>>from the cube studios in Palo alto in boston connecting >>with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the 2021 AWS Global public sector Partner awards. I'm your host, Natalie ehrlich. Today we'll discuss the award for the most customer obsessed mission based win for state and local government. I'm pleased to introduce our guests for today's session Todd, Carey, Global Head West Business group Cognizant and David. Sullivan chief executive officer of Elizabeth river crossings. Thank you gentlemen for joining the program. >>Thanks >>Thanks Todd. >>I'd love to start with you. How are companies thinking about cloud today in their businesses? >>Well, there's some, some really exciting developments but at the heart of a cloud is changing the way companies interact with their customers, their suppliers and the way they think about business. And at cognizant it is really a customer first customer centric approach and then we work our way back to a solution. But most of the time, cloud decisions are not really made from a cost optimization or cost take out point of view. They're made from a customer experience or a business driver point of view. And how do we make businesses better? More, more scalable, more agile, more flexible and we've really built some some really great solutions that are industry specific and we've loved working with the R. C. In this capacity. >>How about you? I'd love to get your insight. Um As well. David, what what what do you see is like the main challenges and also how next gen technologies like you know, five G. Can help alleviate in those issues. >>Um Yes. First, it, like Todd said that, you know, the customer has an expectation and that expectation is raised every day by what they experienced in every other channel they work in and shop in and whatever they're doing so, so expectations are always increasing from the customer side, responsiveness personalization. They want to see all of that in everything they do, including paying their told bill. Um, and so I think as technology has changed, you know, tolling has kind of come from technology that is really 2030 years old or older. Uh, two more of a modern influence. And today we use R. F. I. D. Tags that are embedded in things like EZ Pass. But in the future it will be, it'll be your, your mobile device or your automobile itself that that triggers a total transaction and helps us process it and making in a way that is fast, convenient and most importantly accurate. >>Yeah. Well staying with you, David, I'd love to hear how working with AWS helped modernize your systems and as well as if you could give us some insight on your tracking systems. >>Yes. So with AWS, we have been working with Cognizant. Cognizant is our tolling subcontractor. So they are responsible for providing our tolling system. And we had what I would call a typical legacy tolling system. We had to data centers, both of them located pretty close together, a primary and a redundant data center and both of them very close to flood prone areas. And in our location in the southeast corner of Virginia were very vulnerable to tropical storms and tidal flooding. So part of our concern was, you know, we're exposed all our infrastructure, all our tolling infrastructure is exposed. So as we began to pursue a cloud strategy, uh the first idea was just to lift everything out of our environment and move it to a W. S. And Cognizant pull that off in about three months, uh which is really pretty incredible and we never missed a beat. Uh You know, we did it over a three day holiday weekend, but from a business transaction standpoint it all flowed once in the cloud. We began to rethink now that we're out of these legacy hardware environments, How do we get out of the legacy application environment and embrace what the cloud enables and working closely with Cognizant who had a great vision for how this could be achieved. We were able to, you know, systematically move through and migrate to a cloud first cloud oriented uh system. And uh you know, it's given us lower cost, increased availability and most importantly for our customer service agents that deal with customers or customers that deal with the web, it's given them a better experience uh shorter call times, better information and you know, and and frankly better customer satisfaction. >>Terrific. Well, thank you for that Todd. Let's shift to you. What do you see as the next phase of this digital transformation process? >>Well, as David hidden, I think it's an important theme of cloud first. I mean most companies in our clients start with that cloud forest, cloud native mentality. But for cognizant, our cloud approach is really customer first and being able to start with the client in mind and then work our way back into a technology staff or into a scalable solution. But specifically for the coal industry, there's a lot of things that are needed around revenue, predictability and looking at potential leakages. But as we hit on already of making sure that we're really delivering a great customer experience. And so with our solution, as we expect our tolling solution to really grow, we're keeping it cloud native, we're keeping it modular in nature and integration ready. So for example, are total customers can use their own roadside solutions or hand picked some of the small back office modules that they want to use. It's always going to be purpose bill and align to our customer and we see nothing but growth in this segment. It's very exciting. >>Yeah. Terrific. Well, David, you know, now that you've actually implemented this, what do you see as the next phase? What is your vision um for the future for your business in 2021? >>Well, I think, you know, for for us moving forward, um you know, we've been in this uh as Todd said, kind of a modular approach, which is great because you can make the changes and really manage your risk while you're making them. Um so you're you're moving small things. Whereas traditionally new systems meant massive investments, long, long time implementation times and you know, all in cut overs, all of which are packed with risk. So, you know, we want to reduce our risk and the solution that we have being cloud native allows us to really incrementally and quickly, just continually to improve the system. So you know, on our forecast, we would like to have a better insight into our customers and you know, support a direct app, Annie R. C. App that would allow our customers to interact with us and give us a better view of the customer um and a better experience for the customer overall. But you know, we, our goal is to build that total transaction accurately fairly. And then if the customer has an issue to be able to treat them in a way that uh that they feel respected and and valued as a customer because we we do look at it that way. >>Yeah, Terrific. I mean obviously, you know, engagement such an important issue in this area. Now I'd like to shift gears and here a little bit more about, you know, what are some of the other applications that cognizant could provide beyond tolling and let's shift this to Todd? >>Well, David had done a little bit, there's there's a lot of when we start to focus on the customer, there's a lot of opportunity there on the front side. So mobile apps, websites, the synchronization of data, but then also the way that we support that customer interacting with that data. Things like I've er automating, call centers, being able to support that customer through the entire chain of custody. There's some new and exciting applications now that we come out and David touched on a little bit too in terms of vehicles. So the vehicles to everything type motion. That's an exciting development in this segment as well to be able to continually integrate everything that's in the customer ecosystem. So whether that's uh, the, the need to pay a bill or be able to drive a car through a gate and be able to simply not touch anything but be able to have that all the way that payment process all the way through and have clear visibility into usage and insights. And then also be able to turn all that data over to a company like er, C to make good decisions based on what they see in terms of buying patterns, consumption, etcetera. There's a lot of expansion going on in this and the greatest part about this is it's built on the AWS platform. So when we architect something in a cloud native way, we can rapidly expanded and we can really streamline the investment required to jump start any kind of innovation and best of all our customers in keeping with the best model, really only pay for the actual traffic that they use so we can keep those long term costume. >>Yeah. Well, excellent point. Thank you both gentlemen for joining our program. Really loved having you. And uh, you know, that was Todd, Cary and David. Sullivan. Excuse me. And I'm your host, Natalie or like, Thank you for watching. >>Mm hmm. Mm.

>>lie from Copenhagen, Denmark. >>It's the >>Q covering Nutanix dot Next 2019. Brought to you by >>Nutanix. Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix. Stop! Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting along side of stew minimum. Of course. We're joined by Regime Mirani. He is the CTO clad platforms at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cubans. You need >>to be here as usual. >>So you were up on the main stage talking about your guiding force. Your mission to make enterprise computing so reliable, so ubiquitous that it's invisible. >>You don't think about >>it. You don't even get a little No, I mean, look, >>if you look at any successful technology, consumer technology doesn't need to be aware of the details around it, right? I mean, take cars, even because the first introduced you probably had to understand Rick operate. There was how it all works. Remember for water in the radiator. But most people don't know how to do that today. I wouldn't know how to do that today, even though my Utah actually had to do some of those things. Um, that isn't the point. of the cars or self driving. Now the same thing should happen to computing. And we spend way too much time today just doing things that keep the light. Don't nights on. Just imagine infrastructure patching things up, grading them. I really should be something that not what idea is doing i d should be focusing on the business, delivering applications that their customers need and not so much on managing infrastructure. >>Rajiv, that one click Simplicity is so important, yet we know things are becoming even more complicated. Bring us inside a little bit that you know, you've got 14,000 customers. Guess and there's been a major, basically rewrite of a less to be able to be ready for all of the new ash cloud Native envy me obtained, you know, you name it all of these things. How do you balance getting all of this new stuff up with making sure that you keep that simplicity and don't make things for all of your customers while all the jet engines, uh, you know, >>it takes constant effort. It takes a conscious effort to make sure that things are in drifting away from our goal of being simple and to be frank. At times it has and you know, we periodically to audits off all our work floors. Make sure that as simple as you think they are and haven't drifted over time. And occasionally we do find some rail clunkers and have to go back and fix those things. What >>makes it >>different is that we start with a fairly opinionated view on how things should be done. The idea is to make it simple for 99% of the people, while still offering the all that washed options of one person power users would need them and making sure that we understand what 90% 99% of people need. And focusing on that is very important to a lot of customer focus study sort of design reviews, but also this constant going back and you're taking work feel like we m creation like provisioning of'em. When he started, it was pretty simple right then, as we started adding more and more options eyes, this thing going to use a PC I passed through isn't going to use this option. That option suddenly realized that now they're 30 things that people are feeling into provisional we have, most of which nobody cares I care about. So you go back, read I tte keep doing that again and again and again. >>So rich Eve It's one thing when you talk about living on different servers, whether it be super micro underneath or Delhi Emcee Lenovo H p e. It's >>gonna be a >>little bit different if you're talking about where you're going with H p E Green Lake with, you know, the X in AWS that you talk about when I talk to people, you know, it's like, Oh, I'm trying to use terror form and you know, But I have to write it. One way to work with Amazon. I have to write it another way. If it's, you know, azure G C P S o. You know, will Nutanix be able to keep that simplicity and bring, you know, homogeneity to thes dispersed invite? >>Absolutely. So the point is, watch a layer of abstraction right the way we are going to public cloud away we go every server winter out the way of doing things and sigh all if it starts with the hyper wiser and the story of stock and networking with three layers of abstraction. And if you have the same three components everywhere, everything we built on top of that remains exactly the same. Prison was the same on a P S. On the same. Everything looks the same. So higher level constructs like calm and so on don't have to be aware of what the actual substrate is creating a calm blueprint, whether it works on ZAY on AWS or whether Trump's on SX or whether runs on Nutanix H way. The blue blueprint remains exactly the same. Now, if you want to consume more, service is if you want to consume. So this is an Amazon, which are not available on premises. You want to use things like auto scaling groups in Ec2. Sure, you could then create blueprints that our customers we're putting in the substrate. >>So, in terms of this, you said, you start with a very opinionated place of where the customer is well, First of all, it's based on customer feedback and customer surveys. And so where were are you right now in terms of where the customer is? Are you meeting the customer now, or is the customer ahead or what? Where would you describe that? I think it >>depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at the core products, absolutely, the customers are with us. They were ready to consume. They actually drive a lot of the innovation that we're doing. We're feeding, feeding back changes that we could be doing to make things even simpler on the private cloud side that's getting there. I think we get a lot off feedback on files on on present pro on com on on Flow because those have started getting a lot of adoption in the market, and we do get a lot of feedback on them on. So our newer products that you started a war being more recently, it's a more collaborative process. There were actually working with customers directly understanding their problems on dhe, moving a roadmap forward based on that. So while it's early in terms off adoption in production, the whole process is very collaborative in those situations. So we really are very close to the customers there. >>What are some of the biggest customer problems right now that they're facing what's what's keeping them up at night and therefore keeping you up at night? >>Security is always a big one. Complexity, people skills. All those things are big problems. In fact, one of the biggest things like that was just training enough people to handle all the complexity in a data set. Is the Morrigan removed from that? The more they don't have to focus on that, the easier you make their lives. The other thing is just a lot of time to spend on routine activities which, which acquired disruption to service is right. This is something we've talked about before. Why does it Why does it require a legacy three tier system to have maintenance windows and downtime to do an upgrade? Google our has downtime. Google is never down for maintenance. Doesn't mean they're not already there waiting all the time. So how do we bring that same kind of capabilities on premises that's gonna focus our long power? >>So, Rajiv, when I'm talking to users out there, when they talk about all of the items that are out there that they need to deal with and the routine task automation is something keeps, you know, coming up. So tell us where automation fits into some of the new things that you were talking about today in this week with your customer? >>Yeah, automation >>for us. Waking automation in three steps anything that's automatic better be safe. First of all, safety is paramount. Started security. It has to be simple, and we talked about how calm provides for that. And then you can start adding in this new wave off technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning. And it's not so much about automation right now. It's all gone to me. It's it's autonomous operations, not just scripts. That due to a task on dhe, that's >>an area >>we invested in very heavily early on with our prison pro product way, build our own patented or thumbs for machine learning applied them to operational metrics like capacity planning. And what if modeling and dynamic alerts and what we've been doing with that is extending that more into the application layer so that not only can you apply these algorithms to CP when memory, we can actually get insights into Hey, the Leighton see on this particular application looks somewhat unusual, or the amount of cash available on a sequel server is unusually low and act on those, and the other part is acting on on alert. Something happens. There's a human being need to get in wall to solve for that. And if it does, then well, it's not really automatic. Right? So that's the other part that we introduce, which is a cross for a product which lets you define these action chains that automatically, uh, what about to be triggered when Annie went on alert takes place, they can go ahead and fix the problem. But also, you know, simple things like send your slack notification or an email locked. They went, maybe create a snapshot of your wee am so that you could go back and be back problems later. All that sort of thing made really, really simple. >>Yes, it goes back to the simplicity and the invisibility to this. >>Yes, yes. Uh, autonomous data centers, by definition, have to be invisible, right? If if if If you're to get involved in marriage and autonomous Data center, then what's the plane? It's a point. Exactly. So the whole idea is that, uh, human involvement in day to day operations against solo that everybody's focused on applications on line of business use cases. >>Rajiv, when it when it comes to those applications. You know, you talked about some of the new enhancements like envy me on and obtain, You know, Where are your customers today? You know, Are there any interesting applications that you're seeing them deploying today? Ah, Pattern. I've talked about the last couple of years of the Nutanix show, is modernized the platform and then modernized the absolute top of it. Things like container ization. I'm sure to bell curve in a journey where all the customers But you know, what are some of the patterns that air starting emergen where they finding success? >>Yeah, This >>whole wave off new applications around data pipelines with Kafka spark things like that Apache stack effectively which are putting more more off load on storage in particular. So that's that's one area. We see customers looking for more performance. But >>even, >>you know, some of the traditional ah traditional uh, applications like ASAP Hana and epic and meditate expanse. They also have patterns which can benefit greatly with some of that wants wants that we have been making and gets a technical issue. No, The size of the working said with it all fits and car and on sst was spitting on magnetic drives. But something like we've been doing is moving the overheads. If you do have a miss and you go to slow a media, you still get good performance. And that's really how we're getting good to the new. >>Well, yeah, maybe without getting, you know, we don't need to go drill down into the core of the intel chip everything. But you know, Nutanix doesn't just take off the shelf stuff and, you know, put a box together. It's software, and there's work that happens with your partners in the ecosystem. Give us a little flavor as toe. You know where you're making the investments and where some of those partnerships and integrations or a key? >>Yeah, So on the platform side, Ah, a lot of the investments happen in validation of the platforms, making sure that we're ahead of the curve in adopting technologies but also feeding back from our side things we would like to see in the platform. Right? So how do you adapt things like R d m A. To handle not just the traditional work with the happy converge workload? How do you essentially look for things in this new class? of memories that would benefit from data locality for us. So that's one class off partnership that we have the hardware vendors with GHB, with Intel, with the IBM, a whole bunch of people. But >>then >>we also have partnerships up the stock these days with companies like service. Now, with we for backup for for our mind product. I think you saw a little bit of that today. It's a whole bunch of things happening across all areas. >>One of the things that it really comes across at this conference is just how strong Nutanix culture is. The company culture, the humble, honest, hungry and another word that's creeping in now is resilient. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your division of the company and describe how the company's resilience, the employees and the company itself has really displayed itself. >>So, you know, as it any company you know, Any time you go through the kind of growth we have, there's the forward momentum that everybody sees. They also a lot of setbacks that people don't really see, and they've been a whole bunch of us off these in our history. They've been areas where literally. The product has has a floor which is so fundamental we call it internally a near death experience. What's really great until again, from an engineering point of yours, how the teams come together at that point instead of these war rooms, even working weekends, Everybody's there. Everybody's on it and nobody talks about. Hey, look, where's my work? Life? Balance of things like that, especially when they're the customer in world. If there's if there's a problem that's causing customers outages, our engineers will give up everything. They'll give up everything and not just at work with their lives to make sure that gets fixed. And that has helped us get Basti setbacks get back in stride. Happens last Now. It used to happen a lot earlier, but spill this real culture resilience from the big *** in the early engineers. >>All right, Rajiv, what's exciting? You going forward? You know you don't have to touch on this one. But you know, when I saw at the end, the site clusters and hibernate feature was something that was like, Oh, yeah. I don't think I've seen that as to how I could make sure I save my data be ableto, you know, Shut things down. Maybe start there. But give us You know what a little bit. Look forward as to where the team's playing. >>Now, that's kind of, >>you know, thinking that detail thing that you have to do. What, you want to launch a new product, right? Okay, look, the whole point of doing doings, I clusters on Amazon. One of the biggest use cases. This cloud bursting cloud busting is not just about increasing your workload size, scaling it up at some point, you want to scale it down? How do you do that for state for work? Stateless. It's easy. All I'm registering Web servers over that sort of my way, they're gone. But our database that I scaled out over there well, that data can't go away. So we had to find ways to essentially solve for those from. So that's how the hibernate feature came around in general, The bigger question that you asked about, You know what I'm most excited about? I >>think this >>whole convergence of private and public cloud with same stack on both sides is a new new tank. It really hasn't existed before. Um, the father applications can now move back and forth seamlessly between public cloud and private cloud without rewriting without re factoring without a big lift and shift is very, very interesting. But by itself, it's not enough. Um, the flip that's missing is what about data movement? What about if you have your data and Amazon and I want to move it on premises? That there really are no good solutions of the Amazon doesn't give you a P eyes on dhe the tools to do that. So I think data movement's gonna be a big thing. And then Billy, a common service's tack on board because it's not just networking, storage in and compute anymore, right? If you're an Amazon, you're probably using all kinds off. Networking service is security groups. Ah, Route 53. How do you take those kind of service is and also make them available on premises. >>So, Rajiv, is there anything you've learned as a team when you look at AWS outposts or Oracle clouded customer, we've had a few years of talking about, but not a lot of deployments yet, so, you know, not saying you're late to the market, but you know what would have been able to sit back and learn from what has been done so far. >>So the >>reason we >>a little bit late to the market is that we think of solving a problem which the other windows are not, Which is kind of what I alluded to before that is that how do you support both the legacy applications on the cloud Net Cloud applications? How do you provide for migration both ways? Applications of a born in the cloud and now you want to move them on premises or applications of a born on premises and you want to move them to the Cloud Outpost is great. I think it's a good good product of technologies that AWS are thinks that hybrid is the right strategy, but it's also one problem. It's also the problem off cloud applications running on premises it does not solve for the problem of legacy applications running and cloud right, that is just a cz difficult as ever. That's that's not become any easier without force. Similarly, if you look at what we are very swing with AWS, it's also legacy applications going going to AWS. But in doing so, they don't have access to all the different networking services that AWS offers because you're not running and a sex, and you're kind of running a different networking start tonight. So with well, thought long and hard about this problem. And I said, Hey, look, we're not going to take the easy answer over here. You can take Take our stock, which is known to run both legacy and cloud native applications. If probe in that on Internet natively into Amazon so that you can use Amazon service is you can use our service is you can a legacy. Applications can run more than applications without giving up. Anything on that, I think is why signal this longer? But I think it's a more powerful solution for the long term. >>Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always a pleasure having you on my back and see us again. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for stew. Minutemen stay more of the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next Nutanix here in Copenhagen,