 Live from New Orleans, Louisiana at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman with co-host Keith Townsend and this is Nutanix .NEXT Conference in New Orleans. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Vijay Luthra, who's the senior vice president, global head of technology infrastructure services at Northern Trust. Vijay, great job on the keynote this morning. A lot of cool technologies that you're digging into. Thanks for joining us. Well, thanks for having me. All right, so luckily it's easy, Northern Trust understand finance, but tell us a little bit about your organization and kind of give us a high level. What are some of the biggest challenges you're facing? Yeah, absolutely. So again, Northern Trust, the global financial services firm, I primarily in the asset servicing, asset management, wealth management business. Again, 128 year old history built on some very sound principles around service integrity and expertise. Some of the challenges we're facing is around growth. The firm is growing, revenues are growing at a very, very healthy pace, especially when you compare that to our peers and competitors. And the challenge number one is, how do we scale the business while managing the overall operating expenses, right? So we want to create some leverage in the business and we want the growth to be a healthy growth. So that's challenge number one. And we recently, our CEO recently launched a value for spend program where while we grow, let's make sure we're spending and we're getting the value for the spend. Yeah, Vijay, can you just sketch out for us? You talk about growth and scale, how many locations, how many users, they're M&A that you have to like, you know, wrap into this stuff? Yeah, absolutely. So Northern Trust, about 18,200 employees, I would say 50, 60 plus locations. I would say well distributed across the different regions between US, Asia pack, and EMEA. Yeah, at a high level, those are kind of the, how we're kind of geographically dispersed. Okay, great. And cloud, what does that mean to your organization? How does that fit in your role and across the company? So cloud, so we've been on the cloud journey for several years now. We had a very mature virtualization strategy which transitioned well into our private cloud strategy. We have enough scale internally where we said if we built an efficient private cloud, which by the way, if you heard on the keynote, was built 100% on converged, hyper-converged technologies. We were actually in the forefront and we adopted these technologies back in 2013, 2014. The goal back then was how do we get efficiencies and scale from the private cloud by leveraging automation, converged stacks are highly reliable because, for example, the patching is a lot more well tested by the vendors. So on our journey to the cloud, that was essentially the first phase when we transitioned from virtualization to private clouds. And since then we've actually built more value added layers on top of that, because the goal is not just to cater to traditional applications that leverage infrastructure as a service, but also to cater to some of the more contemporary cloud native applications that we're building or even some of the containerized workloads. So we've built on top of that with Paz and CAS and software defined components like SDN. And we are closely measuring the outcomes and the benefits. So Vijay, let's talk a little bit about that initial investment in decision. Northern Trust, well known for being conservative among the most conservative of investment firms. I'm from Chicago, so I have an affinity for Northern Trust in general. Back in 2013, there was not as simple to look back, it's simple to look back now and say, oh yeah, right choice, easy decision. But 2013 OpenStack was, you know, all the rays, building clouds based on these open source and available technologies was kind of the way to go. What made you guys take a look at hyper-converged and say, you know, we're going to buck the trend and we're going to go with hyper-converged? Not many of your peers made that choice. Yeah, that's a great question. So at Northern Trust, we are heavily focused on outcome-based investment decisions. So within technology infrastructure, our mission is pretty straightforward, which is as we scale infrastructure, how do we continue to reduce total cost ownership, improve time to market, improve client experience, which is a very essential part of our decision-making process, and while we're doing that, not lose sight of reliability, stability, security. So with that kind of as our guiding principles, as we make major investments, we take them through these lenses and Nutanix hit all of them. So it was fairly straightforward. And again, some of the benefits, as you probably heard on stage, were phenomenal. We were able to increase capacity without increasing staff. We were able to reduce some of our automation team, sorry, build teams significantly. Reliability, stability improved drastically. For example, our virtual desktop infrastructure, the number of incidents, client-general incidents, internal client-general incidents went down by 80, 90%. So again, to answer your question, outcome-driven, have key metrics and measures on what you expect the outcomes to be, and then partner with the right firms to make sure you get the outcomes. So as we look at the next phase, infrastructure as a service, you guys seem to have that down. Mature, virtualization practice, you laid on top of that infrastructure as a service. Now we look into the next phase, CAS, past type solutions. What are some of the major decision points and what's guiding your decisions? Yeah, so clearly on everybody, and all head of infrastructures, or any organization's mind today is how do we build a hybrid cloud strategy that is safe, secure, does not lock you into a specific vendor. It's the right application, the right type of workload. And that's what we're focused on now. We've got a few applications, nothing that's production-client-centric is in our public cloud from an AAS perspective. But we think we've invested in the right components to allow us to now orchestrate safely and securely across multi-clouds. So that's what we're focused on now. Can you talk a little bit more about containerization? What's the experience like with working with Nutanix for those type of solutions? Yeah, so we were early adopters of containers with partnering with Docker, built on the Nutanix platform. We've been working with them since the last couple of years and more recently, since they announced the Kubernetes integration, we are factoring that into the Docker environment. The goal with containerization is, again, back to kind of those guiding principles, right? Lower cost ownership, improve time to market, reliability, stability. We see an opportunity to consolidate Linux Windows-based workloads because of the efficiencies that containers bring, as well as extend DevOps-like functionality to app teams that might not be looking to refactor in a cloud-native, pass-like format, they could take advantage of containers to get a DevOps-like experience. We're enhancing security as we move to containers. There's several things we're doing there. So the point being, we're looking at it through kind of the same lenses. So you threw out a couple of things. I heard DevOps in there. In your keynote, one of the things that you talked about, a team going from 45 people managing something to 12. Maybe explain a little bit about Ops in your company. What happened to all those other 33 people? Great questions, two parts. On the infrastructure as a service side, a few years ago, we had a build team, mostly contractor-driven, where we would use them to build servers, deploy applications, extremely manual, with converged technologies and all the automation that we have deployed, that team is down to 14, 15 people because a lot of the work has gone away and our goal is to continue to fine-tune that. So that's infrastructure as a service. DevOps-wise, what we did was, we carved out a team of four or five, what Gartner calls versatileists, multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary resources, senior engineers that focused on building out our DevOps practice on top of our platform as a service. And that has gone extremely well. The team has very successfully onboarded hundreds of microservices as we re-architect some of our applications. So, Vijay, talk to us about the decision and the capability of being able to take monolithic applications that are not gonna be refactored and go into containers. There's a lot of debate on whether or not that's worth the trouble. But beyond that debate, talk to us about the importance and the reliance on the capability that Nutanix will be bringing in with ACS 2.0. Are you guys looking to deploy that or are you looking to manage Kubernetes and that capability of managing these traditional applications inside of Kubernetes? So we are a few steps ahead of Nutanix. In one of my conversations with Sunil, I was saying, man, I wish this feature was available six months ago. So we are watching that development very closely and we're very interested in it. But because we have an existing Docker footprint, that's what we're leveraging for Kubernetes for now. Great. Could you speak about Nutanix, the relationship you have with them and their ecosystem? Things like secondary storage, how do you look as Nutanix as a partner and what do you see the maturity of their ecosystem and any solutions you'd want to highlight there? Yeah. Clearly, what Nutanix did to the primary storage market, there's an emerging market on the secondary storage side and we're working with a couple of different companies to help us in that space. But just the Nutanix ecosystem itself, just because we are a few steps ahead and we've got some Nutanix components, we've got some third-party components as part of Nutanix. I think the fact that Nutanix is becoming a one-stop shop, as you can see with some of the announcements today, from a total cost ownership perspective, it becomes very interesting for someone like myself to say, if I took out a few vendors and focused on the Nutanix stack, what does that mean? At what point is it usable? When can we start migrating? And those are the types of things we're kind of focused on now. So have you gotten into a situation, especially seeing that you're at least six months or so ahead of Nutanix when it comes to container orchestration? Has the infrastructure gotten in your way at all? Have they done anything? Because Nutanix can be opinionated and how they manage infrastructure. Has that opinionation, has that opinion, rather, gotten in your way as you look to go down your cast route? No, so far, I would say no. I think a lot of their tooling is very intuitive, very easy to use. The engineers, with very minimal training, in fact, some of our engineers that retrain themselves on Nutanix happened over such a small duration and had to do with how simple to use Nutanix. That goes, you know. One of the lines I love from your presentation, you said you run IT as a business. What advice do you give to your peers out there, learnings you've had, staying a little bit ahead of some of the general marketplace? I think the key is back to kind of my initial comment. How do you build scale with an infrastructure? Meaning, how do you take on more workloads, new technologies, while managing your operating expenses tightly? We have essentially done that extremely well over the last few years where we have added capacity, absorbed a lot of growth, introduced a lot of new technologies, while keeping a very close eye on our operating expenses. So I would say, if anything, when you run IT as a business, you take into account not just all the net ads, you have a program to consider optimizations. For example, where we use a technology that helps us reduce physical VMware-based footprint, helps us optimize and says, here's where you have some dead capacity. As leaders in somebody in my position, you should be willing and able to take out costs as well while taking on new technologies. I would say that's the key. So you say you guys are running IT as a business. What have been some of the KPIs and showing success in that transformation? Okay. We closely watch our operating expenses and we measure that as a percentage of total company operating expenses. What percentage are we of that? We closely watch time to market. How soon are we providing environments to app dev teams? We closely watch stability off the underlying platforms, off time of those platforms. So I think those have direct impacts on our internal clients as well as end clients. And then as a business, who are your competitors? As normal trust. No, as you run IT as a business. Yeah, that's a great question. I would say cloud providers are competitors. But to be honest, I shouldn't say that. I mean, in a new model, I want the team to think about cloud as just another endpoint. And we need to be able to safely and securely deploy the right app in the right cloud, kind of the end state that we want to be in. So I wouldn't say they're competitors. I think we as a firm or any firm should get comfortable with being able to orchestrate and move the right workloads in the right data centers to say. All right. Fiji, I want to give you the final word. You're out there looking at some of the new technologies. What's exciting you? What's on your wish list from the vendor community that maybe you can share? I'm very personally, I'm very excited about AI in apps. I know people talk about AI in financial services and other industries, but I think the application of machine learning and AI within data center operations is relevant. And there's many things we're doing in that space in terms of a client facing chat bot that integrates with link or certain add-ons onto Splunk that help you with machine learning and analyzing logs or bots that help you classify tickets and put them in the right cues at the right time. So we're looking at how to take advantage of those. Again, to build scale, to lower cost ownership, improve experience, et cetera, et cetera. So again, I think that's something I'm personally very, very excited about. All right. Well, Fiji Luthor, really appreciate sharing your story. Great success and look forward to catching up with you. All right, thank you. In the future. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from the New Orleans Convention Center.next, Nutanix's conference 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE.