 Live from Vienna, Austria, it's theCUBE. Covering .next Europe 2016, brought to you by Nutanix. Here's your hoes, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE. Happy to welcome to the program a first-time guest, Nigel Henderson, who's the Chief Operating Officer of UCS Solutions, which is a service provider based in South Africa. Nigel, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much, thanks so much. All right, can you tell us a little bit about your role at UCS, how long you've been there, and maybe a thumbnail on the company itself? Sure. Well, I've been there, believe it or not, 10 years. And the company is really around providing retail solutions, SAP retail solutions to our customers. We provide it through a leverage platform that's both people, process, and technology. We use the Nutanix product on our leverage environment. And I think we are one of the largest single English-speaking SAP service providers in the world. So we have about 270-odd consultants who work on SAP retail. Wow, great. So we've been watching in our communities the transformation of SAP solutions as to what lives in the cloud, what lives in various hosting environments, definitely one that has been of real interest before we get into some of that. Just sketch out for the company itself, how old's the company, how many locations, any number of data centers or footprint or whatever metrics you have. So we are primarily focused in South Africa. However, we've got a footprint in the Middle East and then also the United Kingdom. So we're focusing on the UK market quite extensively now in the tier two retail market. We've been around in various forms, certainly since 1998, and it's really the largest provider to you on retail in the South African market. And we do a lot of work, believe it or not, for Walmart, because they would. And when you look at the mix of your business, I think service providers, it used to be kind of, there's hosting, there's Kolo, there's managed services. You know, what's the mix of services that you offer at UCS? Yeah, so we have a managed platform which we then sell to our customers. So that's really, I suppose you call it a cloud, which we've been running for about eight years. And your customers consume it as a service? Absolutely, customers consume it as a service. Whatever you call it, they don't care about what it's built or a little bit where it is, but yeah. And we do it from desktop services all the way to the host environments. And it's really private cloud for them, hybrids, I suppose, on our platform, but a dedicated area to their particular needs that they need. Okay, and since you mentioned SAP, I'm curious, do you commit to get Virtustream then as a company that, EMC, now Dell EMC, acquired for over a billion dollars? SAP was a big focus of what they do. I'm not familiar with that company, but we really just do mainly the SAP implementation, which is very customized solutions, yeah. Sure. You've been around, been with the company for a long before Nutanix came on board. Maybe can you give us what led you to look at Nutanix? When we're talking about service providers, they have very particular needs and tend to build some of the stack themselves. So what led you down the path of looking at a solution like Nutanix? So Nutanix, we did a lot of research on it because again, retail is 24 by 7, 365, you can't go down. And we want to make sure we had the right product. And the whole hyper-converged technology was something that was really interested us. And that's the reason why we did all the testing and we did the benchmarking based on performance and we then selected Nutanix. And we've really have found that it takes away the requirement for your storage, having a separate storage person and then a separate person who does the provisioning of services, you can integrate that into one single team or single platform. And we then went down the road of Nutanix. What does that mean operationally for, did it change roles, change skillset, change headcount? What was the impact of looking at Nutanix? So the Nutanix plus you also got Prism, which is on top of it, which is really a very easy way to provision and manage the whole environment. Which meant that your skills requirement was not really having to be varied and also of a high level. And we then decided that we had to start scaling down our existing environment and then scaling up the new environment. And you've got to make sure your business is all around people. You've got to make sure because the right people, the right technologies. And you couldn't then say to them, oh, don't worry, in three or four years time, everything's going to be moved over to Nutanix. So we had to start that migration of skills into that new space. And at the same time, ramping down the old environments, but keeping those people who are relevant in their particular skills, but ramping them up in the new skills. Can you have some color? How did that go? I mean, we just say, I know you actually got to interview Dr. Art Langer, who was on our program right before you. And just the whole dynamic of trying new things, doing it differently can be challenging. People will push back against change. So how did that training go? Anything that you've learned going through it that you'd want to say, hey, you might want to think about this. What would you tell your peers about the skillset, the operational changes? I mean, there was really interesting discussions around digital transformation, but really hard you get those skills on board. You've got to take people on the journey. I think that's the main thing is getting people involved right up front into what you want them to achieve. And not saying that you're going to get rid of individuals, you want them to make sure they're on a road or a path to achieve an end goal. And I think that whole digital transformation is something that a company has to embrace. And it goes around innovation as well. If you don't put innovation together with that and let the people come up with innovative ideas and then take them down the path of whatever that's going to be. And this particular Nutanix idea and concept came from a cloud executive. He did some research and he's the one who drove it. And it's been phenomenal in the actual uptake and the amount of I suppose saving in people and what we've been able to achieve in the business. And what's the impact on your end users? You said the retail is no stranger to digital transformation, definitely, an industry that's going a lot of change there. What, how are you able to help your customers more with digital transformation? What is the impact of yourselves? So that's a great question because when you look at retailers, they turn a penny over 20 times. They got a very small margin which they work on and they squeeze us for every little bit. So it enabled us then to start looking at new technologies, new ways to drive down the overall business. And I think that's where we were able to start pushing down the costs and then passing that through to the customers. And I said to Dr. Lange too that the challenge you had is that you've got to start cannibalizing your own market. You've got to realize that if you can take a 50% saving to your customers and reduce your revenue but making sure that they're happy, you need to do that. And that's what we did and then you've got a customer for life, I believe. Yeah, on the disruption part, the old joke is you can either set the menu or be on it. Absolutely, yeah, that's very true, very true. So your customers, there's the kind of the, we understand, especially service providers in general, margins can be tight, you need to be able to pass those through retail, a really tight on thing. And anything else, how does this help you with kind of from an agility standpoint? What is your internal change processes or does that speeding up over time? I think that that's very relevant because the normal traditional way of allocating services could take you anything up to three weeks by the time you've gone through your change control process. And what this does do, especially with interfaces to stop provisioning services a lot quicker, long as you've got the capacity there, you can allocate it. But I think the real kicker and the benefit to the business is around high availability and disaster recovery, I suppose you can't really say is that anymore because you've got to have systems which you can automatically restore immediately. And that's what Nutanix also does for you. You can do a single system recovery in an off-site location within seconds. And that's really differentiated for the customers because now they can't have downtime and they're not going to get any downtime. So that's where they really benefit from that process. I believe you said when we were getting ready for this that you were the first deployment of Nutanix in the African theater, correct? So talk to me a little bit about, do you buy direct from Nutanix? Do you have a channel partner? How is service support of Nutanix solution? Have you seen them over the last two years? So we were definitely the first in South Africa and I think we were speaking to one of the gentlemen yesterday, he was flying out from the UK before they had a South African office. And we were then, after doing all our due diligence, we decided to go for Nutanix. And I must say the whole interaction, the way they've engaged with us, they've allowed us to go through the process of testing. They were quite aggressive on the original pricing to get a footprint in. And then they've utilized us too as a reference site. So a lot of the banks and the insurance companies have come to us and said, how's it going? And certainly from our perspective, we've had tremendous benefit from utilizing Nutanix and they've started embarking on that roadmap. But their support has been great. We had some issues on performance. We got the teams involved from overseas and local and we were able to address them very quickly. Over the last two years, product change has changed greatly. How do you keep up with the change that they're driving and what are they doing good? What more would you like to see from them going forward? I don't think you could tell them to innovate any faster than they currently are innovating. So it's really great. Is that because you can't adopt it faster or because they're just doing enough in your mind? I think they're doing enough without disrupting the ability to get a quality product out. Of course we'd like everything, be everything to everyone. And we then could change a lot of the other technologies. But I think that'll come over time. But they certainly are innovating and Acropolis is a prime example. Acropolis is now your single app advisor which you can start integrating into many of the other products. And that's made a significant difference and saving to us also by you take VMware can be replaced over time with Acropolis. So there's some great innovation which we've seen now in the conference at the conference. And I think if they can just deliver on those plus the networking component, it's going to make a huge difference to our lives. Okay. And in your environment, what percentage of your applications run on Nutanix? Yeah. Maybe start there. So is Nutanix the only thing you have or do you still have other pockets of infrastructure? Now we do have, of course, because we are running SAP workloads, there's a lot of other products which we have in the environment. But Nutanix is the largest portfolio with our Linux and the Microsoft space that we run AIX and Unix currently with P-Series. But there's a lot of discussion with Nutanix to see how we can get those workloads in place. And the first we are just implementing the flash with the flash on the hardware which is going to make a difference in performance. And if that benchmarks correctly, we can move a lot more workloads across. Yeah. Excellent. And you mentioned you're using Prism today, correct? Yes. Most service fighters have their own software that they use to manage that environment. You're just tying it with APIs or you're using two different things. How does management of your entire environment work? So that's always a boner contention as to how we, what is there going to be that single plane of glass? What are you going to use for the environment? So we've got different types of environments which we manage, but Prism is used primarily for the Nutanix space. And I think that what they're again doing is able to monitor other platforms is going to by default create a platform for us to be able to have a single pane of glass into the various environments in our space. So we don't really have a specific strategy yet. I would like to work extensively now with Nutanix to see how we can incorporate the whole cloud management and structure into our business because I think that's going to differentiate us in the market as to how we can orchestrate everything and have a single view into the environment. So Nigel, one of the questions I usually ask as service provider is about Amazon. You're in the retail space. So I have to ask, are all of your customers all, what's their relationship with Amazon these days? So as indicated on Nutanix, I think they are our competition indirectly because they are service providers and they have been talking to us as well. And I think what they're going to be used in our space is to make sure that we can maybe burst into their space or we can have access into the environment for disaster recovery, whatever it might be. But I think where you've got dedicated workloads and you have customers who are really wanting to keep their data separate. I don't know if that's necessarily going to be the right environment for the customers right now in the longer term possibly, but I think the biggest way we can drive that is on cost. If we can try and be cost effective and make sure we deliver a really good service, we can still complete with Amazon's the world. I like to believe that. I think because they're certainly making a takeover in a lot of the spaces. But we haven't had any uptake, believe it or not, in our particular spaces yet. Well, the reason I set it up is if I'm a retailer, I've talked to plenty of retailers. I mean, Dick Walmart for example. Walmart heavily involved in what they're doing. No way are they ever going to do any service on Amazon. So I said, you're actually in a sector of the marketplace that I think no one is Amazon proof, but that they have it in their own vested interests not to support Amazon because of the .com piece that they have. Do you think that's definitely true? I agree with you, but you never know because over time don't be complacent and that comes to digital disruption is that if they do decide to go, they need to have a counter and make sure that you can deliver those services comprehensively. I think the biggest benefit we have is that we go right down the value chain and across the stack in the sense that if you're going to start ticking all the boxes around quality of service, 24 by seven, response times, availability, yes, Amazon offers those. But when you do all of those together, there could be some pricing pressures I think coming from Amazon. So we'll keep to aim that and keep our customers happy on service. So you mentioned before. I also understand the industry, yeah, so. Any nuggets that you had from the panel discussion either for Dr. Langer or questions from the audience that we can give us kind of a final word for the interview? I think it's around the digital disruption in the sense that it's coming in every industry and I think we need to just be aware of that and make sure that we'd never get complacent to our business and always trying to drive it to new levels and exactly what we're going to do today is not going to be what we're going to do tomorrow. So let's be aware of it and drive the solutions and hopefully through new techniques. Nigel Henderson with UCS Solutions. Thanks so much for sharing with us what's happening in your environment. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE.