 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .next conference, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to the district, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and this is our special presentation of Nutanix NextConf, hashtag NextConf. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, and my co-host for the two days of coverage at this event. Adam Jaffe is here. He's the head of infrastructure at Scholastic Corp. Adam, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. So, is this your first .next? This is my first .next. What do you think? There's a lot of energy here. It's a tremendous amount of energy, just even in the size of the place, but the number of partners that you've got here, the number of customers, it's, I'm really excited to be. Well, the best is yet to come. Nutanix always does a really good job with the keynotes. Yeah, you haven't even opened the keynote yet, so there's already this much energy. Yeah, I was very crisp messaging. They have great outside speakers. Robert Gates last year, Condi Rice, and then who was the illusionist? They had that. Oh, yeah, the guy in the box, David Blaine. Yeah, David Blaine held his breath for like nine minutes. It was unbelievable. He was holding his breath underwater while the SE configured. For an entire session? Yeah, while the SE configured, because the argument was it only takes eight minutes to configure a Nutanix solution. Wow. And then he came out after eight minutes. He was able to configure the solution. Big hugs afterwards, wet hugs. But anyway, it's a lot. It's a fun show here, and it really hasn't even started yet. It started with, you know, Cube interviews. We've been interviewing. Now even more excited. So we've been interviewing practitioners all day. So tell us about Scholastic. Sure. What do you guys do? Sure, so Scholastic, if you went to school in the U.S., you've probably heard of Scholastic, but I'll reiterate it's actually the world's largest. Not just in the U.S., the world's largest children's big publisher and distributor. It's also a major education technology firm. So we do a lot of work within the education space with administrators and librarians and other educators in the school system. We're probably most recognized for our trade businesses, which book clubs, which is now called reading clubs, fairs, and trade. And just the access to so many of the titles that so many kids in the U.S. have grown up with. So you're making sure the next generation will at least have the opportunity to read. And it's interesting because I don't know if you're aware of this, but it's actually just two days ago, was the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book, what was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in the England and now it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S. And actually they did some analysis, some of the articles I was reading about about literacy and they actually think that the Harry Potter series has contributed to, I guess we're calling them Gen Z or the Post Millennial or whatever, they grew up with Harry Potter really improving literacy in the U.S. That's how important some of these books that we've published over the years have been, yeah. So you actually used to call it book club, now you call it reading club. So I mean that's sort of an indication that your business model is evolving, going digital. So maybe talk about some of the drivers there. Absolutely, I mean that was really one of the key drivers. I think I've been at Scholastic a long time now, 17 plus years, so I've seen lots of different evolutions have been involved in a lot of different technology projects have been involved in different launches. And I think in particular in 2011 when the iPad came out and we saw such a rapid transition with newspapers and periodicals and magazines, myself included, I felt myself going through it, switching to using electronic devices for consumption, the next immediate question is, is this going to make all physical books go away? And so we really pivoted hard into the digital arena at that time because we wanted to be where our constituencies are. And interestingly we found that actually digitization in the children's book space, maybe a little bit in the young adult space, but especially in the elementary school space, it's actually been fairly resistant to digitization. It's there, we've got a number of excellent products there, with Storia and a number of other products for delivering digital content to our consumers, for primarily children, but ultimately, kids still read physical books, like my kids are 11 and nine and our house is full of physical books and we really kind of segregate the two together so that they have both the digital reading experience, which is somewhat different from the physical reading experience. Nevertheless, it is continuing to transform our industry. We were talking to Virginia Gamvali before, she's an advisor, a strategic advisor to a number of companies, board member, investor, and she was talking about capital allocation and one of the questions I have is, when you guys sort of look at this digital disruption, the change, at what point do you decide, okay, hey, we've got a change or we'll be changed or we need to get ahead of this? How does that all take place, how did it take place in your organization? Do you, was it more proactive, proactive and sort of where are you headed? I mean, I think the proactive elements around it is that we want to make sure that when our consumers are ready to go digital, we've got a viable product that's reactive to responsive to as many devices as we think our consumers are going to use and parallel information there, we've been watching really in the last three years how much Google has sweaped into the educational space and they've kind of done that at the expense of Microsoft and Apple and so we see trends like that and we see how quickly digital can move into the educational spaces which is where the primary customers are and how we sell our products to children and we knew that we needed to have a viable product there so I think a lot of things for us are looking at the different channels and making sure that we've got a singular view of our customer and recognizing that our primary customers are really educators that we're connecting with them and we're understanding how they're using our different models, our different lines of businesses, how they're communicating our products to the parents and children that consume them and really getting that right balance of physical and digital products in front of every kid. I mean, our core mission is to get kids to learn to love to read, to generate literacy so that kids become young adults and full adults and they love to read and that's really what the core mission is behind Scholastic and however we can deliver the products to satisfy that mission, we're prepared to do that. Adam, reaching the ultimate user in that whole digital transformation that tends to put a lot of stresses on infrastructure which is the hat you wear so maybe explain a little bit some of those challenges you were having in what you've done to transform on the infrastructure side to meet the requirements of the business. Absolutely, so in my role and my various roles that I've had at Scholastic over the years, one of the things I've been able to experience is how different parts of the company move at different speeds and some of it is just the nature of the function of the company. Your back offers corporate space is obviously going to move somewhat slower than your digital engagement in your e-commerce space but in a role I had several years ago where I was delivering e-commerce and digital services I quickly realized that the traditional infrastructure model simply wasn't going to cut it at this point. We were delivering infrastructure trying to scale it out for a very seasonal demand three, six month lead times trying to stack tech stacks all stuff that would end up being non-undifferentiated heavy lifting. So ultimately for us we took a couple of big leaps one of the big leaps that we took was really moving into the public cloud several years ago and that worked out tremendously for us and we've really been able to find the right infrastructure model for delivering our customer engagement experiences has been the public cloud but when we started to pivot towards the fact that we move physical products you know a lot of companies don't necessarily deal with physical products anymore I could be wrong but I don't know that Facebook has a physical product I guess they have their VR they've acquired, I forget the name of the VR company now but generally companies that don't deal with physical products and all in public cloud model could work pretty well for them when we're dealing with physical products latency matters and geodata locality matters and some of the applications that you're dealing with could be very centric to the delivery of your manufacturing and your warehouse operations so that's actually part of why we've been investing in Nutanix because we want to have that same kind of agility with our infrastructure and get out of mixing and matching various vendors' tech stacks to deliver essentially with a foundational platform for us to deliver business value out of I'd rather go with one vendor and have a finite set of vendors where we're delivering network and compute and storage and the service delivery of our applications on top of that and Nutanix has worked out very well for us for this Appreciate that Adam and it's really interesting when we talk to customers the two terms that get thrown out are hybrid or multi cloud and you laid out where you're using public cloud do you consider your Nutanix solution is that private cloud, hybrid cloud so does that interact with multi data center or any other services? I've kind of avoided the term hybrid cloud because what was originally marketed to us as hybrid cloud was the idea that your workload is seamlessly portable between all of these different cloud providers and we kind of realized that was never really our intent I think multi cloud is probably a better model for us because we're finding that our various cloud provider services and if you even scale beyond just the basic I ask and you get into the paths and especially SAS layer they're all cloud services but they're fairly fit for purpose and a lot of what our role is as a technology organization has moved towards assembling all of these fit for purpose cloud solutions together into a service delivery that we from a technology group can deliver to our internal and external customers and so I prefer the term multi cloud so if we could follow up on the sort of if I may skepticism on hybrid cloud but this idea of a control plane that spans multiple physical clouds including on-prem is something that in my understanding that you don't feel that that's needed in your organization or that's not feasible technically I think it really depends on the applications that we're looking to deliver through that so for example we're finally making our first real foray into containers and so we've looked at a couple of different technologies there's a number out there like OpenShift and Kubernetes and so on and that's really we feel that's the best opportunity for us to find a way to deploy in a true hybrid cloud model where you can actually provision your workload maybe not to get so far as to the price line type kayak type view of I want to deploy this workload right now at GCP is the most optimal at this point in time for that that could be a potential future state but again even that feels like it's still a fair amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting for our service delivery so we find the right mix of products so that we can deliver a kind of a cost optimal workload and then in many cases I think the technology vendors still haven't quite figured out how to handle state it works great with the stateless part of your applications which you need to persist your state somewhere and so we're probably in an earlier stage as I would say around the rest of the delivery what I heard I think is you chose by application whether this is going to be something we do in house because whether there is the locality the analytics or data processing something I need it for a reason as opposed to other things it's undifferentiated public cloud can take care of it and that's not a need to own it in town You said it better than I said it but one of the question I think Dave's asking is how do you manage across do you manage them separately or do you want to manage it together? Probably at our maturity level at this point we're probably really only at the governance stage so we understand what we've got we've got a good understanding of our cost structures in the public cloud we don't have nearly as good of understanding of our cost structures when we're doing hybrid deployments or on-prem deployments and so that's probably as far as we matured at this point I would say I think we do want to get to a future state where if we take other considerations in particular latency the particular nature of that application or any other sovereignty or legal concerns outside that we want to maintain maximum flexibility part of my role in the infrastructure group is to provide that kind of foundation so hoarding that workload is seamless across these different cloud providers and those application teams can really position the application where is the best fit for purpose aligned with the price performance So bring it back to Nutanix a little bit where do they fit? Talk about your journey a little bit maybe paint a picture of the infrastructure before the after and what business impact it had So there are really a couple of drivers for us for Nutanix one of them is that as we started to as we moved a vast majority of our assets out of our data centers to these various cloud providers we were left with a number of physical data centers and some in many cases now the only data center that we're actually left with there are on-prem data centers that were no longer sized in accordance with the workload we want to maintain Additionally for us a lot of the investment of moving to the public cloud we deferred a lot of the regular capital investments that we've made in traditional infrastructure and that we accepted the aging of that infrastructure but we recognize now that there's a fair amount of infrastructure that we need to maintain for these more local applications and so I wanted my team I challenged my team last year really to take a modern approach I don't want to necessarily assemble everything that we've done in the past but on a much smaller scale to manage the local applications I know that conversion in particular hyper-converged had matured pretty far by 2016 what are the options out there and so when we do our due diligence and we settle on Nutanix we really felt that it's both pioneering at times even a little bit scary because it was moving into a new foray with us but I think it's worked out tremendously we've started in our back office so that was actually really for that location some mission critical workload in terms of how we actually do the fulfillment of our physical books and we're in the process of bringing on number of those applications off of traditional infrastructure with your segregation between your blade servers and your chassis and your racks and your fiber storage and your inline networking switches and your storage array and just having one condensed box that's going to run that system itself for your in-house deployments is that all Nutanix today or what's your mix I'd say Nutanix is probably more and up getting up to about the 20% range itself 80% of it is still on traditional but my goal is about a year from now that will, I don't know if that necessarily would be flipped but it'll be more than 50% Nutanix is there anything that you're waiting for from Nutanix to be able to move those or is it just it's our own budget and process yeah at this point we're not as far even with any of these cloud providers we're not as much hindered by the technology the technology at this point as many cases lapsed our ability to actually consume it we're drinking from several simultaneous fire hoses now and it's which one we turn our mouths to so and you're taking advantage of Acropolis hypervisor? absolutely that was also one of the key drivers so that was the hyper part of it really I challenged the team and said you know I want a solution where we can present a general purpose operating system and our application stack and to me bringing on a third party hypervisor at this point it just felt like undifferentiated looking and the container discussion is Nutanix part of that too probably in our early stages when we look at our workload right now we don't have any on-prem workload that's been designated with containers but I know having made the choice of Nutanix if and when we come to that time we'll be able to provision that on Nutanix and Acropolis not sure if you heard actually this morning there's an announcement of a partnership between Google and Nutanix so that should accelerate some of the containers that's very exciting yeah what's exciting about that to you? well Google Cloud is one of the cloud providers that we actively use today and I think they've really been a great thought leader in this space we use a number of their services and so I know they've really advanced the community around containers with Kubernetes and some of the technologies that they're working on and they have a very mature cloud offering today and so I think the opportunity for that Google and Nutanix to work more closely together I think a company like Scholastic is really only going to see the fruits, the benefits of that relationship and ease our growth into both platforms right Adam we have to leave it there thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights and your story appreciate it thanks for having me on you're very welcome okay all right keep it right there everybody Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break this is theCUBE we're live from DC at Nutanix dot next we'll be right back