 Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT Nutanix. We are here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Karen Openshaw. She is the head of engineering at Zen Internet and Justin Fielder, the CTO at Zen Internet. Thank you both so much for your first timers on theCUBE. So welcome, we're really excited to have you. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about Zen Internet, who you are, what you're all about. Yeah, sure. So Zen is a UK based, we're up in near Manchester, managed service provider. We turned over this year about 76 million pounds, which is a great achievement for us. That's about the double digit growth we've had for the last few years. So we're really starting to motor as a business. We employ about 550 people. We have about 150,000 customers split across retail, indirect, so we have a very big channel business. We have a wholesale business, where we sell our infrastructure that then other people productise and put into solutions for their customers. And then we have a corporate business, which is where Nutanix really comes in. So we offer managed services, both in networking, hosting the value added services that are required to make all that safe and secure and a solution for a corporate. Great. So, managed service provider, your company's been around for quite a while. Predates when everyone was talking about cloud. Maybe give us kind of the update today as to where you really see yourself fitting, what differentiates your company in the marketplace. So I suppose, I mean Karen can add sort of what her team does, but I suppose that the big difference is, Zen is a very people first company. So Richard Tang, our founder, he founded the company nearly 25 years ago. He's stated publicly he's never going to sell it, that it's a very, very people orientated company, which of course has great affinity to Nutanix's own people first values. And fundamentally, we believe that we always want to do the right thing for the customer, even if that is difficult. So I don't know whether you want to say about, how you pick up some of the hardness about keeping up with customers. Yeah, so we have customers that come to us asking for things that we don't necessarily sell at the time. And we put quite a lot of effort into adapting our products at the time to deliver them what they need. Some of those challenging conversations can be about making sure the customer is getting the right product for what they want. So understanding what they need, making sure that we can support them, not only in taking that product, but coming on to the product in the first place. And that's what we use a lot about Nutanix infrastructure for. Yes, great, Karen, maybe Kenya, dig us in a little bit. What does Nutanix enable for your business that ultimately then has an impact on your ultimate end user? It's done two things for us. So the first is our IT operations. So we've been on a journey, I guess, over the last three, four years, consolidating all our legacy and physical team onto virtual services. We've used Nutanix to do that. So we've collated all of our services. We've got about 90% of all our legacy services on that IT infrastructure now. So operationally, it saves us a lot of time, effort, cost, et cetera, much more reliable as well. But conversely to that, we also use it for our products offerings as well. So we used to be managed hosting where a customer would come give us a spec and we'd go and build a physical server, host that in our data center, host their applications on there, support them with that. We don't really do that anymore. We now use Nutanix as our hosting environment. So we've reduced our environmental footprint. We've reduced the amount of space that we need in a data center and the power that we put through there. Again, operating that is easier for us because we can consolidate where the skills are from in terms of both IT ops and in terms of the infrastructure for the managed services as well. One of the things that you said, Justin, is that you are a very people-first company and that really fits in well with the culture at Nutanix. Can you riff on that a little bit and just describe what it is to be working so closely with a company like Nutanix and how important it is that your cultures mesh? Yeah, sure. I mean, Nutanix has been part of Zen for many, many years and we work in the industry. I've worked in this industry for 25 years and nothing stands still. Literally nothing stands still. And therefore, whatever you thought was a good idea last year probably is now the worst possible idea because there's some great new idea. And I think it's that pace of change and so what we've really found with Nutanix is as they've got to know us and we've got to know them and they can see that we're starting to really be able to take some solutions to the market that really resonate. The what they've done is they've literally embedded their people in our company. So we have our systems engineers, our account managers, they come up to our offices, they sit down, they understand our people, they understand where we're trying to go, they understand our propositions. And this is a journey for Nutanix. I mean, Nutanix in the MSP land is not really where they started. They started, like Karen just said, like we use them, that's actually where we started was, oh my God, I've got a thousand server and this is just too much. Yeah, it's too much hassle to try and segment it yourself. And it's that sort of hypervisor of hypervisors of hypervisors type approach. It just makes it easier, but conversely, it's therefore really important that you work out how you take that value proposition to a customer. Because if you can't explain it, because it's so easy, how do they know whether this is going to solve their problems? So that's been a fantastic part of Nutanix. It's really the Nutanix team feel like the Zen team and they're saying that they also feel the same. So, you know, things like nothing ever goes 100% right, but it's always, you know, who's cool, they're always, because you've got that personal relationship and that's really important to us. It's more than that. So what we've found with Nutanix guys is that they'll help us fix problems that aren't necessarily Nutanix problems as well. So that's something we don't get from any other of our suppliers. It's normally, no, that's nothing to do with me. You need to phone someone else to get support on that. Nutanix guys will, they'll bring in their own experts on that particular combo and they'll support us through that. So, it's good experience. Speak very much to the partnership that you're saying. They're not just a supplier of a product to you. When I talk to the customer base, one of the biggest challenges any company has these days is really understanding their application portfolio. What needs to change? What needs to stay the same? You know, Microsoft pushing everybody to Office 365. You know, changed a lot of companies out there. What do I satisfy? What do I put in managed service provider? What do I just build natively in the public cloud? Can you bring us through kind of what you're seeing at your customer base and where that does interact with the journey that Nutanix is bringing people on? Yeah, I mean, maybe I can say that. All of our customers are on a journey and they need help. They seriously need help for exactly that reason that you've said. I mean, this is my job to understand this stuff. That's what a CTO of an MSP is required to do. The problem is, I don't know, if you're a CIO of, we're really good in construction. You can revolutionise the construction industry by the application of IT, particularly during the sale cycle, you know, the ability to VR walk through, you know, argument or augmented reality, all of that sort of really cool stuff. And then you've got a thousand subcontractors that you're trying to manage from an IT perspective. And that juxtaposition of the problem is really problematic, I think for a lot of people. And so what we've done is we said, the first step you can do is just take what you've got and get rid of the management overhead. That's the easiest, simplest straightforward. And some of the Nutanix, the sort of lift and shift capability that they've got that they will go and inspect a workload somewhere else. They will work out what resources are required for it. They will pick it up and they will move it. And we've had some fantastic success of our customers. There are gracious advocates who just say, oh my God, it just happened. One day it was over there, the next day it was over there. And then you can start to analyse what's happening. And that's where we can really add value because this is not as simple as just an application because it's about your security posture, it's about your DR requirements, it's about what your appetite for risk versus reward versus cost. And that's really hard to do when you don't have the simple thing which is there, which is, oh, that piece of tin cost me $10,000. And therefore you can work that out yourself. So I think the key to all of this is giving tools to the end users. So the CIO in that company and their IT team so that they can make those choices in collaboration with an MSP like us. And that goes back to what you were saying. It's about when we hit problems, we might not even know there's a problem before we've hit it and therefore having Nutanix deeply embedded within us is really important to them being able to go back to the customer. And sometimes to the customer you actually have to go, what are you doing? That isn't going to work in the long term. And as you said, you also have to provide the value so that the customer understands what they're actually getting to. In terms of customers future needs, we are living in this multi-cloud world. How are, how do you describe the customer mindset and how are you coming in with solutions that work for the customer? And then having to break the news of them on occasion that what on earth are you trying to do here? This is not going to work. Yeah, we have a few interesting, it's sort of like, okay, are you going or am I going to tell them? You know, as you can tell, I always think, Karen, I'll be going. He doesn't really. I think it's, and this is where I think we work really well. You know, it is about what is going on. Karen, work with your engineering teams. Try and understand deeply actually what is going on. Why is it not a good idea to do that? And that's the thing. Once you're going to explain why, I'll go, thank God for that. Finally, someone's telling me why what I'm trying to achieve isn't the best way to do it. Because I think a lot of people just sort of, it's a bit buzzwordy and they just think that they need to do this. And it's, I mean, talk about the journey we've been through, just sort of how do we move stuff onto there? What's that, three years? I've given you- Yeah, it's three, four years, no. You know, it's a huge amount of work. Can you- Karen, any lessons learned maybe that you might be able to say there? You could do probably about 50 years. Are there any that I could repeat here? Less practices. I think one of the biggest challenges is the re-skilling of your teams. So, getting everybody, first of all, to understand this bright new future that you're moving into and then getting them trained upon it. Training is not just going and sitting in a classroom. It's going and working on this thing and seeing problems occur and understanding how to fix them. That's the biggest problem that we probably went through. I guess we want our customers to not have that, though. So we want them to give us their workloads and their IT and we'll sort that for them. And that's where we want to take it. I think in the future, helping them understand what they can do with cloud. So we don't just do private cloud, we do public cloud as well. So we can introduce opportunities and concepts from a public cloud perspective as well. AWS is a really good one. And we are looking at all the providers as well. So we help customers solve their problems, whatever that problem is. One of the things that's so salient about Zen Internet is that it has a really strong culture. You said it's a people-first culture, but it's also a very diverse culture. Bringing in multiple perspectives, women in technology, LGBTQ, other races. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to work at a diverse company and how it changes how you think about problems and go about solving them? Yeah, I guess, that's a really good question. I guess working in a company, we're not as diverse as we'd like to be. We're not where we're at in terms of balancing out the number of women in the tech roles in particular and the diverse tech. But if we give everybody a voice, which is the main thing, then we will see a more wide-ranging set of inputs there. So developing our teams, high-performing teams, you need that mixture of input there. Not just about women, by the way. It's about, we have a Pride at Zen network, for example, where we try to ensure that diversity and diverse people feel included in what we do as a business as well and have an opportunity to have an input into that. So where does it add for us? I guess people just think differently when they're from different cultural backgrounds, they're from different nationalities, different races, I guess, different sexuality, different gender. They've all got different life experiences. So solving problems is probably the main thing that you get the benefit from there. This industry is full of people trying to solve problems and bringing diverse teams, not just about women in tech, because we saw three women speaking this morning at the keynote, which was fantastic to see. But it is about the diversity as well. So innovation is the key there, I guess. And I think it's not just about your staff. If you've got the ability to think differently, that applies throughout the entire ecosystem. And you can take a differing view. So we work very closely with the TM Forum because that's sort of our industry and it's the whole application stack about how you approach that. And the TM Forum have really done some fantastic research that now proves that the output is different if you have a diverse input. And that, I think, for our customers is really different, is really important, because then it's different. We're not one of the big guys. We're not a BT. We're not a Deutsche Telecom. We're not one of these people. We think differently. We act differently. We behave differently. We have a different approach. And the people first, I mean, that doesn't mean we're just here for a good fun time. We're here to drive this business forward, to generate profitability that we can reverse back in the business to enable us to get on to bigger and greater things. And we've got a five-year plan, which will see us at least double revenues quite happily. And we're very confident now that we can execute that assuming we can get that diversity in the business. And it's a huge challenge. It's how do you reach out to those people? How do you use the right language? How do you overcome unconscious bias? You know, that's a massive thing. And it's great. Again, Nutanix just resonates with us. Just some of the little stickers around they are diverse. They've got different representations of people. And it shows that someone has thought about that and that will resonate. And it's always the classic thing that, you know, you do something wrong once, people will remember it forever. You do a hundred things right, people won't even notice it. And that's the type of approach. So for us, we think it's a really exciting bit. And it's something that the entire executive at Zen are absolutely focused on is getting this right because we know it will secure our future. It'll make all the difference. It'll make all the difference. Great, Justin and Karen, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dot Next from Copenhagen.