 Live from Vienna, Austria. It's theCUBE, covering .next Europe 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back. Digging into some of the ecosystem partners here at the Nutanix .next conference. Happy to welcome the program. First time guest, Simon Taylor, who's the president of Comtrait Software. Another Boston-based person. You and I fly, you know, two flights to come all the way to Vienna, Austria, when, you know, we live like 15 minutes apart from each other. And here we are. Right, yeah. Great to be here. So good morning, you know. Absolutely. All right. And good morning. Simon, actually, so tell us a little bit about you, how long you've been at Comtrait. Now Comtrait Software, maybe kind of tease that out for us a little bit as to what that is. Yeah, sure. So I've actually been a Comtrait group for about 10 years. I started at the company running the US sales force, set up their first US sales office. And Comtrait started off as a software engineering business. So a thousand software engineers located across 10 different campuses, most of which were in Europe. So I set up those first sort of American sales operations, started selling outsourced software engineering. But over the course of that 10-year period, we started to move up the value chain. So we looked at what we really were doing in the services side of the business, and we said we are really good at two things, backup and monitoring. And there's not a lot of companies out there that can say we've got a thousand software engineers and we're incredibly good at backup and incredibly good at infrastructure monitoring. So rather than continuing to sell services in the marketplace, we began looking at ways to productize that experience so we can move up the value chain and be more valuable to our customers. So we started to do that by building our first, what we call management pack, which was an end user monitoring and infrastructure management tool that was supporting Citrix environments. We went from building one to two to 16 of those over the course of a five-year period, and that product line actually became one of the most profitable and biggest sellers in the company. So we began that sort of evolution away from services into the monitoring and the backup world. And then in January of this year, Citrix came along and acquired that part of the business, and we've continued to develop a long-term relationship with them ever since. So Simon, your company is proof we've talked about most companies in the future, you can end up a software company in one way or another. It's hard to avoid. So my understanding, you've got a bunch of your team that I've met are based in Slovenia, which is right down the road from here, but you've also opened a Boston office. So what's the makeup of Contraged software now? Sure, so after the acquisition, we spun off the entire software division and said, let's really focus on monitoring and backup. And most of the engineering teams were in the countries of Slovenia, Bosnia. So what we would sort of call central Europe. We then decided because our US presence was where the business was being built, and because we were focused on Citrix and Nutanix, we really need to re-establish ourselves as a US company. So just a few months ago, we launched our global headquarters right there in Bosnia, Massachusetts. That's great. Now let's speak, you've got a management pack now for Nutanix, what is that, how does that fit in? Yeah, sure. When we looked at the ecosystem and we looked at Nutanix, we said, these guys really have created a new industry. Going beyond hyperconverge, enterprise cloud, we see Nutanix as the clear leaders in that space, just like we saw Citrix as the clear leaders in the virtualization space. Because Prism does such a wonderful job of correlating data and pulling data out of the Nutanix environment, what we wanted to do was make sure that major platforms had that available. So we began building a management pack for Microsoft system center operations manager as well as OMS for Microsoft, porting all the information out of Prism and then adding some very cool features. So we add something called application awareness. And this application awareness feature is one of the first times in the marketplace where systems administrators can now go in and see what applications are running on which virtual machines. So it really changes the whole paradigm because now we're enabling those systems admins not just to look at what's going on in the environment but to actually dig down to the VMs and figure out what applications are running on them. And from a hypervisor standpoint, is that the Acropolis hypervisor, do you also do VMWare, what hypervisor? So it's hypervisor agnostic and really the key to it is that you do need to have Microsoft system center operations manager, which is great because Citrix is now offering free management packs to all of their Citrix Platinum customers. So you're seeing this massive growth in the scum world. And by offering the Nutanix management pack, we're allowing people to monitor and manage their entire environment right under a single pane of glass. Okay, so I'm curious. Obviously Nutanix is definitely a leader. From our standpoint, we say from a revenue standpoint that they are still in lead. But if you look, there's other options out there. And if you look at Microsoft's making some moves, you kind of look, Azure Stack next year, they've got Azure pack. And VMWare of course has their own virtual SAN. Is that something that ComTrade software looks at, plugging into those? Or is there something special about Nutanix that enabled this? I love that question. So we absolutely look at it and we absolutely say no. We believe that Nutanix is the platform to follow when it comes to hyperconverged. And we believe that for a number of reasons. One, there's a lot of followers in this industry as we know. I think that absolutely VMWare did a great job in the virtualization space. We're not knocking anybody. But in terms of who built hyperconverged, in terms of who is actually building a platform like economy around hyperconverged, you can only really look at Nutanix. They're big enough, they've got the growth, they've just IPOed. But more than that, I think that Derage and the executive team at Nutanix have a true vision for building Enterprise Cloud. And that's the vision that we want to support. Can I ask you then on VMWare, because VMWare had a very large ecosystem, but something like virtual SAN, it is heavily integrated from their part. So is that not open for partners to be able to do solutions like you're doing from Nutanix? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly open. And I think that from a VOPS perspective, ESX is obviously still a key part as a hypervisor in the Nutanix world and so forth. And again, there's many wonderful vendors out there. But from a platform perspective, where we see growth, where we see adoption, and frankly, where we see the best customer stories and customer experiences is certainly coming out of Nutanix. So I think when you're picking a platform partner to extend, you're picking a platform partner to work with, you want to make sure that they've got wonderful growth, that they are delighting customers across the world, and that they have a vision you can really get behind and invest your team into. And for us, that's Nutanix. Yeah, obviously they've reached a level of maturity if you're building a product specifically that's just running with their environment. Absolutely, and you're going to see a lot more products from Comtrey coming out specifically for Nutanix. This is certainly where we're placing our investments. We think it's a game changer. We just love what these guys are doing. Simon, how's the show been for you? It's been fantastic. I think the great thing about Nutanix, where it's at as a company right now, size-wise, you really have that customer intimacy. You've got the ability to interact with the executives at Nutanix here. Everybody's very open. It's a great environment to come as a partner because you can really spend quality time with the people that are making the decisions. So we've really hit a great timer. Okay, any good stories from the customers you're hearing, kind of excitement there? What's bringing them over to your booth? Yes, so we actually just launched what we call a super pack. And the super pack is correlating all the information from the Nutanix management pack with all of the information from the Citrix management packs in one place. So if you are a Citrix Platinum customer and you buy a Nutanix management pack from Comtrey, you get a free super pack now that's going to correlate all of that data. So we've had wonderful discussions and chats with Citrix Nutanix customers who want to be able to monitor everything under a single pane of glass. All right, and being at the European show, is there anything different? You guys obviously have a strong presence in the area here. What do you see kind of adoption-wise, customer discussion different here versus back in our neck of the woods in Boston? Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of excitement about Nutanix globally, right? They are still new. They did just IPO. There's a ton of buzz, whether it's Silicon Valley, whether it's Europe. I think the interesting thing is there is people sort of learning about Nutanix here. And I think that creates even more buzz, even more excitement. So we're seeing a lot of partners in particular coming up and saying, oh my gosh, we're now selling Nutanix, it's huge, people love it, what else can we do? How else can we support that customer base? And I think that's where the ecosystem partners like Comtrey software really come into play. We can then put, add the monitoring, add the infrastructure management, add the application awareness, tie them together with Citrix and do all these sort of fun things that are going to help those partners to then, you know, add even more value to their customers. Simon Taylor, president of Comtrey software. Appreciate you joining us here on theCUBE. Expect to see you back in the Boston area. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix.NEXT 2016 in Vienna, Austria. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks.