 Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE conversation. Really excited to have to the program, a first time guest and a user. Vinny Chabra is an IT engineer with Medalia Vinny. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. And to Vinny's left, we have Christian Badrina, Ryan, who's a director of product marketing with Nutanix. Chris, thanks so much for joining us. It's good to be here. Okay, so we always love to be able to dig in with the customers, understand the challenges they're facing. Chris, let's set the table first. I'm very familiar with Nutanix. We go to all the Nutanix shows and the like, but for customers, what is Nutanix to them? Why do they turn to Nutanix? Okay, absolutely. So I think it's a great time to be in IT. You see new businesses that are sprouting at all. The last 10 years or so, starting with Uber, Airbnb, specifically the ones we've really heard of that have disrupted some really, really big industries. So technology is making it happen. While IT teams are the ones that help make that happen and helps those CEOs disrupt, they're not in the best of positions to utilize infrastructure they have today, the way it's set up to be able to get more done, be more agile and truly serve the needs of the business and help create those comparative differentiation. Which is why Nutanix is here to help our partners within companies such as yourself to be able to be those people, to lean in and help CEOs really achieve what they're trying to get done. That's great. We definitely see, used to be, okay, IT was a cost center. IT, business would ask for something and IT would often be the no or be really slow into the work with that. So Finny, before we dig into the IT piece of it, tell us a little bit about Medalia, the business. What's happening? What's changing there? Sure, Medalia's been around for about 15 years now. We're located, we're headquartered in San Mateo. We used to be in Palo Alto. We moved last year. We have a brand new building right off 101 and 92. We are an analytics company and there's lots of fields in analytics. We specialize in an area called CX which stands for customer experience. And our goal is to make our customers happy which therefore makes our customers happy. And we specialize in doing surveys and then specializing in designing surveys for different types of companies and then we analyze that data from the surveys. Well, Finny, I find there's very few companies that I talk to whose industries are stagnant or not changing much. The analytics space, the space that we cover heavily here on theCUBE and with our research, boy, has that changed a lot. I mean, five years ago we were talking very much about big data. Today, all the AI, ML and things like that. Give us a little bit about what's it like being in that business, fast driving, your Silicon Valley based. I have to imagine that the business is going through a lot of changes that put stresses and strains on IT. No, definitely. So I've been in the IT industry for many years in the IT area, different big companies, Sun Microsystems, Uniber Networks, NetApp in the past, excite.com, which was a search engine way back when before Google days. I remember excite, you know, because Microsoft, didn't they buy that or things like that? It was an early search engine at home. There was a partnership with that at home. But yeah, people would confuse as to, wait, excite.com, what kind of site was that? It's like, no, no, no, it's a search engine. Back before, by the way, audience, for those of you that haven't been around a while, it wasn't all just being in Google. There were a lot of predecessors for that. Yeah, there was four or five big search engines at that time. So most of my company I've been out, we've always been packaging stuff in a box and selling it. In this, this is my first time at an analytics company. And it's a, like you said, it's a fast moving field. Things are being, there's no development staging type of production type of stuff. Things are just continuously being put into production. Changes are made, you know, customizing, you know, customers applications and their interface. So it's a very fast moving field. All right, and Vinny, you said, IT engineers, your job, what does that encompass? What's your role? How many people in the group? What do you manage? Sure, sure, sure. So we have basically two IT groups. We have one that manages our production data centers, which our customers interface with. And then we have one that supports our engineers. So I'm part of that group and it's kind of, we're part of the IT systems engineering team. And that involves traditional IT tasks, like backups, monitoring, application installs, new server installs, managing storage networking, basically keeping infrastructure and applications running as efficiently as possible. And therefore keeping our engineers happy because they can get their work done and their development done. Okay, Chris, sounds like, you know, pretty typical from what I hear from companies is, what do you hear from customers, structure wise, challenges they're facing? Absolutely, so it's very much in lines with what you were just talking about. Where there's these multiple needs from the business and customer expectations. So how do you really help IT organizations be able to keep up with those needs? Infrastructure needs to be ubiquitous. Data needs to be ubiquitous. Application services need to be ubiquitous. And you need to be able to scale out as your business needs to do so, to be able to serve all those multiple requirements. So whether it's standardizing internal applications that are delivered through virtual desktops or deploying databases or standing up customer websites, you need to be able to do that and respond as quickly as possible. And if you're spending cycles on acquiring infrastructure, deploying it, making sure it's well integrated and then once it's up and running, figuring out what went wrong and enjoying those multiple nights of pizza, right? To figure out how to get this thing going back to the way it was. It just distracts you from what's important. So it's only when you make infrastructure invisible and truly scalable, very much cloud-like. And make it your own as a process of doing so. Can you truly be that business partner? And I hope we've done that with you. Definitely. All right, so Vinny, let's go inside. Was there a specific project rollout that led towards Nutanix? Was there a pain point you were having? Give us kind of the before and what was the main thing. Sure, sure, sure. So traditionally in IT, you want to set up a new application and your infrastructure environment. You would buy servers, you would buy storage. You would buy HBA cards, which helps you connect the servers to the storage. You'd have things like worldwide numbers to worry about, getting the right cables, getting the right cards. And then you put it all together. You get all the stuff delivered and then two weeks later you might have things working and then you're having some permission issues, security issues. So it was always a big challenge to get things up and running. So from- That was the fun of IT, is let's roll up our sleeves, let's turn those geek knobs and optimize everything. And yeah, within six months I'm sure everything's rocking and rolling. Yeah, everything's rocking and rolling. But you're still not quite confident that things are running. You're worried that a card might go bad. You're worried that a worldwide number might change somewhere or somebody might mess up your security. So you would spend a lot of time just getting things up and running versus spending time on development and working with people you're supporting and trying to try to enhance things versus just keeping things, getting things up and running. So Nutanix with a hyper-converged infrastructure, we're not worried about those things anymore. It has our storage needs, it has our compute needs, it has our memory needs. So was it a refresh cycle? What was the impetus that led to looking at a new architecture? Sure, sure. As we were growing and engineering base was growing and IT was growing and our requests and what we needed to satisfy was increasing tremendously. Before we were working with just individual desks, desktops or blade servers, but each one was kind of working individually with its own storage, its own applications. Things weren't being shared or anything and we were just growing fast. So we needed some, we needed a new infrastructure where we could actually have everything working most efficiently and be secure and fast and easy to manage. So we did look at, we did some analysis on few products and Nutanix, after a few POCs, Nutanix was our part of the choice. Yeah, I mean you describe something we heard a lot is it used to be every application you would kind of build your own temple for it. Let me build it, let me get the performance I need, let me optimize certain things, let me forecast how it's gonna grow, but I get islands out there as opposed to I wanna be able to scale. I don't wanna have to worry about, you know, here's one of the challenges out there. Most people and across the board forecasting is really hard or impossible. I either overestimated a bunch and then I bought stuff I didn't need or I underestimated it and then, oh my gosh, I need to look to a new architecture. And the things ended up burning at 10% of, using 10% of utilizing, 10% of the resources that you're purchasing. Yeah, I remember 15, 20 years ago, 10%, you were doing pretty good. Before virtualization, it was like, six, seven percent is usually what we were running. Awesome, so challenges before we had silos out there, I couldn't share, I couldn't do, talk about that role. How did you get from that old environment to the new one, there's something I said when you look at this wave of really a distributed architecture, in the old world, migrations were really, really tough and you had to do it with every cycle. Hopefully moving to an architecture like this, this is your last migration. It was like, you know, my wife always said the last time we moved, that's the last time I never wanna have to move. Well, IT, I'm sure, those migrations were always painful. What was the experience like getting to? Migrations is one thing that we went through, but also now it's just setting up new VMs or new applications, new servers, it's within a few minutes versus hours. As far as migration, we were running a hypervisor before, but like I said, it was on individual servers. So the migration was basically picking your VMs or your servers one at a time and just migrating over to Nutanix once it was there and with the hypervisor tools that are available, it's very easy to use like things like VMotion or different types of migration tools that Nutanix offers with their HV hypervisor. So it was just, it was pretty seamless. It was just, you just pick and choose and identify your destination host on Nutanix node or Nutanix cluster and all your stores that you wanna move it to and just go. Okay, so Vinny, you went through a bit of a bake off to figure out the solution. Tell us, when you finished the deployment, how are you measuring, what does success mean to in deployment of your standpoint and give us the after, what does this change to your business process, your organization? Sure, qualitatively, success is when our engineers are smiling and not calling us too much and asking us to go to lunch versus telling us about issues they're having. So that's qualitatively, quantitatively, looking at performance, CPU memory, IAPS performance on the storage, how are applications responding, that's how we measure quantitatively. Do you know like what kind of utilization you're getting on your current infrastructure then with the Nutanix? Well, so currently you've made as far as a. So you said you were lucky to get 10% in the old world. Do you measure that in the old world? Yeah, we measure that. We kind of, we have our choices of how much storage you wanna use, how much CPU memory you wanna allocate to each VM and we just monitor it and through the prism interface that Nutanix offers, you can actually see performance of each VM and you can decide when to throttle things. So, but as far as how much we're utilizing or we have it structured where we have room to grow. So yeah, absolutely. And if we do need to grow later, we can easily add nodes or chassis with nodes. Yeah, Krish, I think back to the early years of what we call hyper-converged environments and it was like, oh well, they are monolithic blocks, even if they're small and but you don't have flexibility there. When I look at many of the solutions, especially what Nutanix offers, there's a lot of flexibility into how I can grow in scale and get the utilization that I need but get the performance, the ops and everything. What are you seeing from your customers? How is that story play out today? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it's all about empowering people, right? It's about making IT people truly successful, broadening their skillset, giving them greater control over the full stack, if you will, right? It's no longer a siloed across functions, you're no longer found helpless, relying on a different team to deliver upon something that was promised based on a certain SLA. So how do we do that? How do we make evolved functional specialists into IT generalists who then become cloud engineers, true cloud engineers, right? The world is changing, technology is adapting, businesses are craving for more and the only way we can keep up is to adapt ourselves and utilize the best of great technologies that gives us that power. So as a result, we hear that a lot, where we find a lot of the customers progressing from being either storage admins, network specialists, but most likely virtualization admins who then become these cloud engineers, if you will. They reorganize that way, they tend to be in a position where they are managing a lot more infrastructure. We're talking about 100X of what they used to do prior in the earlier days, right? So the numbers, the ratios just grow immensely, as well as the quality of service provided. The SLAs are far reduced as they used to be. So all of that goodness that our customers are able to deliver to that stakeholders in the organization makes us feel good about what we do. Yeah, Finney, we love, we talk about, you know, the engineers now, they're smiling and going out to lunch rather than, you know, fighting bugs, anything- Or complaining about his performance issues. Yeah, anything kind of, when you look at skill set, I've talked to some Nutanix customers, like, oh, I had that security project that was sitting on my desk for two years. I can finally tackle that. Or I can be more responsive to the business so that they don't, you know, I can engage with them, rather than just going off running it and doing stealth IT. Anything along those lines that you can share? I mean, one thing, like an IT admins, we typically want to know everything, right? So we want to know what's happening behind the scenes. With Nutanix, we don't have to as much, but we still like to. And so we take the opportunity to do trainings, learn what's happening in the interface, use support when needed. So as far as, yeah, as far as skills go, I think it's, you know, the skills you keep up with, it's just different, like Kavrish mentioned, it's different type of administration. Like you're managing virtualization, you're managing cloud, you're not just managing luns and cables, you know. Yeah, love, it sounds like you've got a team that's got that intellectual curiosity and wants to understand what's going on. How was the on-ramp? How was the cycle to understand the Nutanix piece? How did you find that? Yeah, so we learned a lot during the POC, of course, that's when you kind of, you know, you can play around with stuff and break stuff and try to break stuff if you want. We use some professional services to help us get set up originally. And after that, it was just kind of learning day to day and just improving our knowledge in different areas. Like we're not used to having everything like in one kind of a couple chassis, storage and, you know, compute. So that was a networking as well. So that was a little bit, not challenge technically, but just being an option. I had to reset the mindset a little bit as to the way I used to do things versus the way now I can do things. Correct, correct, correct. And troubleshooting, you know, the great thing is when we have troubleshooting, we're not calling three different vendors like a networking company, a storage company and a compute company and having them point fingers so it's networking. Now if I ever have an issue or a question, I call Nutanix support and they're very helpful. So Vinny, how long has it been since the solution was deployed? The first one? It's been about two and a half years now. So first of all, I'd love your viewpoint as to how Nutanix has changed in those two years and along those lines too. Now that you look at things through the lens of 2018, if you could go back to peers of yours, what would you tell them now that you wish you had known back when you rolled this out a couple of years ago? I would tell them there's a much easier way to deploy and manage your infrastructure and this is one of the, Nutanix is definitely something you should look at. All right. Krish, what advice do you give to the IT people of the world that I'm sure most of them heard about this, but what misconceptions might they have? What things do we want to make sure we open the door for? Sure. So as a former developer myself several years ago, I think it's very easy for us to forget the role we play in our organizations. We're not all about the applications. We're not all about the speeds and feeds. We are a critical core part of how businesses go to market and achieve success. So let us recognize that and use the best approaches that are available out there to be able to deliver that value. If it means going with a good hyper-converged infrastructure solution. If it means leaning in and building new disruptive technologies and such that can help your businesses do better. The other thing that I want to highlight is just as you are in the customer service business, I believe we are as well. We pride ourselves in our support. So if anyone has questions about how hyper-converged infrastructure can add value, call us, give support a call. You would be put in touch with anyone who can speak about all the value we deliver to our customers and begin to read some of those ideas. All right. Vinny, I want to ask you, you've got some experience, works for some of the really well-known companies, not only here in the Valley Button Tech in general. What's exciting you these days? What do you look at either in the analytics space or in IT that's getting you excited? For me, it's I like to get up without stress and so ease of management, ease of deployment in the IT area is very that's one of the things I look forward to. Being able to do other stuff than just focusing on routine stuff. Yeah. One of those lines, if I could give you the one wish to help make that goal even more either from Nutanix or the broad ecosystem out there, what would make your job even easier? I don't know. I'm trying to think of a good answer, but it's typically when issues, once and while we have application issues, it would just be some self-healing type things, or maybe some automatic adjustments that could be done. That may be something in the future. Adjustments as far as resources allocated to different types of resources. Chris, I'll let you have the final word there, because absolutely once we simplify, modernize the platform, modernizing the application sum. It's definitely something I've heard from many of your customers as to that role of infrastructure really is to serve up and support those applications and that seems to be where it's going. That's right. That's right. The business partners, partners in the business, CFO, whoever on the other side of the fence, they care about applications and services, not so much about all the blood, sweat, and tears we put into the infrastructure. So I think it's an opportunity for us to help us elevate beyond the infrastructure and focus on apps and services, along with making sure we have some of those self-healing capabilities and such that take care of us and not require us to pay heat to all those infrastructure speeds and feeds. So it's a great opportunity to do that and be truly strategic in the company. I agree. All right. Well, Chris, really appreciate you sharing the updates. Vinny, really appreciate you sharing your customer story. It's our purpose here at theCUBE to always help bring out the information. So make sure to check out thecube.net. If you actually go to the top, there's a search. We've got over 5,000 or 6,000 interviews we've done, including many customers, including many of Nutanix. Go in, search Nutanix. You'll find a plethora of content out there. If you ever have any questions for us, please reach out to us. See us at any of the shows or in between. So I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks again for watching theCUBE. Thank you.