 Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. We're back, welcome to Nutanix.NEXT, NEXTConf, hashtag NEXTConf. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise, my name is Dave Vellante and I'm joined by my co-host, Stuart Minerman. Mike Day is here as the CEO of PXP Solutions, a financial services company and a customer of Nutanix. Mike, thanks for coming to theCUBE. My pleasure. Tell us a little bit more about PXP Solutions. And we're a payment gateway, which is a part of the financial services industry that most people don't even think about. But if you think about going into a store, going into a hotel, presenting a card, we're the bit between there and the bank. So, talk about mission critical piece of service. That is a very complicated process. It involves many banks, many card schemes, visa mastercard and so forth. So we actually have to be the piece between the retailer or the merchant, the consumer and the bank. So, in thinking about your industry, some of the drivers and changes of the industry, how is that affecting your strategy with regard to information technology? For us, it was about expanding our business. We came from that really old three tier model, big investments, they're a lumpy IT. We're moving more and more to a global business. We worked in the US, we have some big retailers here, we're involved in the EMV rollout for the US. And that creates demands on us where we have to have processing in the locality. So we had to create a new infrastructure here in the US. So we had taken up hosted space in New Jersey and we had to build a whole new processing infrastructure. I don't want to have teams here. Nothing personal, I know that we're a small business, we don't want to have teams dotted around the world, which means I have to think about getting manageable IT in the right territory. So Mike, I hear things like that and it comes to mind, well, why don't you just use the public cloud or what is the edge implications of what you're doing? Edge computing has been talked about a lot. So maybe sketch out for us a little bit about kind of the scope of what you do and do you tie into the public cloud? I think of like CDNs, are you related to that? What do you deal with and what don't you deal with? An interesting conversation is one I've had with the public cloud vendors. For us, it's all about PCI scope. You'll get all the merchants talking about this. It's about card data. There's a lot in the press about companies being compromised. We provide secure processing. So the sooner that card is either on somebody's webpage or it's delivered into a page, we encrypt that data. Now, if we start putting that encrypted data and those tokens and card records, and we've managed over a billion card records into the public cloud, that brings that cloud infrastructure into scope of PCI. You don't want to be doing that. So we kind of have to use our own infrastructure, but we want to leverage, or leverage, it's a nice American way of saying it, we want to get some leverage to say that we want all the benefits of public cloud, but we need to do it ourselves. Now, I'm sure a public cloud vendor will say, oh, we can be PCI compliant. Right this time, we don't want to do that. So we have a cloud solution, but it's our cloud. Okay, so you're essentially trying to mimic that public cloud experience on-prem. Yeah. And so presumably that's where Nutanix comes in. That's their whole message. Absolutely. So can you maybe take us through how you, where you came from and where you are now, how you got there? Okay, again, the benefits of being a small business, the benefits of being an ex-CIO means that we can make decisions quite quickly. You're not going through layers of the CTO and his infrastructure guy and the SQL guy and so forth. You can play fast and lose. We had a three-tier architecture, largely coming to end of life. We had a big sand, so you had lots of single points of failure actually in the process, and we needed to do something different. We'd been bumping into Nutanix, and they were very aggressive three years ago, as you can imagine, as a new entrant. They did the puppy dog sale, here, have one, see how you get on. We deployed that. We were going to do a VDI deployment, which seems to be how most people start, but actually we thought, why? Why do you do that? So we went straight to heavy lifting, and we put production into our production environment, into Nutanix, and immediately kitted out the two new data centers with Nutanix kit. It means that whole storage compute piece has gone from our daily management. Okay, and Mike, can you talk about the operational model? You said, especially, you've got some remote sites that you don't even want anybody there. How many people do you have managing this? How's that different from the old Sam days that you had before? I hesitate. Six people operate our entire infrastructure. They're not located anywhere near the infrastructure. The infrastructure's in the London, Docklands, and in New Jersey. We go to New Jersey for physical inspections once a year. Everything else is done remotely. Yeah, I'm from New Jersey originally. I understand why people don't want to go there too often, but... It's a nice place to visit. So does it live up to that invisible infrastructure that Nutanix, what do your people and operators, what do they touch, what don't they have to worry about? Okay, so if I give you a scenario where we obviously have processing in more than one data center, one of the things that we need to be able to do with that processing is to move stuff, either for reasons of operational requirements where you're trying to take a part of your infrastructure down for maintenance, or if you had a disaster recovery incident, you need to be able to move your processing into these different DCs. What we can do and what we do on a regular basis is actually we will ship our processing between the different stacks in the different locations, and that's a press of a button. I mean, obviously our infrastructure and our systems and solutions are designed to operate in that way, but literally we can move processing to a new data center, and in terms of consumer experience, no change. Technically there's about a half a second delay, but half a second, no problem at all. So we can move stuff between data centers, and we do that on a regular basis. Mike, you mentioned that initially you were considering just doing a VDI workload, kind of testing the waters, and you decided, let's just go for it. What were your concerns at that point? I think the concerns for us was, does it live up to the hype? We were being given lots of figures, lots of, like all the vendors were doing, telling us how much quicker it would be, how much less compute we would need, how cheap it would be, but only when you do this thing in real life, when you actually do some real heavy lifting, when you start installing SQL servers into a Nutanix environment, does it work? I had a queue of people telling me, don't do it, it's going to be a disaster. And we did it, and it wasn't a disaster, it was outstanding. We always talk about the labor cause. As a former CIO, you know how labor-intensive IT is. And our premise is, when we describe mimicking cloud on-prem, our premise has always been, and our research indicates that a lot of the savings are in the productivity of the IT people, you can shift those resources elsewhere. Guys like you are trying to do digital transformations, which sounds like such a buzzword, but it's actually starting to gain foothold, it's a real deal. And you can't be doing loan provisioning and fund that, and fund these analytics and data-driven transformations. So, is that a correct premise? Did it have a sort of major business impact on your IT staff? It does, I mean basically what it means now is our guys can get on and do the fun stuff. When we started doing this, they all thought they were losing jobs and we were going to be cutting headcount. We were never doing that, because we never got out of the soup. The IT guys wouldn't understand this, you spend all day fighting fires, you never get to do the fun stuff. All we've managed to do is, we've managed to get to the point that our fundamental processing is just solid. We can deploy servers at the click of a button, we can move servers between data centers at the click of a button, we can do the stuff that everybody aspires to, but then those guys can then go and do the fun stuff. What's the fun stuff? The fun stuff for us is the analytics. It's using tools like Splunk to truly understand what's going on, getting predictive in what we do. That's the fun stuff. Were the skill sets of the guys who were putting out fires with the infrastructure compatible with the fun stuff, or did you have to reskill? We trained. It's very easy to take a bunch of guys that you've always asked to do one job, then change the job and then assume the guys are bad guys. That's not how it works. I do think it's 80% personality, 20% skill. You can fill it in. So what we did was the guys who had been previously just firefighting, it took a while, and it took a while for them to trust us that we weren't really taking them into a trap of some sort, but we reskilled them. We didn't just bring new people in. Would you feel like you would have had to hire more people if you didn't? Yeah. Make this move? I'd say we couldn't have actually deployed in the model we're currently deployed to with the people we have. We were looking for operational efficiency, but we want resilience. Think about payments. You don't get two chances to take a payment. I mean, it's a very high level. It does not be precise, but in percentage terms, I mean, how much more, what percent more IT labor would you have needed if you didn't make this move? Was it a 10% factor, 20%, 50%, double? Remember, a small company, we're talking about six people now, we'd probably need another four or five people. And at one point we had that as vacancies. We've done other things recently. So in terms of our corporate environment, we've gone out to Office 365. We're taking away again stuff that doesn't add value to us as a business and pushing that out of what we do. That's a substantial business. It is. So Mike, you seem really happy with Nutanix, but what's on your wish list? What would you like to see from Nutanix or maybe their ecosystem? We've got the big expo floor here. What would make your company's life easier, simpler? I think for us it's just having some clarity as to where they're heading next. They've been an excellent startup. They've been moving the market. They've been ahead of the market. The problem I've always seen is companies as they get to this size, almost like the wave of the market swamps back over them. They start hiring in from all the companies they used to be different to. And it's how do they stop that happening? How do they preserve the essence of what made them dynamic? So you can talk about the functionality, you can talk about the hypervisor. We're an ESX house, we use VMware, but we're now using a crockleys hypervisor in some of our environments. The issue for that is... Any information you can give us is how you make that decision, whether you go ESX or AHV? It's purely down to not so much the capabilities of AHV or ESX. We think AHV from a price point perspective is incredibly attractive. But as you know, everybody's infrastructure isn't just the hypervisor, it isn't just the hardware. It's all of the other ancillary platforms, the security platforms, the FIM platforms and so forth. And until those vendors start saying they support AHV, that's a barrier to us for using it in a production environment. Nutangents are great. They'll say they'll look after us, but no CIO ever got praise for just trusting a guy they met on the street. You've got to be careful. So you want that ecosystem to develop further. Very much so. Whether it's Nutanix, integrating with a particular platform that you need or vice versa. Yes, definitely. And you can see that here, there are some announcements, I know they're coming to that from some of the vendors here, where they have much tighter integration to AHV. That's got to pick up a pace. Well, and that's their philosophy, I would presume, as we're going to write to our API, at least make that open. Now, but somebody's got to write to the API. Absolutely. But fundamentally, it's there. It's not a closed stack, as it were. But there's got to be a compelling client driver for that. So I can understand where these other vendors aren't making, haven't made the investment in the past, because until they know they can make money with a deployment with AHV, why would you invest in that? But I think Nutanix have got to the point now where there's no doubt they're a player. So now you have to be a player. Well, being a public company helps, right? And to see the growth rates, and it just helps with that, sort of advertising the brand, but that takes time, and they're still small companies. Very much so. Mike, you said you started out with VDI, and I kind of got to know it. You kind of look back at what you've done. Are there any surprises or anything you'd give advice to people that are just starting this journey from your learnings? I'll use a really bad analogy that I used last year, and most people don't sort of like it as much as I do. When people start on VDI, and we never did it, we actually have never gone down the VDI route. We looked at it and went, we've got more important stuff, more fun stuff to do. Going down this road, taking a VDI approach, I said it's like driving your Ferrari down the high street. You might think you look cool, but you're not really driving a Ferrari. You know, you've got to take this kid out on the road, and you need to give it some heavy load, because in the early days, the new tax box hated being quiet, that they took time to spool up and so forth. That problem's gone away now, but if you're going to really look at this stuff, and you're going to get proper return on your investment, give it heavy lifting to do, and use it in anger, and don't just take the easy option, the option where you don't have to convince the production guys. Yeah? So I would say that's, for us, the biggest lesson. Absolutely. Find one of those hard problems, throw something meaningful at it. Yeah, and you learn then, you know. How about any thoughts on the event? I mean, it's early, but, you know, it interacts with me. This is my third done next. So they've only had three, so. Okay, so you've been all three in the US. You didn't go to the one in Vienna? I did as well. My head office was in Vienna, so I actually wasn't at the event, but I attended the parties. Okay, even better. What do you get out of events like this? Two things. First of all, we get to understand what's going on. We do get briefings from Nutanix. Obviously, we're quite involved with them, but it's good to hear it, and hear the reaction from other customers. I think more importantly is an opportunity to network with other customers in Nutanix, understand their issues, share ideas. It's a great networking event for like-minded people. And I think, for me, it's worth the trip over to the US to do that. Good, Mike, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Appreciate your insights. Yes. All right, keep right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back at Nutanix.nextconf. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back.