 Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering Dotnext Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix Dotnext Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program, a first-time guest, Danielle Montcousseau, who's fresh off the keynote stage, the director of innovation and engineering at TI Sparkle. According to your website, TI Sparkles, the world's communications platform, so thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. All right, so for those of us that aren't familiar, give us a little bit of outline of the company first. Yeah, so TI Sparkle is a fully owned company belonging to Telecom Italia Group, spin-off by the mother company back in 2003, with the mission to develop wholesale and corporate multinational retail and enterprise business abroad. 37 countries present office, 125 posts all around the world. That becomes around 1,000, if we consider also the partnership we'd have with other operators. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber-optic spreads between Southeast Asia to Europe to North American and also South America via private backbones, via submarine cables in consortia or bilateral. In the top rank for IP transit with our C-Bone backbone, we are number seven in the world. And I think number nine at the moment for voice in terms of Minix exchange to international carriers. Okay, and so innovation and engineering, what's under your purview? What's the relationship with kind of the IT department? Yeah, basically I am a peer within a division called ICT Engineering. I am a peer with the IT responsible. Her role is basically to develop the new digital OSS and BSS of the company, as well as the, let's call it, East-West API for the internet working with other peer operators. My role is instead to make this world speaking with the network elements, the network domains, the cloud domains, all the infrastructure. And we are undergoing a severe transformation altogether because of course things must be very much synchronized in this new crazy world that is accelerating day by day. Yeah, so I felt telecom, a lot of my careers I worked for one of the companies that spun out of AT&T back in the US. So many companies talk about digital disruption. Digital has had a huge impact on telecom. Transformation, you talked about fiber rollouts, it used to be. I remember in the 90s it was like, oh, we're going to have infinite bandwidth and prices are going to go there, things like that. So what are some of the key drivers? What's changing in your business? What are the stresses and opportunities? Well, we need to analyze in two parallel scenarios. One is the wholesale business on which we were a pioneer. We are still having a severe and big role in the market. But the issue is that wholesale is starting not to pay anymore. We face a severe dramatic price decline year over year and therefore in order to get the sustainability of the company, you need to start turning the bar in a strong way towards the enterprises because it's there that is the money. So this doesn't mean that, of course, you go out from the wholesale. We are a wholesale player. Our strategic plan imposes to consolidate and to enrich the offering of wholesale services as well as developing new services focused for the enterprises. Therefore, with high capability of execution very strong and fast time to market and enriched with a plethora of plugins that make the customer feeling the sparkle experience as we call it. Most of the actions on which we are active at the moment are the new dynamic services that are provided as part of the Metro Ethernet forum. Therefore, all on demand paradigm, new connectivity towards cloud platforms, connectivity enriched by cloud experience. In order to reach these targets, you need to abandon a little bit the concept of network infrastructure. You need to scale it up. You need to softwareize it. You need to make it closer to IT. And at the same time, IT needs to come closer to the network and the two needs to inter-work together in an orchestrated way. This is the new world, the fashion at work, orchestration. In reality, we like to speak more of choreography because orchestration is something that we see just residing within the company. Meaning, if you think an orchestra director is making all the instruments, all the artists that are within the company to play it in an harmonized way. But in reality, we want to export towards our customer this experience. And therefore, we see it more as a ballet. So the orchestration is the baseline. But in reality, we want the customer to feel embraced by what Sparkle can offer to it. All right, so connect the dots for us as to where Nutanix came into it, how that discussion started and what you're using with them. So this, let's say, paradigm of the digital transformation in Sparkle started around two years ago. We stopped one moment and we said, okay, what should we do? How can we do? How can we embrace it? Of course, there are a lot of issues that are related to business, processor, organization, skills. But also the technology is a fundamental driver and is about most important. So we started to design a new data center initially for our internal purpose. And we decided that in this data center, all new technology, all new software-driven capabilities of the company should be deployed. But if you see the numbers of Sparkles, Sparkle is a lean and clean company. We are just 700 people, despite a global presence. And so we cannot approach the transformation using the old paradigm of the best of breed, which is a traditional way of approaching things for third-party providers. We instead decided to go completely to a new road. We started to do a strong analysis on hyper-convergence. And we came to term with Nutanix. Finally, the new data center for what concerns all new network application is based on Nutanix nodes. And we force all our vendors to certify their application on Acropolis. So everything is AHB-based. And when we say everything, we are speaking about applications like voice-over-IP monitoring probes. We are speaking about lifecycle service orchestrator. We are speaking about network domains orchestrator, cloud automation and brokerage platform. Everything is running on Nutanix on this huge cluster with different nodes that are more or less powerful depending to which application we pin off. But the main driver there is easy-of-use, predictability, easy capacity and management. Everything runs in a very orchestrated and simple way. Yeah, so, you know, relatively lean organization, you know, simplicity is something we talk about, kind of base hyper-converged. I have to imagine that one of the reasons you looked at HCI and is that why Nutanix was the one that you chose? Yeah, absolutely. Those are fundamental features for us. And in the development that we are doing with Nutanix, we are working very close with their engineering to develop also new feature that are customized for our solutions. We see that at the moment, they are a perfect fit for our walking model. They are also a very fast company in developing things, agile development. They are kind of having some predictability of what customers need in the future. Back at the keynote a few minutes ago, we were discussing about the usage of Nutanix for arranging public cloud environments. We just say that HV needs a further step of maturation, but Sunil was immediately coming out with micro-segmentation and multi-tenancy features that, in our opinion, what the small missing tip to complete HV as a complete cloud solution. So we are going there, also this is our direction. Yeah, so absolutely, in your keynote, you spoke a lot at HV, getting it certified on all the platforms. I want to talk about that cloud strategy. What are you using from Nutanix? Did public clouds fit into your picture? Okay, hands to the kind of your cloud strategy. So let's always remind that we are a telco, no? So are we going to compete with the big guys? It's not in our core, it's not in our interest, and it's not possible for us to compete. Let me ask, there's lots of telecoms that tried and failed. Yeah, we are not even trying, we are not even trying. In a telco like ours, that basically does not have a real captive market, no? We are operating abroad, so theoretically, we are the small guy that is going to face the incumbent in the market. But we have regions on which we have a consolidated presence, especially in Europe, and we have data centers in Italy, Greece, and Turkey. These data centers were traditionally addressing a colocation business, both for carriers and on enterprises. So we decided when the direction was let's focus on enterprise to start the cloud journey, but focusing initially on those markets. Again, we started with the best of breed approach because this is what is in the telco courts. The telco needs to provide a service with a guaranteed SLA, with an infinite number of nine behind it. So at the beginning, the first choice is, okay, let's choose and let's pick the best pieces from each technology. It works, you arrange the solution. The problem is that you need to operate the service. And when you create a cloud infrastructure with the best of breed approach, but you want to maintain lean and clean operations, then it's becoming complicated because you need to have a plethora, a bunch of specialists for each technology that you are going to implement, meaning that you have storage specialists, storage area network specialists, backup specialists. It cannot work like this. If you don't have the ability to scale globally, you will never be able to get sustainability there. So in our cloud 2.0 strategy, which we are started already to apply from last year, Nutanix came to help because basically, we did an analysis, we did several proof of concept, and we found out that we can get the same SLA, the same predictability, the same or even better quality of service to our customer. But using something that, first of all, is manageable by generalist IT skilled people, you can simply expand by scaling more bricks. And at the end of the day, it's also more cost effective in terms of ratio between CAPEX and OPEX. You don't have granularity of OPEX, you have only one player to whom to speak, fight, negotiate, but finally get results. So that is the current scenario. On the cloud, as I said, we are still a V-Sphere shop, but we are starting already the move to HV, especially after this announcement of micro-segmentation coming through. What is our future in cloud? We are going to address a transformation of our POPs all around the world. They will essentially become micro data centers from which we can offer data proximity, data locality to customers, especially taking into consideration the GDPR entering from next year on World. I expect that many customers will feel a little bit more reluctant to disperse their data on centralized data centers without their having control of where really the data stays. So we are studying also with Nutanix, very small and compact solution that we can install in one of our cabinets in the POPs. And this will come also with the strategy of integrating these services with network virtualization, so load balancing firewall, everything residing in the same stack, and SD1. In this way, we are quite confident that we can, for sure, leverage on our existing customer bases but also try to attract more customers that at the moment are not interconnected to our network via local loops, simply using the internet as a new means of communication. All right, so, Danielle, a lot of pieces here. Just to finally get a brief statement from you. It looked like you're looking at Nutanix, you know, they were called kind of the core, there's their cloud, even the edge starting to took there. Why Nutanix? We have done some analysis. We have done a few proof of concept also with competitors or with former competitors, let's say. What we really missed, in our opinion, was the comprehensive vision. We understood from Nutanix, I mean, apart the numbers of performances that somehow you can also get with other solutions. But what was missing in the others was the focus, the strategy, the vision, and the certainty of the target that they wanted to get through. Speaking with Sunil, speaking with Binigil, speaking with all the guys, we see that they have a strong vision of where they want to be in a couple of years from now. And we have seen that they have a high capacity of execution and fast. And we basically have the same targets, we want to get the same achievements. So for us, it's a very reliable partner to work with in the next few years. All right, well, Daniel Muccuso, really appreciate you joining us. We know Nutanix always looks for the customers that are helping to move that digital transformation, be a partner with them. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Acropolis in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.