platform. Now obviously working through a multi-cloud channel to our own Nutanix cloud, our own Post-it cloud, in addition to it, our telco and XSB partners using their cloud infrastructure as well as some of the hyperscaler work we're doing with Azure AWS, in addition to our direct sales force and private cloud approach, HPE and Nutanix are working hand in hand in this multi-cloud so to speak operating model. So it's a new relationship in some ways from a multi-cloud perspective. One of our fastest growing segments, we had a phenomenal quarter in the last three months, we just released our results and HPE is a growing for us and we're given definitely a great suite of solutions to our customers with the typical usual simple to deploy, simple to use Nutanix customer delight on the HPE platform. So I'm sure we can talk a little bit more, but glad to be here, but also with Herman, Herman Brown, the DA's office in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world. So glad to be here. So thank you Stu again for hosting us. Great, thanks so much Tarkin, Herman, we're going to get into a lot of the technology pieces you with your CIO hat on, want to understand of course how cloud, how modern infrastructure, your applications are changing, but give us a little bit about your personal background and really the purview that you cover in the city of San Francisco district attorney's office. Yes, well I've been with the DA's office for just over three years, I'll be four years I guess in August of this year. And I come from 20 plus years of private sector experience, some government experience. And the city and county, the government is really no different than any other organization other than, we're known to be a little bit slower to adopt the technologies, which is why I'm here is I want to help government become more efficient, more productive through the use of technology. And so I'm excited to be here and thank you first and foremost for having me on the show, appreciate it. Yeah, I love you brought that up because we've been doing theCUBE for just over a decade now and in the early parts of that it's like, right, okay, if I'm talking to a local government, we understand your budgets are tight, you're using older technology, you've got duct tape and bailing wire to keep things going. The last few years, some of my favorite conversations have been in the public sector because you talk about some of the tools that are out there and I don't need a huge capital investment to get started, I can modernize. So Herman, I guess digital transformation is that a term that you've brought from the private sector over to the public sector, what kind of transformations are you going through and what is it that's, I guess, driving the need for transformation in your world? Yeah, so, I've been with the city and county of San Francisco for nine years. So I'd love to say that I brought digital transformation or at least a term with me, but I was actually here in the DA's office or in the city and county's employment when that terminology came out, being the CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, I mean, we're essentially a law firm, and law firms are historically just paper intensive organizations, right? You have court filings and rap sheets, all these physical documents that have to be physically signed and transferred from one attorney to another to the courts and between police departments and sheriffs and so forth and so on. And we just looked at, what are we doing? How can we work more efficient as a lot of organizations will always find ourselves to be understaffed for the amount of work that we have going on? The city and county of San Francisco, the DA's office, we see roughly 26,000 cases a year. We try about half of those cases per year and we're staff of 320 people. That includes everyone, you know, the attorneys, the paralegals, finance folks, IT, investigators. And so it was like, we need to really, you know, embrace technology and be able to help transform, you know, these paper intensive processes into automated digital forms and documents that can minimize the physical transferring of data, especially now, you know, during COVID-19. Yeah, Herman, you know, that transformation process is often multi-step. There's a lot of people, there's technology and there's, you know, the applications. There's actually had a Nutanix show that the comment I made is, you know, well, you know, let's modernize the platform, then you can modernize the applications on top of it. Harkin, maybe I'd love to hear just a little commentary from you. You've got a great perspective on this. You know, that modernization effort, you know, where your customers are, some of the levers that are helping them along that journey. Yeah, so everything Herman said is very interesting and obviously delight to my ears because as a technologist in the industry for the past, you know, three decades, we're dealing with these, what I call transformational waves. And, you know, last 10 years, the cloud transformation from the server, virtualization transformation, now increasingly we're seeing this very fast migration from the old school legacy data centers with legacy infrastructure and apps, basically lifting and shifting these applications to a new cloud, so to speak, operating model. So cloud to us in a sense, it's not a destination, it's an operating model. So we see the customer's needs at the end of the day, just like Herman outlined. Herman is not trying to do cloud or digitization for digital cloud sake. He's trying to lead his team and for the DA's office, one of my most favorite DA's, by the way, in the nation, but then making sure that they can process data faster, they can achieve their goals locally, especially in this post-pandemic world and the entire change are happening in our country in a big way over the past few weeks on the events and how our country is going to change and move forward in the future. So there is going to be a lot of work going to happen in e-government. This transformational digitization, migration to the cloud is going to be a big deal. So as a company, very quickly, we're seeing this as a huge opportunity with our customers as we're partnering with them in a multi-cloud way, so to speak. We still believe our server partners are super important in this context with HPE, with their cloud services around HPE GreenLake, the things we're doing with them. At the same time, working with HPE and some of our partners, delivering our own Nutanis Cloud services, as well as some of the things that we're doing with some of the telcos and service providers to give choice to our customers, to consume the services we provide on-prem through our own cloud services, through a third-party telco or service provider, or their choice of hyperscaler like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, Oracle. So in this context, this partnership is hugely important. So there's a lot of work going on with HPE, with Antonio, with their CEO, with Atari, with their CFO, with Tom Black, with Sonali Parek, with the entire executive team, we're working very closely with them, with Haiko in the field organization, our field organization, and we really cherish customers like the DA's office who are doing that transformation, who are leading that transformation during this pandemic and during this massive change in our country and hopefully it's going to make a transformable change to our world in terms of, obviously, not only technology, but social change. So you see this as a transformative timeframe for companies like us in HPE and with partners like Herman and DA's office. All right, so, I mean- Herman, please, yeah. Yeah, I was just going to say, and absolutely, I agree with Tark. I mean, the way that we're able to react so quickly to this pandemic is the fact that we've already have started this digital transformation that we've already looking at these cloud services. We've already started down this path and so it's made the transition with this surge and overnight change of, in the office, nine to five, five days a week to, everyone is remote every day now. We couldn't do that without having these cloud services such as Nutanix HP partnership to make that possible. Yeah, is there something specific you talk the work from home initiative is, did you have to scale something out? Did you have to, what bring us inside that change that helped enable your workforce that you wouldn't have been able to do without this technology? Oh yeah, we absolutely had to scale out the workforce. I would say that before the beginning of this pandemic, we had roughly 15 people that probably had VPN access from outside the office. Now, you have to also understand that the DA's office is very unique in the form of the types of data that we handle and deal with. So I have HIPAA data, I have CGIS, which is criminal justice information that's managed by DOJ. So there are certain systems that we normally would not be able to access from outside of the office that we had to be able to access now remotely. And so it's taken some time to get us there to that point. But having this environment that allowed us to scale up easily, start looking at digitizing this process and being able to have the storage and compute processing power to be able to support that initiative is really what we're talking about. And that's what we've been doing. We've been quickly scaling adding additional storage but piping in drives and making this all possible just in a very quickly and seamlessly process. Excellent, maybe we talked a little bit about the results and how you can move faster, digit transformation is all about leveraging your data and be able to react more quickly. So the pandemic definitely has put services to the test and it sounds like they are doing well. Maybe step us back a little bit as to what led you to HPE in Nutanix, how you made that decision? Well, we went through a trial period of proof of concept. We looked at Dell, we looked at obviously the HPE Nutanix we looked at a few different solutions and it really boiled down to cost and what we were getting bang for the dollar. I think there's some other great solutions out there or good solutions out there, but none of them came to the value that the partnership with HPE and Nutanix actually had to offer to us. One of the things is that with this partnership is when there's a support issue, I call Nutanix. I'm not calling HPE, I'm not calling this other third party vendor, I'm not getting the run around of, oh, that's not our problem, that's someone else's problem. You need to call the software team, you need to call the hardware team, you need to call. No, it's one person that we call, we've had and it had to go that route. Nutanix has been an excellent partner for hours and they have been great to work with on the ball and that's what I always talk about and success is not just the success of the organization but the success of the individuals and the success of the partnership between organizations and that's what I looked with is a business partner that wants to help me and my role in our organization be successful. Great, Herman, we talked about modernizing the environment, it brings us inside the applications if you would. What applications are you using? Maybe are there new initiatives that you're doing from an application standpoint? Yeah, so we're running pretty much the same standard of applications that most organizations are running with DHCP, IS, ISS. But I have some other systems that we run that I can't talk about just because of the CIO, CISA hat that I also wear within the organization I'm very security conscious about talking about those applications. But we run pretty much the same basic applications as most organizations do. Those specialized applications that we also operate on, we do see an improvement in performance. We see the speediness of the access, the more stability and reliability of the solutions. And so we're very pleased with the performance that we're getting. Excellent, you also, you talked about just the efficiency of what you're doing. I mentioned earlier that public sector, you can get started for smaller chunks using things like Nutanix, but budget obviously still a concern. I'm sure anything you're doing with really the virtualization and the infrastructure that is helping you keep budget under control. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Nutanix environment is scalable. It allows us to be able to look at other solutions such as VDI, which we're talking about and looking at potentially doing for staff members that don't have laptops that may need laptops or need remote access into the system. We also have that ability to scale up with just another blade, more storage. It makes it very easy to go with we're looking at cost saving measures currently are running VMware on the back end, but looking to convert that over to HAV, AHV, yes. In the future, that can also help us reduce those costs as well, especially at this point in time where City and County is looking for department budget savings. Excellent, yeah, Tarkin, I guess this would be a good point for you to chime in on just generally AHV and any other commentary you've got. I was just trying to hold my words back because the things that Herman is doing are so exciting in a way, techies like myself to get really excited. Like Herman talked about, right? You're not doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. At the end of the day, Herman and DA's office, like many government offices, both in the Fed as well as in state and local have to do more with less. Obviously in this post pandemic world, we need to get even more efficient, more innovative and get most output from our input. So in that context, bringing storage, compute, networking, all integrated in a converged way with smart ways, not just adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three, but one plus one plus one equals less than one in terms of cost, making it make sure it's infrastructures and simplified, easy to deploy, easy to use. That's why we keep an NPS score of 90, by the way, part of the reason, a little bit of shameless plug there for you. I don't know many companies doing NPS 90 because we make infrastructure simple. So if you said all this to Herman's point, all those applications he's managing and building and then obviously digitizing and in some way, lifting and shifting to a new cloud digitized model, he want to make sure Herman and companies and organizations like the AS office under leadership with innovative CIOs like Herman, making sure they have choice. They can choose the operating model they want on-prem, off-prem, hybrid or multi-cloud or in a government cloud fashion and deliver these services. To give you an example, we talked about home as the extended enterprise. Our home office is now part of the office. I have to secure my home. The way I secure my new tank set quarters because I'm now running my business from home. So in the past, there was a delineation between home and the office. Now home is part of the extended office. The way I manage my trash, the way I manage my peripherals, applications, the network latency, everything has to be dealt with in a very smart way. But even our paper trash in our office, we manage it carefully because of the IP, people steal IP. Guess what? Now at home, I have to have the same vigor. Guess what? DA's office, the things that Herman is dealing with, they have to be so careful, not only in the office, but at home. So in that sense, desktop service, virtual desktops, all these new technologies are gonna be delivered in a simpler way. Our new solution frame all requires a browser. That's it. Deliver a browser-based application, integration to home in a secure way, the things that we've been waiting for for a long time. So this post-pandemic world is gonna make us more agile, is gonna make us more efficient, and hopefully we're gonna do much more with less. Excellent. Well, Herman, I have one more question for you. If you can, give us a little bit of a look forward. We always love to hear from the CIO, just number one, what's on your plate? And as you look at this solution, what you'll be using it for and going? And secondly, if you've got anything, if you could have something more that the ecosystem, maybe HPE and Nutanix, or just maybe in general from the ecosystem out there that would make your life and your staffs easier. Well, that's a great question. We have over 30 projects on our project list right now that are active projects that's going on. I have a staff of nine IT professionals with three open positions. So I should say nine. I have six actual staff members with three open positions currently and we're on a hiring freeze. So one of the great things about the Nutanix HP solution has been that I've been able to downsize from the two systems engineers to the one system engineer without necessarily losing any bandwidth or knowledge or experience because the environment is so easy to manage, which has been great. We'll continue to move forward with the generalization of our records and utilizing the cloud services that are available through the various channels. And it's just an unprecedented time. I see that this is going to be the new norm. Excellent. So Tarkin, we'll let you put the exclamation point on it. Give us the final takeaway for HPE and Nutanix. So look, at the end of the day, we are in this new software defined world in a multi-cloud fashion, having a partnership between two companies which covers data center services, DevOps services, as well as end user services, end to end. Both in private cloud, also in a multi-cloud fashion through telco and service providers as well as hyperscalers like AWS and Azure deliver the service with the operating model the customer chooses. Again, end to end from data center to DevOps to end user is the perfect marriage that HPE and Nutanix relationship delivers. So we are really looking forward to working with customers like Herman to deliver on that dream, on that journey, making sure that cloud migration and cloud consolidation happens efficiently end to end. Again, from the data center to DevOps and to end user all the way in a fashion that we do more with less in this post pandemic world and we're looking forward to that partnership as we move forward. And thank you Stu and take your Herman for the time today. Excellent. Well, Tarkin, Maynard, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Really great to get all the updates from you and really appreciate HPE and Nutanix. Bringing us Herman Brown, CIO, Herman, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate you sharing your story. Hopefully you'll be able to open up and hire those three people that you're looking to hire in the near future. Thank you both so much for joining. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me, Tarkin. It's always a pleasure. Thanks Nutanix and HPE for just making a solid, great solution that it can help in the success of the DA's office. Really do appreciate it. Thank you so much, Herman and Stu, really appreciate it. We'll be back with more coverage from HPE, Discover 2020, The Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you as always for watching theCUBE.