 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. We're back, I'm Stu Miniman here with Justin Warren and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE live from Las Vegas at VMworld 2017. Always excited when we get to talk to one of the end users at the show. Joe Cowan, first time on theCUBE, is a systems engineer with Carlyle Interconnect Technology. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So Joe, software might be eating the world, but eventually, things live places and one of the things that connects it all together is the cabling and plant and something. I've spent many years in my career dealing with those sort of things. It's not all wireless and things like that. So tell us a little bit about Carlyle, the organization itself and your role there. Sure, what I do, I'm an IT systems engineer and the company as itself creates power and data cabling. So anything from commercial to military applications, airlines, vehicles, heads up displays, anything that requires special adapters, cables and end connectors, that's what my company makes. Wow. You had nothing to do with the new MacBook Pros though, right? I would not. Yeah, the dongles and everything. Your role at the company, what's your purview, your team and how much stuff do you manage? Sure. Well, because my company has grown through acquisitions, every site has their own intelligence for IT. So what we've done at the corporate level is try to bring that together. So my role as a systems engineer is to find those solutions, develop those solutions, document, package and then turn over to the sites to execute. So my role is to make sure that compliance is met, security is maintained and that the execution of those products and applications are actually deployed properly. Yeah, I mean something, anybody that's dealing with kind of mergers and acquisitions, it's like, oh my gosh, what did I get this time? Is it, oh, that's something easy for me to change or oh, hey, they're doing something cool that we never thought about. How's that typically go for your environment? Do some of the acquiring companies kind of push back on kind of the new oversight? So it is very interesting. So whenever an acquisition is done, we are very excited to find out who they have, what are they doing? And we do have standards at a corporate level but those standards can also be changed if they're doing something better than we are. We didn't think of that. That's a great idea. Let's all do that. And so my job is to assess all of that, look at it saying that is a great idea. Let's redo what we've standardized and let's do this instead because it's not only better, they're using it better, they've actually documented it better and we adopted across the board. So acquisitions become very exciting to what they're doing. Joe, why don't you walk us through your current infrastructure, your user of I guess we'll call it hyper-converged infrastructure. Maybe you weren't looking for HCI when you looked out but I'm curious, kind of give us what led you down that decision tree. How do we get from there to here? Yeah, was there something wrong before or what was going on? Well that's just it. You find yourself in a position and our position was the fact that we had an opportunity. We were ready to renew some legacy support on equipment we had across the board and that was a great stopping point because now we're at a budgetary moment where we can say we're at a great spot to where this is now legacy and depreciated. Do we need to do something else or should we continue with what we're doing? It was a great decision point. So our decision after evaluating the products that were out there and the ability to turn a vertical subject matter expert as storage controllers go and storage appliances, well look, sometimes those are very specific. You have to be an SME to really get in, carve it up, pass it out and make it available. Well we wanted a product that didn't hone us into a single set of people. We chose a product that was easily deployable. We can train up very quickly. All of our system admins actually maintain it, use it for backups, deploy, carve it up and it turns our subject matter experts across the board. So we didn't have to have all these verticals in our company of three people know that, two people know that. We were able to allow more people to easily understand and use it without having heavy training. Yeah, one of the things that a lot of the hyper-converged vendors will do and in fact IT vendors in general is that they focus on cost savings, particularly around things like operational simplicity gives you operational savings. But for this kind of situation, it sounds more like you've actually retasked your staff to be doing different things. Maybe you could tell us a bit more about what you're actually doing now that you weren't doing before or perhaps doing more of. We were doing a lot more of. So when it came to deploying something we needed to allocate more storage, get more storage, expand more dynamically and quickly on demand. That was the reason we chose the products that we did is because now each person can actually look into the product that we're using, assess what's going on and quickly decide what's going to happen next. So one of the things that was very important is that we ask all the people that work at the site, because remember we grew through acquisitions, how does your site do business? So if they didn't understand how their division or site was doing business, how are you making these technologies choices? We can't just be reactive, you actually have to go learn how we're doing it so we can provide the service. So instead of saying, hey, we need this, no problem, we're flexible, here you go, that wasn't the model, especially financially, to stay in because that's too reactive. So getting in and having more meetings from the operator up to the operation CEO to actually find out how are we conducting business? Let me help you with these pieces, we can do better. And that's where our technology went. Yeah, Joe, so I want to go back to that decision that you made. Did you have some idea in your head that it was going to be HCI or were you just kind of looking out at what the options were? What was the decision tree? And don't keep us in any suspense, what did you actually end up buying? You know? So the decision tree was, what were we going to choose to do next? Was it viable to stay in our current storage array? And so after we looked at many products and many meetings, we did decide on Nutanix. And the reason why we did that is again, we can turn subject-matic experts and divide that out because it's more easily understandable for more admins to operate in that zone. And so when you made that decision, were you intending that you would then retask people and that's what drove it? Absolutely. Yeah, so that's a really different kind of role for people who would be used to be doing, I'm a storage admin, that's what I do. And now you want me to go and do these other things. Can you talk to us about how did you manage that change? Were people embracing that change and ran towards it or did you have to convince some naysayers? Well, we got to see people's personalities come out. And so people that were very accepting like, cool, new things, oh, the great yes. And when they actually got into the product, they thought it was going to be really complicated. And when we showed them, it's not. When you present that storage to VMware, there you go, it's just a couple of clicks and you're done. When you actually want to upgrade ESXi, it's one click and you're done. And they're like, that sounds too simple. And the other ones that just didn't want to, they're fine with what they're doing, it made it easy to document it, to actually pass it over because it is very simply laid out the way Nutanix does it. All right. Joe, we've been tracking Nutanix for quite a while. We were at the .next conference actually and Nutanix positioned themselves as an enterprise cloud company. I'm curious, does Carlisle have, do you have a cloud strategy? How does Nutanix fit into that discussion? What do you think of all the buzzwords that people throw around? Sure, because we have all these different sites, it was great to have a remote office, business office set block of Nutanix, but we do have a private cloud. And in that private cloud, it made it very easy, not only to do offsite replication, but it also became our DR. And so it made it very simple to capture the block level snapshots very quickly, import them off to our private cloud, which we have a huge stack of Nutanix. So with some of the announcements at the show today, VMware on AWS is a theme. So are you VMware based on the Nutanix? Yes, we are. Yeah, so are you looking to use something like VMware on AWS to extend outside your private cloud? That's a great question, because not every site fits the bill. Okay, so we do have certain sites that are even smaller. Where do we put their stuff? Well, they don't have a closet. Well, it doesn't feasible to send them a block. So using that service is exactly what I will be suggesting for these smaller sites because they need their data. And everything going to cloud is only as good as your internet connectivity. If that should halt, falter, jitter, your production line stops, that's a problem. That's one of the main reasons why you still have on-prem private cloud as compared to someone else managing it, which is total cloud. Yeah, okay. Joe, talk to us a little bit about your application portfolio, how you manage that? Did switching over to Nutanix change anything? We talk about older applications, I don't know what you're doing with anything that you'd call cloud native, but I'd like to understand from an application standpoint what you're doing. Well, that's a great thing, it didn't. So we were able to change our infrastructure in seamless changeover, if you will, from one hardware back end to another, and they saw nothing, which is great. The whole point is, is IT doing its job? Well, do you notice anything we're doing? No, then we're doing our job. Excellent. Do you get any credit though? When everything just works, it's like plumbing, it's brilliant until it breaks, and you just assume that it's there. How do you actually show visibility and show that we're doing a great job? Reward us, give us more stuff. That's the responsibility of my leadership. So it's for them to see, but do I go around tuning my horn? No, we all did it. So whenever I refer to IT, it's never I, it's we, IT did it. We did it, and so everyone obviously has to have the credit because we're all doing the same effort. Joe, I'm curious, you're pretty thoughtful, you've got a corporate strategy. When you implement a Nutanix, if you look back, do you have metrics, or metrics, or sometimes we call hero numbers that say, right, here's where this much more efficient, or heck, I've got this stack of projects on the side that never got done. I talked to one Nutanix customer once, he's like, yeah, you know that two-year-old security project that I kept kicking down the road? He's like, now I did it. So what can you kind of markedly go to and whether it's a metric or new projects that you've gotten to do? Sure, not only were we able to expand very quickly, especially with storage is concerned, so new projects come on that require terabytes of space. How do we dynamically grow that immediately? So another way we were able to do that was also backups and DR. So to actually have backups and DR at a certain level and get them off-site replicated, we actually were able to get rid of our tape backups. So that was another thing, do we want to renew this old legacy storage method for something that's faster, more dynamic? We don't have to put it on tape, we just ship it off-site via our connection to our private cloud. And so we were able to do that, saving quite a bit of money. And because remember, we grew through acquisition, everybody had their own backup strategy. Everyone had all these different products. We're like, we're going to change all that, get rid of that and get rid of your tape drives. Everybody's like, thank you, thank you very much. And I felt really good, I'm like, well, I'm glad you like it because it's better. It sounds like you've built a really a strategic resource for your organization really, and being able to do M&A very, very well. And having the ability to absorb new ideas and then roll them out across the board. Has that resulted in an increase in M&A activity? Because, well, actually we're good at this so we can go and do more things because the risk of the acquisition not working very well, well, not being implemented very well is so much lower. Well, the idea that the work will never stop coming. But it did provide us more time. It gave us more elbow room to move around, especially once we actually moved everything into it, our budget actually shrank because we didn't have to buy all these different facets to go along with it. So Nutanix allowed us to do that. Okay. All right, so Joe, you talk to your VMware customer, your Nutanix customer, sure there's more in the stack of your private cloud. Question I have for you is, what's on your list of your wish list? What would make your life even easier? I mean, of course, lower prices, that kind of stuff is a given, but what's on your roadmap that you'd like to see from the ecosystem? You know, I'd like to see certain things come together. Many of the products, especially that are showing here, are showing a lot of overlap. Where do I find my information easily? Some products aren't as easy as others. That's why there's vendors saying, look, we can bolt onto that, we can make it easier for you. So there's a few facets of performance, a few facets of tracking and logging and aggregation. How do we put more of that data together? And that's what's happening. I like to see all those products start overlapping APIs, saying we can provide you that information. That's what makes it so wonderful to come to VMworld and see all the vendors products because you try to Google for what you need, you're going to be lost. You need a little bit of help, but to be able to come here and see what's going on here, you actually get these little mini conferences, if you will. Every 15 minutes, you can have a new conversation about, you know what, that fills my need, that fills the hole I was looking for. Has there been any sort of standout vendor or someone that you didn't know about that you've seen here at the show and that's impressed you? Now the AWS one, that was impressive because I didn't know that was going to come to fruition. I didn't know when it was going to be launched. So it's great that that was happening. There's a few other companies, and forgive me, I forget their names, but the way they bolted on to VMware to actually show you stats, what are people doing, especially in VDI instances, how do you see somebody YouTubing and they're cutting down the bandwidth, how do you find that one person, that one key thing that's killing it for everybody? Now there's software to see that. Awesome. Joe, I want to give you the final word. What brings you back to a show like VMworld? You've been here a couple of times. What's your favorite things? What do you, what really gets you going? Putting all the vendors together. Having the huge room where you can walk, talk, get the paperwork, get contacts, set up proof of concepts within a few minutes, and go to the next one, that's valuable to me. Getting the information, if you don't know, then you're lost. All right, well Joe Cowan, really appreciate you joining us. So much information. Justin Warren and I'm Stu Miniman. We're going to be back with more coverage here as we're getting towards the end of day two of three of theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017. Thanks so much. You're watching theCUBE.