 from New Orleans, Louisiana, at theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. So you're watching theCUBE and there's 5,500 in attendance here at the Nutanix .NEXT Conference. Getting ready for a big party this evening at Mardi Gras World, getting flavor for the local cuisine. And one of the things we always love at the show is to really be able to dig in with the practitioners. Happy to welcome to the program, the first-time guest, Mike Spencer, Vice President of Hosting and Managed Services at ICF. Olson, thanks so much for joining us. Well, thank you very much for having me. It's been a great event so far. All right. Very inspiring keynote speech this morning. Awesome. So, Mike, first of all, your first time here at .NEXT, tell us what brought you here and a little bit of background of yourself and your organization. Yep, so one of the reasons why we came here is my team is up for an award. We've been a user of the Nutanix platform for about three and a half years, and it's done a lot to help us in our position in the marketplace. And so part of this is giving a little bit back and some of it's coming to hear about what's next. So actually, can you tell us what do these, what does this award mean to you, your team, and everything like that? Some people, there's vendor awards, there's show awards, and the like, what's that like? Well, I think my team is really excited to have some sort of external validation that the last three and a half for four years that we've been working towards this journey towards DevOps and infrastructure as code that somebody externally is starting to recognize that what we've done is great, and appreciating that work. All right, so Keith and I, I think are excited to dig in. We hear things like DevOps and infrastructure as code, something we've been documenting, talked to a lot of customers about kind of digital transformation. Can you tell a little bit of the story? Bring us back, what was the challenge, what did your organization look like, and walk us through what you did? Yeah, so I think initially, very traditional IT team, really managing things on a per server basis, on a per client basis, and really needing that guy there to click next or to pay attention to a server, really kind of that old adage of treating all of our servers like a pet versus more like cattle, which is what we are today, and the efficiency around it. So we had some issues around stability, performance, availability, those types of things that really drove us to take a different look at the way we were doing things. And so that's kind of what kicked us off on the journey to start looking at, how do we totally rethink this whole space and bring innovation in a space that historically doesn't have a ton of innovation? So let's talk about that innovation because the managed hosting services, you buy commodity hardware as cheap as possible, you let it run as long as possible. When I think of Nutanix, I don't think commodity, help bring the story together for us. Yeah, so as architecturally as we looked at everything that we were doing, one of the unique things that we did is we decided to look at our infrastructure as more of a service-based architecture, which is very much more of a software development look in the world versus an infrastructure look. And some of the key tenants in that space are around driving for simplicity in your environment. And the Nutanix platform helped us eliminate a lot of the specialties that we needed in our area, right? So we are very much a commodity type person when it comes to servers, right? The name on the front of the server wasn't really important, but what was really important for us and what Nutanix brought to the table was they merged together all of the pieces in the server part of the stack down to the network stack. We no longer had to deal with things like storage, I didn't need to have SMEs on staff that were specialists in that space. We helped to simplify our networks. It helped us manage things through a single pane of glass, right? And we did it all in a very cost-effective way. So it was, for us, it really helped us take that 25% of our labor in that space and refocus about 25% of it into really driving forward with the infrastructure as code and DevOps methodologies. Mike, what did this mean for your business? Funny, I look at your website, it's a customer experience agency built to help you through this digital transformation. It's like, wow, it's like what we're talking about at this kind of show. So talk us, what does that mean to your company and ultimately your end users? So ICF Olson is the marketing services wing of ICF, our parent company, which is a large consulting wing, but from a customer experience agency standpoint, we span everywhere from PR, brand, all the way to the end of the year and all the way down the stack, including managed services and hosting, right? A lot of our clients say, hey, you know what? You guys are really good in designing this. Why don't you guys go and run it for us? And so that's really where my org comes into place is not just the hosting of something, but also the running something and working with the clients. And so it allowed us to become more of an end-to-end agency, right? It allowed our clients to focus on things more important, like how they were going to change their brand, how they were going to look at the market, how they were going to advertise. And so from a business perspective itself, one of the things that it did is it helped enable, frankly, we want a lot more business, right? Because we were willing to take these things on. We were willing to be, or we were able to repeat those types of things with a high level of success. So. How do you measure success? Success is in our space in particular, honestly, it is our clients not having to interact with us. Mm. So, yeah. We're not the sexy part of the digital ecosystem. Yeah. So modernization of data center is a critical piece of it. Clients are looking to you to basically make that invisible. The data center should be just something that they consume. As Nutanix has moved, you've been a customer for three years. As Nutanix has moved from a hardware software appliance where they're selling you the entire platform to a software only solution. What has that meant to your business? Well, so, I mean, it's allowed us to take our focus off being experts in the hardware space, right? Again, something that didn't necessarily bring value even in our private cloud. We do manage both public and private cloud, but our private cloud space, it allowed us to not have to focus any energy there. So, and really allowed our infrastructure team to become more of a software development team. So that's been a big win for us. Talk to us a little bit about the organizational dynamics, rolling out DevOps. What did that mean to your team? You say things are invisible now. Was there a adjustment in headcount or roles or retraining that you can share? Yes, yes, to all of that in its simplest form. Yeah, so a lot of people look at the implementation of DevOps being something that's kind of done to an infrastructure team, right? It's designed to make an infrastructure team look more like a software development team or to work more fluidly with a software development team. And I think those things are all true, but it also helped us transform our overall SDLC for software development. There's a lot of things, as we continue to build skill and trade out skill, right? Continue to move up the stack. We basically became middleware developers, to where now our software developers for our core products and things that we sell for our clients and support for our clients, those developers are now working on purely code and the aesthetics of things, the UX side of it, where we're much more managing the middleware component which interacts nicely with the hyper-converged platform, right, Nutanix. So, there was a shift in labor without a doubt, right? As you mature through the process, you do a lot of investment in people, right? Making sure that they're kind of keeping up with the times, understanding the new methodologies. You know, huge shifts from the methodologies that a traditional IT team would use to what a software development team uses, right? So moving, it wasn't only moving an infrastructure team into that methodology, it was also getting the business and the software development teams we worked with used to us working more like them versus more like the old IT team. So, honestly, we probably caught the software development team more off guard than we did ourselves. So, awesome. So, there's a other side of that corn. As you develop that skill, as you develop that capability, retention becomes a problem. There's a natural head count where, you know what, you don't need as many people to come in at midnight to do firmware revisions, do the low-level work, but as they skill up, look around, you know, you look at what happens in the rest of the DevOps movements where you have entire teams leaving Fortune 500s to go to another Fortune 500 to implement their DevOps. How do you encourage your team to stay? To me, it's all about culture, right? Our team can work remote, they all choose to be in the office, right? So, they enjoy each other. It's also investing in people and investing in their growth. So, it's not always about necessarily the size of a paycheck, it's also about work-life balance, the willingness of the organization to invest in their people, right? And giving them time to innovate, right? I mean, you know, when you talk to the majority of infrastructure guys or even technology guys out there, what drives them every day is not necessarily their paycheck, right? That's a side effect of good work they do. It's really the challenge, the pure problem-solving of IT. And so, we give them that opportunity to be able to innovate. All right. Mike, tell us a little bit about your Nutanix solution that you have. Sure. What you started with, how much it grew, what's not on your Nutanix today? So, private cloud, we are 100% Nutanix today. We started with a four-node environment that was really purpose-built around our analytics platforms. We were looking for some way to isolate IOPS from our production environment, more of a standard three-tier architecture. And we did some research out there. This is the same time that we're rethinking architecture of everything, really kind of looking at the way we do business. And we came across several vendors, one of them being Nutanix. It was a very young company, fairly unproven and at least our market. But their message was exactly the same message that we had developed. And so, we decided to take a chance on them. We put them in. We did some load testing between that platform and our traditional platform, and we're very pleasantly surprised to find what we found. Almost a 3X increase in disk IOPS. And so, we went live with this analytics platform and really did a lot of testing there, right? And then we kind of started the natural process after we got comfortable with it for about six months of, hey, why don't we start working through the lifecycle process and bringing in Nutanix to offset? Instead of buying a storage shelf, I can go get a Nutanix cluster that has the same amount of storage but also brings compute with it. So, once we started doing that, we started putting production workloads onto the Nutanix platform and seeing great results. We expedited our journey, and within about a year and a half had replaced all of our traditional SAN and compute platforms. So, the infrastructure guys, once they saw it in action, once the business saw the results, even the financial side of it, we were almost asked to expedite the process of moving towards Nutanix, which for us, it was great because it was less to manage. So, as you guys move to the Nutanix infrastructure, talk about the more advanced services that they've offered over the past few years, specifically the Hypervisor. How have you guys embraced AHV? So, we have in-dev. We are not running it as our primary Hypervisor right now. In our architecture, we run VMware today. I'm not probably supposed to say that here, but we run VMware. We have been looking at Acropolis. Really, the way we look at the Hypervisor is a component in our service-based architecture. We are in a position where we can replace that because it's not an important part to us. We just haven't had the cycles in our roadmap to be able to put towards the replacement of VMware yet. But it is certainly something on our roadmap and something we're marching towards because the APIs have continued to evolve on the Nutanix platform. We work quite closely with Nutanix on that. They seem to accommodate a lot of our asks. But, yeah, it really has been more of a time thing. There's so many things to code in this space right now. Yep. You've got the award, but what were you looking to really accomplish this week? Are there sessions you're looking for? Are there products you're looking to dig into for you and your team? Yep. So, I think a lot of it was about vision, right? How well does the Nutanix vision align with our vision? And like I said, from the keynote speeches this morning and some of the new services that we see coming out, I think it's done, they're doing a great job. Their head is where our head is. They're headed the same direction we are. In a lot of places where we're doing custom development, we can actually go in and say, hey, why don't we acquire this? One of the exciting announcements this morning was around Beam and the ability to do compliance across our cloud platforms, right? We run today about 50% public cloud, 50% private cloud, just depending on what the solution is that we're providing. And so it gives us that one pane of glass. Yeah. What public clouds are you using and how does that be kind of a hybrid, hybrid world that Nutanix laid out this morning fit into your vision? Well, so the right answer for me should be it shouldn't matter what cloud I'm running, but we are running Azure as well as AWS, just depending on the solution. We have partnerships on both sides, but we don't necessarily look at them as being a long running relationship because this space is changing at a very rapid pace. Who knows who the next person is that's going to stand up that we need to support. So we're very platform agnostic when we look at it. When we deploy something, it really doesn't matter if it's on private cloud, public cloud, doesn't really matter to us. It's just all building blocks that we plug in together and let code do its job. So in that model, you guys do 50% public, 50% private, Nutanix has an opinionated view of cloud. How does that impact your business and services? Nutanix's? Yeah, their vision versus the duty. Well, I think their vision is great, right? Because it is a fairly agnostic vision, right? With them being obviously wanting the private cloud side of that, but understanding that there is no 100% private cloud and 100% public cloud in today's world, right? It is all hybrid cloud environment and that certain workloads are better on-prem and certain workloads are better in the public cloud. So I think that was in total alignment with everything we do, right? Our primary job is web hosting. So we deal with geographic workloads all the time. Well, Mike Spencer, best of luck to the ICF Olson team. Thank you very much for having me. On the award this afternoon, you're a big winner in our books either way. Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. Be back with lots more.