 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back. We're here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Keith Townsend and we're thrilled to welcome to the program two end users here at the show. We have Sharon Harris who's the CTO of Asuda Medical Centers out of Israel. Also have Paul Stallings who's the vice president of IT Infrastructure Services, Guidewell with Florida Blue. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. All right, Paul, let's start with you. Just give us a little bit about your role and your organization. Sure, I work for Guidewell. We're a health solutions company. We started out as an insurance company primarily and now we move to a solutions. So we are on the provider side and the payer side. I run IT Infrastructure Services which is the shared services among five different companies under the Guidewell brand. Great, and Sharon? Asuda Medical Center is the last chain of private hospitals in Israel. We have four hospitals and four clinics spreading across the country from north to south. We're conducting about one million radiologist tests and examination per year and about 15% of the entire surgery is in Israel. Yeah, well, luckily both of you in your industries, but my usual joke is nothing's changing. You have huge budgets, limited staff, and no challenges. Before we get into the Nutanix solution, of course you're using it, tell us about some of the drivers for change in your business, your org, some of the challenges and opportunities you're facing. Yeah, sure. We are really in a growth mode in our organization. In the last six years, we've actually grown to these five companies. We went from a $8 billion company to a $16 billion company. We're in a huge trajectory and transformation is the key. And we have to have high availability. We have to be able to meet our customers' needs. We have to be able to scale and be agile and that's thrown at me every day. So, Sharon? Yeah, now we're in the healthcare industry. We have both ends. On one end, we have to maintain stability and the performance and redundancy because we're working 24, 7, 365 days a year. And on the other end, we must be innovative and innovation and make everything for end users and customers very available, very approachable because users don't want to come to our clinics and hospitals. They want to do everything for them. So, as much as we can, we're giving them the opportunity to do it. Yeah, digitization. So, Paul, that's amazing growth. $8 billion, $16 billion, to $16 billion, whether it's organic, inorganic, that's a major shift in capability. What have been some of the primary challenges from a technology perspective as you guys have gone through that major growth barrier? Yeah, I think the velocity is some of one of the biggest challenges for us, being able to grow. We really need a solutions that we could really want to modally grow, want pay to grow, want scale better. It's really hard when you have so much growth to do the legacy where you think about the next three years, I need this much capacity because it's unpredictable because the growth is so fast, that makes sense. Yeah, it's impossible to forecast. It's impossible, absolutely. I had a CIO that tells me, I said, the data costs are getting out of control. So, you know what, just as long as data is growing, it means that the business is growing. Absolutely. Our drives are definitely the thing that you want to buy. So, as you both deal with growth, stability, capability challenges, what appeals about the Nutanix story to you? I think one of the things that I just mentioned, that pay to grow opportunity is huge for us. The simplicity is huge, the availability, and really trying to get to automation. I really have to do more with less. We're growing so fast, I can't even onboard folks fast enough. So, I think that simplicity, the automation, and that pay to grow model is great for us. So, we're in the digital era. So, we need to supply our end users, once again, as I said before, digital application, and to be able to execute those needs very quickly. And we're looking towards the cloud. And you can't really have public, cloud readiness and services, unless you have private cloud readiness and services. So, Nutanix for me is the best solution for automation as Paul said, and to begin the process to achieve the connection between private and public cloud. An interesting point, could you expand on that? What do you mean by, what does private cloud mean to you? And most customers you hear, oh, we're doing some development, we're trying some new products in the public cloud, you flip that some. Yeah, I spoke yesterday in one of the session, and I asked the audience, how much time it takes to fire up a virtual machine from a template? And the answer was like between half an hour and one hour. So, one hour, that's cool. And how much time it takes for you to take this machine and join it to the CRM or the SharePoint on the Epic or the SAP farm? And the answer was about a week. So, where did seven days go? Why the gap is so huge between one hour and a week? And the answer is because of lack of automation. For me, public cloud is exactly like, sorry, private cloud is exactly like public cloud. The same services, the same ability to execute and generate services level, not server level, because server level are already there, like a few, 10 or 15 years ago, we are already there. Services level in the same ability that we have in the public cloud. Yeah, Paul would love to hear your comments on how cloud fits into your environment. Yeah, absolutely. Because we're in the health industry, private cloud is paramount, but we really need hybrid because we want to be able to burst and scale and have that agility. But to a lot of things, Farone said, I do need that, the automation, I do need the scalability, but I definitely need some commonality on my stacks. I have a shared services, I have to be able to scale, I have to be able to have best prices, I need to be able to compete and collaborate with the private and public sectors. So let's talk about some of the services that Nutanix offers. First, let's start in a private cloud. A lot of great announcements. One of the things that I've been asking from Nutanix since I heard about them is basically what they're delivering in AFS, a, I'm sorry, AFS, a file services solution. Are you guys using any of those file or type solutions within your environment? Not yet. We are not using the file solution by Nutanix, but we're using other services, such as the big data verification with Cloudera because we're actually built environment for our new research development company that we signed in, big data Cloudera, Doop and Impala and so on, and we did it very quickly and stability-wise and performance-wise and file services-wise because it's a big data, you know? It's a different kind of perception over there. Nutanix give us a very quickly deployment and the services that we needed for this project. Could you just expand on that? When you say it was a fast deployment, you know, days, what? Our CEO signed the contract with this company and said, okay, I want it to be ready like two weeks from now. And then I thought, okay, I can do it traditionally and it will probably take me a month or even more and I can do it with Nutanix. And Nutanix wasn't ready that in this time with Cloudera verification, but Nutanix promised me that they will support me 100%. I got a letter from the VPR R&D of Nutanix that they will support me and they will get the certification. Now, most of the vendors that they want to sell you something, they say, yeah, we'll get it, no worries and they delivered it. First of all, they give us full support in the duration of the implementation of the environment and they did get the certification a few months later. So performance-wise, we did the test. So I know that it works with Adoop and Cloudera. By the way, when there was performance issue, it was by Cloudera fine-tuned that we need to do. It wasn't Nutanix at all. Really, I really like this product, but they really delivered. So performance-wise, execution-wise, and stability. You met the deadline that your management wanted. I met the deadline now. The medical staff is behind schedule, but I did my part. They're researchers there. So Paul, is there any particular service that you use within the Nutanix private cloud that you want to talk about? Well, we're pretty new to Nutanix suite of services, but one thing that's unique about our organization is we're one of the first to not only do x86, but do power systems as well. So we wanted that one pane of glass, one cloud management system that we can actually do all of our workloads. So we really just, we started x86, but we just recently got our power infrastructure up and running, about 100 nodes, and that's working well as well. And we're happy to have both sides of the fence and really look at all of our workloads through that single pane of glass. Great. Can you tell me what workload are you running on that? And do you have any AIX that you might look to put on that now that that's going to be supported? Yeah, so we're really now starting to look at things with Kubernetes and really start putting our open enrollments applications on, because that's really our seasonality, right? It's kind of our busiest timeframe. We want to have the highest availability. We have to be able to scale and want to have zero downtime. So that one click, we love those kind of capabilities and that's really helping us with our new application for open enrollment. So let's talk about Nutanix's vision. You both are cloud-forward-thinking organizations. As you look at XI, as you look at integration of COM with the major cloud providers, what are your initial thoughts? I think XI is really interesting where I can have those recovery options. We really got to move infrastructure to resiliency and make sure resilient, but it's always nice to have that backup and be able to click over very quickly opposed to the traditional recovery model where you back it up and you have to restore it. We don't want to restore. We want to be able to bring that back up and have that high availability. So I'm really interested in the XI piece. Yeah, we got the budget for DR this year. And we needed to take into consideration the best DR module for Asuta. Now to be honest with you, if regulation would allow us, I wouldn't think twice. But this is a barrier that I need to check with my legal department. But technology-wise, XI is amazing solution. In terms of cloud, as I said before, I believe that there's no other option. There's no other option but to build your private and moving towards public cloud services. By the way, the main barrier for me is the human barrier because we need to train our personnel. We need to change the way they think. We need to combine between system guys and networking and security guys because now it's one box. So it's quite a challenge. Vontanix, make a difference. All right, it's the first time for both of you attending this show. Paul, start with you. If you can tell us what brought you to the show, what you're hoping to accomplish, what you've learned so far, and general experiences here. Yeah, so as Nutanix is really helping us build our private cloud, we definitely know that even though healthcare has a lot of regulatory requirements, we don't want to do full public, we know we're going to have to start moving more and more into the cloud space. So we know there's different cloud players out there but we want to have that mobility of our workloads and move them in and out and move them back to our environment and move them from cloud provider to cloud provider. And I've definitely started hearing about a lot of the services that Nutanix provides that enables those kind of solutions and I want to learn more about those. For me, Nutanix is bringing to the table new ideas, new perception, and the most important thing that they gave us, giving us things that we need. And you talked about Zai, you talked about Calm, there's been a new concept and they are always moving ahead and bringing the market to chase them. If I can say it this way, and for me the most important thing is to have everything as Paul said in one box and able to do it very simple by automation processes. So one question around people, you're growing at a cliff, like doubling the organization as you go out and look for staff to augment your existing staff to innovate, to change. How does Nutanix help or hinder in the hiring process, like onboarding new employees, you said onboarding is a challenge, onboarding and training, commentary around that. Yeah, so people are our most precious assets, right? And when you hire new, you want to get the best people you can get, right? So I think that we definitely try to identify folks that have the type of aptitude we need. We're not always able to find the folks that are skilled with all the solutions we need because cloud is so diverse and converges so diverse with the stacks. But we actually are doing a better job with finding the right talent or training the ones that we have up and to prepare and give the training to the new folks that are coming through the door. But onboarding is definitely an opportunity for us and I think we're going to be able to scale a little bit better with onboarding as we look at automation. Automation is going to be the key to getting folks onboarded faster. So Sharon, what about you? How has Nutanix helped with your, not necessarily onboarding because growth is not necessarily a change, but people change. Yeah, people change and the market is changed as well and people must understand that they should embrace the change. Even I change each and every day. I learn new things, I implement new things, I dare and I challenge my organization. I have to convince my finance and my CIO and my CEO that this technology, whether it's Nutanix or other technology, is the right technology for our organization. Now Nutanix is helping us in terms of innovation because of the fact that we're beginning to sign contracts with startups and we have to build them labs and combine them with our production environment but do it very smartly and sophisticated way. So Nutanix with the micro segmentation and other features that they're having is very helpful for us in this area as well. All right, last thing I wanted to ask, lessons learned. You're relatively new in the space but there's always things that you look back and say, what could I done better? What I wish I knew a little better. Paul, to start with you is to talk to your peers as to what would you recommend to them and what changes might they make? You know, I think we're so new into it. We don't have a lot of lessons learned yet because we're just really going into production with a lot of the systems that we have and especially on the AIX side and the power side but I do think that we are doing a debrief probably coming up in the next 30 days to really identify if there are opportunities that we probably do differently. Now I will say that I do want to look at the whole private cloud to public cloud opportunities and really understand what those challenges are because I think from an application perspective we don't always build applications that we plan to bring back. So I need to really partner with my development shops that when they build applications how do we make sure we can bring those workflows back and I want to understand some of those cost models. It's awesome. Yeah, I would say choosing the right use case and the prepare for the implementation plan as much as you can because those two things will make or break if you're a beginner. If you're already got some of the things you know what to do but if you're a beginner those things are very important and combine it with a good or very good integrator because once again if you want to succeed in this project because it's another project it's not that service that you install. If you go with this method then you didn't earn anything. So if you want to get the best out of Nutanix and Nutanix have to offer a lot of services as we discussed you should do it. Sharon and Paul, thank you so much for sharing your stories for Keith Townsend and Stu Miniman. We always love to talk to all the users here and glad to be able to bring them to you. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE.