 Satish to take us to the journey of design first reimagining enterprise computing using design Welcome Satish. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you to the organizers of UX India Like the person was saying, you know, my name is Satish. I'm the global head of design We were a startup until a few weeks ago and now we are a public company We have headquartered in San Jose in the Bay Area But we have a very large presence in Bangalore with all functions including a significant presence in design Engineering finance marketing all the functions. So today my talk is going to be on reimagining enterprise computing using design meaning all of enterprise computing Storage servers networking the whole bit the whole gamut of things But before we go there, I want to spend a few minutes Looking back at history because history teaches us a lot of things and history like people say repeats itself So we've all been here. We've seen this right. So on the left is the Dynatac circa 1983 Wade a kilogram cost $4,000 Took 10 hours to charge for 30 minutes of talk time It was a very big deal. It was the first mobile phone in 1983 It's a very significant point in technology and people bought it then 10 years later Came the IBM Simon Which was up one pound in size I mean in weight and cost roughly half a game and it was the first smartphone with a touch screen display and a few Applications on it like email notes and things like that and then we had the blackberry as mobile technology walled few more applications and then technology receded into the background Then mobile became a platform and the focus shifted towards the user experience That rested on top of the platform, which was delivered through applications So all in a sudden you had a platform which you could use with with applications to customize the platform to your life Right and that we have seen so my point I'm trying to make is things start out very technology centric and Then gravitate towards user experience centric centricity over a period of time Right and I don't know how many of you have seen this graph, but most people have this is Don Norman's graph which essentially says Things start out to be technology centric and the red arrow is there is a crossover point Wherein you have enough technology you have enough performance you have enough capacity and then everything Focuses on the user experience the value that you're delivering at that point in time is all about the experience Right, so let's take a look at computing through these lens for a second It's so this is the past 30 years of CPU costs declining 33% annually This is storage costs declining 38% annually This is networking costs 28% I believe 27% I believe annually over the past 20 years Technology is commodity it is ubiquitous and If you were to ask the question, what is the scale at which we are deploying technology This is Warren Hall in UC Berkeley and The data center here at Warren Hall, which is full of storage servers and Networking gear switches and stuff like that is roughly the size of one soccer field and this is Microsoft's data center in San Antonio in Texas six soccer fields worth of gear and this is Google's Data center in Mace County, Oklahoma used to be a old gate raid plant and that is I Believe six. This is 15 soccer fields. That is a typo that I've made it is 15 soccer fields So as you can tell, you know, 15 soccer fields worth of equipment is really large To deploy to manage to deal with on a day-to-day basis to monitor to troubleshoot to debug Right so This is what these data centers look like as you have seen so it is a significant problem when you have commodity Hardware, you know cheap software and it's deployed at scale It is a huge problem and again You know, we are back at this point in computing We have we are again at a User experience crossover point where you have enough technology But now you need to figure out the experience. How do people Manage all this? How do they monitor? How do they troubleshoot such that it is simple and easy and each person can actually manage a whole lot of machinery and so if we put on a design lens and we reframed the question of Technology and we ask the different question and if we ask the question if We wanted to make human computing of technology simple What needs to be built? Right we built compute we built storage We built a lot of networking gear But then we never asked this question. It was not designed to make human consumption of its simple It was he built for technology which is each of these layers, you know of compute storage and networking essentially is manned by dedicated teams in IT and they know only about their layer. They know nothing about the other layers and They're very specialized. There's a whole bunch of products in each layers with very different user experiences and these teams know how to deal with those products. They're experts in that and When you have to deploy an application for example, like Oracle or Exchange for mail you essentially have to talk to a whole bunch of people, you know Get give me some servers. Give me some storage. Give me some networking and it takes a lot of time It takes roughly three weeks four weeks Sometimes in the order of months to get an application deployed and in this day and age that is a sin Right and imagine if your application has problems Then you don't know where in this entire stack it lies and now you have to ask the question Is it a server problem? Is the storage problem? What is it? Right so the poor user essentially owns the application now has to call long Meetings get everybody in the room together and the compute guy doesn't know anything about networking they don't even speak the same language so to speak and It takes a long time to figure things out. So essentially it is a lot of complexity while Technology has evolved horizontally the needs of the applications are vertical They cut through every applications needs servers storage networking all the stuff so the needs of the applications are vertical and that is a You know that is a design problem that we need to solve So going back to the question if we ask the question to make human computing simple What would we build you end up with a different architecture? So you take all these layers and you collapse them Right you collapse them into a series of nodes and each node essentially has the functionality of all these layers And you can connect a lot of these nodes together Manage them by a single console and you can run your applications on top This is what one would build if you looked at it from a human centric manner if your design was human centric This is what you would build and then you would need just a simple Team to manage this and there is they don't have to learn multiple products. They just need to learn a product A experience so there is no learning tax and so on right, but fine Go let's go ahead. Let's assume, you know, we built this product which we have of course And then we ask a different question, you know, which is the question of impact if you build this product What is the impact? That you can have and let's look at impact from three dimensions Right. Let's look at the impact on the business Which is the customers and what they gain. Let's look at impact from The users, you know, what is the impact the human impact this kind of a product has on people's lives and Let us look at the impact on the organizations That develop these products so the design impact, you know on the business the design impact on the consumers The design impact on the builders of the product itself, right? So if we look at the business the cost goes down because all of a sudden you don't need, you know 12 products from 12 different companies that people have to learn. You don't need, you know, three or four teams The overall total cost of ownership essentially goes down. That's the business impact and then all of a sudden you have more agility because you're now able to satisfy the demands of Your consumers a lot quicker. Okay, you need a new application I'm going to just connect another node and all in a sudden boom things come to life and You're up and running within a matter of hours, right and agility these days the speed of agility in IT dictates the agility of the business because all businesses are IT centric if you're running a marketing campaign and You're trying to figure out which states I should run the marketing campaign in You can't spend three weeks trying to deploy an application to mine the data which will give you the answer By that time the window of opportunity might have disappeared So the agility is a very big deal for businesses Right, and then there's the human impact which is equally important Because at the end of the day we design products for human beings to consume, right? and so this is you know, there's a bunch of tweets from enthusiastic users of our product and You know as people know upgrades are some of the most riskiest operations that people perform anxiety-ridden operations time-consuming operations and this is one of the we've made upgrades very simple So here's a person, you know doing a barbecue and tweeting that they started the upgrade and it's up and running and They've got you know some time back to do other things instead of sitting there monitoring the upgrade and people bet their careers on Certain kinds of technology when virtualization came in in the two thousands There were a bunch of evangelists in IT who bet that virtualization would be a big deal and Their technology and their careers prospered as virtualization became a big deal So there are people here, you know, there's a responsibility we have as designers There's a social responsibility because people actually bet their careers on the products that you build right and Then there is just the sheer joy of the whole thing, you know where Be IT managing IT infrastructure does not have to be, you know serious boring stuff You say kick off an upgrade and we pop a game for you you know 2048 which you can play because the upgrade is going to take some time we know that right and You know when things are going well, we you know, you can do better than You know putting a big check mark on there. We put a monkey with a banana Just to keep it light just to keep it easy, right? So you can bring, you know, simple delight into people's lives, right and The other manifestation is design enables the manifestation of your corporate values in the product If you really say your customer first that needs to come out in the product So this is a support case submission screen we put the escalate button front and center We don't bury it somewhere You know where we don't want people to Unnecessarily call us because there is a way of thinking that I don't want to be bothered unnecessarily about every little thing But if you're really customer first, you should be willing to talk to a customer And so when you design a screen like this, you will put the escalate button right on top, right? And when you do things like this, this is what happens, right? So in the morning one of the speakers was talking about the net promoter score in the enterprise space a net promoter score is Normally in the 20s 30s is decent or good and if you're in the 40s of the 50s you're a rock star For us we have a net promoter score of 92 So when you when you do Design first when you put your customers first, this is really what happens people fall in love with what you build So internally right we design organizations we build products Right and so what is the impact of design? How can we use design to actually design organizations that function well, right? So talent is short design talent, especially around the world is short and We observed that in the Bay Area that there are a lot of highly educated people who Are actually staying at home Because they want to take care of their families the schools close at 2 30 or 3 o'clock and the kids come home and Mothers and in some cases dads want to stay at home for their kids They can do their homework and stuff like that and then we did some research and found out that 29% of all women in the United States Are stay at home mom? moms 7.6% of the dads are stay at home dads and then There is a unknown number of Free-spirited people for whom the 9 to 5 full-day work schedule just doesn't work So we created something called flex Which is essentially catering to the needs of these folks So you work according to a flexible schedule you work half the time and you get paid half the salary along with benefits So design can be used to build organizations to to get talent on board, right? And of course this we have seen how design has been used Not to just put lipstick on the pig meaning you build the product and then you make it pretty using design But you actually start Design first, so I won't say more about this and Then you know design can have an impact on the industry itself So this is an industry enterprise computing is not a product It's an industry and when you reimagine all of enterprise computing new Spaces in the entire field of computing get created which did not exist before so now you hear things like Hyperconvergence integrated systems and you have folks from Gartner and Forester You know talking about these spaces and ranking people and so on so design can have an enormous impact on the industry itself Right. So having said all this so what are the takeaways, right? So if you're an entrepreneur or If you are leading design or if you're just a designer, what are the takeaways? So my belief is for every company to succeed through design You need a true north for design and what I mean by that is For example, the true north for Google was speed If you had five designs and you wanted to choose what is the best design The design that was the fastest that gave most power to the in the hands of the user was the design you chose so that The need for speed dictated a thousand different design decisions at Google Over a period of time, you know thousands of decisions that they made they had a true north They had a litmus test right so for Nutanix. We say the true north for designers is Zero and I'm not being facetious here. What I mean by zero is that we want to build Computing infrastructure that is Zero human zero touch zero trouble tickets So any of course, you know not not that human beings will actually go away and machines will manage themselves But the ratio of how many people you need to manage how many machines Should become smaller and smaller and you need to design for essentially a zero-touch experience It's not like we wake up in the morning and get excited that I'm going to check on my electricity or some such thing We take electricity for granted. It's not top of mind. It exists We focus on the toaster and making a slice of toast or something like that So in enterprise computing needs to become like that It needs to be something that you take for granted so you can focus on the applications that matter You can get things done. You can get your life back. You can get your time back, right? So and of course from that, you know sort of design You know sort of the true north of design many design principles emanate Which will be used to dictate the day-to-day decisions These are some of the design principles that we follow. I won't go into it in detail for reasons of time and you know, I can talk to you offline if you need to and So in closing I will leave you with just this question It's very important, especially if you're an entrepreneur or if you're leading design in your company to be very clear Very precise About what is the true north for design for you? What is the one question that you're going to ask based on which you can get a very binary yes-no answer to make a decision and that is What I would urge you all to think about and Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure Thanks, at least very inspirational talk Since that we are on the topic of enterprise computing, can you give us some idea about how what are the enterprise? Computing services you receive from your internal service provider. So how does it within Nutanix? Provide a great user experience. Can you you know give us some insight into that? I think the How does it within Nutanix provide a great user experience? I think by putting their customers first By providing, you know designing for the right customer experience for us So and that can mean, you know the, you know, clearly visible status on the tickets being responsive You know those kinds of things so I mean once you put your customer first You will design the right experience for them I mean we do other things like you know having vending machines from which you can get a Cable or you can get your charger where you don't have to go and file a ticket in order to get these simple things we do You know few things like that. I mean there's a lot more to do of course, but those are some of the things that we do Maybe some of the customers speed is not the key. Something else is the key Could they be in this alignment? Sure, I mean you go after a certain base of customers There might be customers that don't value speed Maybe those are not your customers Right, maybe not every person in the world is going to be a customer So you have to identify What is the What are the needs of the customers and then you go after them and you establish your true north According to that, but there might be some people who don't see value in this Maybe you come in at a price point That is too expensive for them. Maybe you come in with a product that is not the right fit for them And those are things you have to sacrifice. You can't have it all Can't have it all opinionated design is It's a minimalistic form of design one of the classic examples of opinionated designers is Apple's design for example, it's opinionated Apple has an opinion about what Their customer needs unlike Android Android gives you the toolbox Android opens up a big tool set for you and you can pretty much do Whatever you want with it. You get a lot of flexibility But they don't optimize necessarily for your experience Apple Gives you sort of a minimalistic Sort of a close walled thing, but they're really optimizing for what they think you are is the right experience for you Right, so that is essentially having an opinion about design, which is clear What you're designing for which is clear, right? It's it many times. It turns out to be a minimalistic Form of design, which is you're not trying to make it overcomplicate, you know Overcomplicated you're trying to keep it very simple very intentional Providing with a short set of menu choices Instead of the whole thing burying things in the ad under the advanced button where you don't see so you don't have a massive cognitive load Whenever you look at a screen, you know those kinds of things. That's what goes into opinionated design