 From Nice France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live coverage from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice France. Always love when we get to dig in of some of the practitioners, the users at this conference, because a lot of them have shown up for this show. Happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Mohammed Ibrahim, who's the head of IT with Securities and Investment Company, or SICO, headquartered out of Bahrain. Great to see you. Hello, how are you? Good to see you too. It's really my pleasure to participate and to be here and joining the .NEXT conference. It's actually very lucky to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, and you've been at both of the European shows that they've had. Exactly, yeah, I have attended last year in Vienna, and that was really good as well, and this year I really see a very big development and enhancement and the difference between this year and last year, which is a very good progress. All right, so Mohammed first, tell us about SICO. How long's the company been around, kind of the breadth of coverage in locations in the lifetime? SICO, it's actually a wholesale bank, headquartered in Bahrain, and we are a premier wholesale bank in the region Middle East and North Africa. We do business in two different lines, like asset management, because we manage more than one billion US dollar as asset management and portfolio managers, and we are also a custodian house, and the brokerage business, this is one of our main business lines as well, because we are brokers, and we started as a broker, and now we are a wholesale bank. Our coverage, as I said, is MENA, Middle East and North Africa, and we have our also subsidiary brokerage arm in United Arab Emirates. It's SICO UAE, it's our brokerage arm there, and they are also working under SICO. Okay, you were telling me SICO's been around since 1995. Give us a little bit of your background, how long have you been, you know? Yeah, actually, yeah, SICO established in 1995, and I joined SICO in 2007, and in that time I'm SICO, I started as a head of infrastructure, and now I am the head of IT, looking after the whole IT and services in SICO. Okay, maybe explain to us those roles, infrastructure in IT and kind of the, how many people, how many data centers, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we have actually one data center, which is the main site, and we have another data center in our DR site, the recovery site, and yeah, it's very sophisticated because we are operating as a bank, and we have a core banking system, we have a trading platform, we are serving more than 1900s customers, and our customers are government, the Bench and Fund, high-worth net individuals, corporates, so we have fund managers, this all our customers, and this is actually very critical customers for us. This is mainly, we are in IT, of course we have a couple of units, we have the infrastructure and application, I was actually entitled for the infrastructure looking after the platform, security, network, and recently from couple of years back, I have been promoted to be the head of IT and looking after the applications as well as infrastructure. Great, so you've got security under your preview, which I have to imagine is taking a lot of time and budget these days. Exactly, this is actually, it was a very again critical task and a critical position because handling the security, it was really important for the business and for our data and our confidentiality, so it was really a good practice and a good experience and now we are actually enhancing more in our information security policy because as you know, cybersecurity is one of the important topics, especially when you go to the digitalization and this is our main purpose and our main target is to do digitalization, automation and enhancing this domain plus ensuring the security is very standard, very high level, matching the whole expectations from the regulator as well as world-wide standards. Yeah, brought up a great point, Mohamed there. I want you to explain to our audience, what does digitization mean to SICO? For us, digitalization is actually, it's more than giving online services, automation for our services as well, make it easy because the whole sale bank, it's actually have different line of services and getting into access to your data, to your portfolio, managing your orders, placing your orders, getting your positions, getting your cash statements, this is all actually transferring your cash, this is all something that it's very important for the customer and in many places, even in the Gulf, even in the area, it happens manually, okay? So we are trying to be more automated, more smart, okay, and this is for us, is the digitalization in the time being. Okay, so let's dig into your, part of your job, your old job too, the infrastructure itself. What's the role of infrastructure when you're doing the digitization? You've probably gone through some transformations there. If you can tell us a little bit about kind of what it was like and kind of what led to where you are and where you're going. Yep, mainly this is a very important question actually and I love to answer it because when I John Seaco, it was a traditional infrastructure, I mean, as many people did, okay, it's a physical implementation, you have servers, you have network switches, okay, so it was a very traditional and this was actually the challenge, is to move Seaco from the traditional way of the infrastructure into very simple way and very standard way, allowing you to grow, allowing you to add more applications, allowing you to really develop and focus more on the functionalities other than infrastructure and this is, since you have also have limited time, our limited resources in terms of IT resources, so you need really to think about a simple infrastructure giving you the functionalities you expect, giving you the stability, the data resiliency and as well as giving you the opportunity to add more sort of critical applications on top of that. Okay, so I have to imagine your time, virtualization played a role in this and when did, you know, kind of Nutanix come into the picture? Actually, yeah, Nutanix came into the picture when we decided to go with our online trading platform, Seaco Live. Seaco Live, it's actually a very important and a critical product for us because it allows our customers to get a direct market access and we are currently online with seven markets and we are going for the globe as well because we are planning to go for Europe and US markets. So to build this kind of critical system, you have to have a cloud, you have to think about virtualization because again, following the traditional implementation of infrastructure, it will not help you and it will take a long, long time and it will be very complex in terms of administration and support. For this reason, we have to add actually our private cloud because again, you will stuck with the regulator if you go with the public cloud. If you tell him, I'm going for the public cloud, he will tell you, again, it's the confidentiality, you cannot take the customer information and put it somewhere. So we said, okay, we will go for our private cloud and this was a challenge. We need a hyper-converged infrastructure. We need infrastructure that is smart enough to be hosting all our VMs with a central monitoring, central sort of administration and easy as well. So we have compared actually a couple of, more than a couple of solutions around the world, okay? And Nutanix was one of the proposed solutions coming to us and we have done a very sophisticated vendor selection and I think we have taken the right decision when we have selected the Nutanix to be our infrastructure for trading platform. Yeah, so before I get into the Nutanix a little bit more, some people when they hear I've built a private cloud and say, well, you virtualized some environment, you did some things, what were your internal requirements? What makes it a cloud versus just, okay, I've automated some things or I've done some things. You know, did you have certain criteria that you went through or what did you do and how do you feel kind of, did you benchmark yourselves against the public cloud from kind of the usage and the agility or how do you sort that out? Again, it's very important question because this was a strategy when I joined SICO from the beginning. As I said, we had actually a traditional infrastructure and the market and the standards was ahead, actually. So you have to bring SICO infrastructure into the standards. Traditional infrastructure, it doesn't give you the facility to grow and to add more sort of systems. It's very difficult. So this was actually the criteria and the requirements from our side. We need to have a simple infrastructure where we can add additional servers seamlessly. We can grow, we can expand, we can add more resources without rebuilding the whole infrastructure because the physical implementation, if you're stuck with the capacity, you have to shut down the server, bring a new server, do another implementation, bring everybody involved to do the new implementation. But with the virtualization, it's easy. It's a virtual server, it's a data. You take it somewhere, just only you need to provide the infrastructure that can host it. And with the Nutanix or with the hyper-convergent infrastructure, you can, whenever you need additional resources, you can add resources and you can keep your application running as is, you can keep your data as is and without interrupting the business, without interrupting the operation and without interrupting customers as well. And this was actually the criteria when we selected and when we decided to go with the hyper-convergent infrastructure. Okay, that's great. Do you have any metrics as to kind of, you know, operations or how many headcount you have working on things? What's been the impact of the Nutanix? This is what we have done, actually. I told you, we did like a vendor selection, okay? And we compared two different vendors and actually, to be more honest, four vendors actually, monitoring and developing and comparing different technologies, okay? So if you go with the traditional infrastructure and implementation, how it will go, in terms of support, in terms of implementation, time, lines, the cost, post-implementation, support, okay? Even with the convergent infrastructure, because I remember in that time we had the convergent infrastructure where some people like well-known companies were talking about convergent infrastructure and we had the hyper-convergent infrastructure solution, which is actually, was a very new into the market. For this reason, we had taken, I think, a decision where everybody said, Muhammad and Siku, I think you are taking a very, what you can say, it's a very new decision. It's something that you can- You can say it's risky, yeah? Exactly, some people consider it little bit risky because you are doing something is still not yet, many people did it, especially in the financial services and the banking sector. But as I told you, it was a challenge that you had to take and you had to go through because you have to have your own private cloud. Why? Because you have to host whatever VMs you need, okay? Whenever you need to add a VM, it will be very easy for you. Whenever you want to expand, it will be also easy for you and with your resources, current IT resources, you can still handle these sophisticated systems and the critical systems. And this was a challenge because again, you cannot, every time you implement a new system, you add to payroll, additional resources and you hire more resources. The business will be killed. Yeah, well, something I've heard lots from the financial markets these days is the business is changing, so you need to have the agility to be able to respond and deliver what you need and if you don't make a change. And to be honest, I want to tell you frankly speaking, now the management and the business decision makers, they look to the IT that they have a buttons. When I tell you something, you should press the button and bring it to me. They don't actually think about how much sophisticated that your system has already in the background, so you don't care about the technicality. They care more about the functionality and the deliverables. So IT is very now challenging and the decision makers and the IT management and the technical resources, they have a very challenge, very high challenge that whenever they get the requirements and a lot of priorities are coming from the business, they have to be always ready. So if you don't have a symbol and a proper infrastructure that can really flexible, help you achieve all of this kind of deliverables, then you will stuck and people will look at you like you are in 19th century. So we are now in 91, we are growing, we have to grow, we have to be very fast like others. Yeah. So it sounds like you're saying Nutanix provides the easy button for the infrastructure. From my experience and from the implementation we have done, I think Nutanix with our systems could really achieve our target and we could really implement the training platform in a very good time as we expected even less. Okay, and we could really do this kind of performance, we could really achieve the deliverables as we expected. We have more than expected performance, we have the right choice in terms of expansion. We have also good support from Nutanix, which is really helping a lot in terms of critical systems because it's a 24 by seven, I cannot actually afford the couple of minutes even down time, it's a market, I'm accessing the markets. So I'm placing orders and these orders are money. And if the customer while placing the order, his order did not reach the market, okay, because of the system, he will kill us. Okay, so exactly, this is how much, and actually it's a seconds because the price in the markets is changing and the customer is placing the order. So if I did not give him the very stable platform that he can really place the order into the market with this moment and then it got delayed, then he will lose money. Okay, then I will lose the customer and I will lose the business. For this season, it's a very critical and it's very important to have such a simple, flexible, reliable solution for your system. Mohamed Ibrahim, really appreciate the updates on what SICO has been doing. Thank you so much and best of luck. We'll be back with lots more programming here. Thank you so much. From theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix.next. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.