(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's The Cube! Covering .NEXT conference, 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage here of Nutanix .NEXT 2018, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Sherry Lautenbach who's the SVP of America Sales with Nutanix and Inder Sidhu who is the EVP of Global Customer Success, also with Nutanix. Sherry and Inder, thanks for joining us. >> Sherry: Thank you. >> Alright, so Sherry, first of all, you were up on stage this morning celebrating customers, we actually had the chance yesterday to nominate one of the, to interview one of the, nominees there and talked about what that meant to them and it was really talked about, you know, it's validation, where you know, we're trying something, we think we went out beyond what other people are doing and getting that validation back was just, they were really excited just to be nominated, so, you know, take us inside. >> Yeah, so first of all, we had hundreds of nominations, so it was super hard to choose and break it down to the finalists and then of course the winners, but for us, it was about innovation about cloud trailblazers, you know, dev ops, lots of different types of awards this year, and recognizing things that customers are doing to innovate with Nutanix. The best award we did have was Art.Heart give-back award and that, you know, it says a lot about our company that we focus on what companies are doing to better the communities they live in and the world in general, so. >> Yeah, and JetBlue is the winner there. >> Absolutely. >> Have to say, it makes me even happier to talk about, I have status with JetBlue, cause I fly to a lot of shows. >> Yeah, I can imagine Doug, they've been a great partner of ours, a great spokesperson, and they've really leveraged our technology to innovate with their company, so it's been a, it was a great morning. >> Alright, Inder, we watched Nutanix since the early days, discussion about NPS scores, and when you can't, when you come to an event like this, you can't help but feel the passion of the customers - over 5500 people here. Talk to us about what your role is, your engagement with customers, that whole customer success, and what that means. >> Yeah, customer success in my mind, Stu, is probably the single most important thing that we do at Nutanix, and the reason is because customers drive everything that the company does; it drives our employee behavior, it drives our partner behavior, it drives our product roadmaps. We're an outside-in company, fundamentally, and therefore, driving the customer success holistically, not just in terms of support after they might have an issue, but holistically, end-to-end over the entire life cycle is very very important for us. So, we're creating an organization, an investment, reporting all the way to the CEO to drive exactly that and we're very excited about that. >> Right, and I call it customer obsession, so I've been at Nutanix six months, the first day I showed up to headquarters, they gave me my laptop, and then they brought me up to the customer support area and said, "This is why we're so successful, because we are maniacally focused on ensuring our customers are being delivered value every day." And with a focus on our NPS four daily. So, for me, that was super impressive, and we don't let up on it. >> Stu: You know, Sherry, and I love some of the pieces. You were talking about innovation, talking about developers-- >> Sherry: Yes. >> We've been talking to a lot of customers about their digital transformation. It's not just, "Oh, okay, I'm re-platforming," it's more than that, talking about, what one of the customers said is, you know, "Business as IT." >> Right, no absolutely. So, digital transformation is clearly the buzzword, but it is all about what are companies doing to transform their businesses to become digital. And, Dheeraj always says, you know, "To be in that digital transformation journey is all about what you do to transform not only your IT operations, but the business." And the business drives what digital transformation does, absolutely. And it's not just creating things online or creating a presence, but its actually innovating yourself to differentiate yourself from your competition. We've seen that time and time again on what Amazon did to bookstores or what Netflix did to Blockbuster. And those types of things are the innovation that drives the change. >> Keith: So, Inder, speaking of innovation-- >> Inder: Mmhmm. >> Nutanix digitally transformed themselves into a software company. You guys made a lot of announcements, a lot of new products in the pipeline, a lot of new features available: GA as of the show. Nutanix has become a bigger company, valuation over nine billion dollars, as you get bigger, it's hard to keep that NPS score over 90. Where's the focus and how do you do it as Nutanix grows? >> You know one of the things, I think, as we become a big company in terms of size and scale, in terms of our heart and in terms of our spirit, we're very much a small company. I go tell customers, there is going to be times when we'll screw up. But you'll never find any company that's going to work harder than us to drive your success. And that's where the intent is, that's where the focus is. We're going to do whatever it takes from an holistic end-to-end customer perspective. We're assigning customer success managers to some of our largest customers so we can proactively engage with them, especially along three dimensions. We're not like a lot of other technology companies, where you just try to sell them technology, we're around three things: we want to make sure make sure that our customers can be organizationally proficient, we want to make sure they're operationally efficient and we want to make sure that they're financially accountable. All three of those dimensions have to do with stuff that's important to them. As we make them successful along those dimensions, automatically the technology starts to get adopted and they start seeing some benefits. >> So, Sherry, let's talk about that customer success manager. What are they empowered to do, like, if there's a problem, how do they make it right? >> Well that's a great question, they're empowered to do whatever it takes on behalf of the customer to ensure that one, they're deploying our technology well and they're finding great value in it. It's interesting, I've spoken to many customers at this conference and so many of them have said, you know, using Nutanix has changed my career, my career trajectory, and the business value I provide the organization, not just from an IT standpoint, but on the business side. And so for me, there's no greater compliment when our customers, they're cheering for us, they're rooting for us cause we're helping to transform what they do every day. So the customer success manager is just going to be an overlap in terms of ensuring and driving that success as we get deeper and deeper into these customers. >> And what we're going to do is we're going to start out with customer success managers more at the top of the pyramid, some of the largest accounts, but remember, we still have hundreds and hundreds of account team members from Sherry's team and others; SEs, all of whom provide an even greater leverage, and then extending all the way through our partners. So we have a high-touch model at the top with CSMs, we have a medium-touch model with SEs and account teams and insight sales reps and partners in the middle, and on the bottom of the pyramid, we've got a tech-touch model, where we're going to actually leverage our technology with self-service portals and so on with emails and webinars and training and material that can actually drive their end-to-end success, very focused on that. >> Stu: Sherry, I'm wondering if you can dig in some of the organizational pieces that Inder was talking about. From your customers as you move up the food chain with the products, what are you hearing from your various constituencies inside of companies? >> Inside of our customers? >> Stu: Inside of the customers, yes. >> Right, so, well we cover, in terms of an organizational size, we cover all different types of customers in various ways. We have dedicated account people to our largest accounts alongside with SEs of course. And we leverage our partners, though, in our channel and everything we do, so they're considered an extension of our sales force, which I think is truly valuable and really important that we ensure that they drive success with our customers. >> Anything special you're hearing when you get up to the C-Suite, pain points, that they're hearing more than you heard in the architect or admin standpoint? >> Yeah, no, they're looking for more of, you know, helping to rationalize cloud: how do I get to cloud, what's the right balance in terms of hybrid, on-prem, off-prem, and really, understanding the business value and drivers around it, not just cost efficiency. It's about transforming different areas of their business and many of the C-Suite customers that I speak to really are approaching it many different ways, dependent on what is the key pain point and business problem they're trying to solve. >> Inder: So, two things I'd say to add to Sherry's answer there is that what we see is customers wanting to engage more architecturally rather than an individual point product through a consultative process that is more around business outcomes. So it's not something necessarily new, but it's a little bit new for Nutanix, cause we've historically engaged at the technology level, and now you're finding more and more. Of the Fortune 50, we have 33. Of the Fortune 100, we have 66. So we're actually starting to get to really large customers in a big way. They want a deeper, architectural, all-in engagement, and as our portfolio starts to expand from just HCI to Flow and Beam and Xi and all of those, they're saying gosh, I mean I just literally ran into a CIO in the elevator, coming down this morning, and he said gosh, we were thinking about doing NSX but now that I came here and I heard about Flow and I heard about Xi, I think I'm going to go all-in with you guys, I'm going to put that thing on ice, and really work with you guys on this. Literally, unsolicited, in the elevator, this morning. >> Keith: That's impressive. So as we, on all those lines of growth, you guys have a huge user community: 70,000 participants, and this morning, Dr. Brennan, I'm sorry, Dr. Brené Brown talked about having difficult conversations around diversity. I want to first give you guys kudos, this is from an optics perspective been one of the most diverse technology conferences I've attended from an entertainment to the onstage presence to the keynote speakers, awesome job. As you guys are working towards having a more diverse user set, how are you helping your user community be successful along with their careers from a diversity perspective and whereas a career development perspective. >> Great question, and yes, I'm super proud of the diversity, things we're doing in the company. Just yesterday, I hosted a women's IT luncheon, so we celebrated the women around Nutanix so that was all about building a network of all of our customers: female and male, they were included too in this luncheon. And we had over 130 people, spent time, I said let's exchange business cards, let's talk about some of the challenges you face. We had one of our board members, Sue Bostrom share some very personal stories about challenges she's faced and opportunities to help advance her career, gave a great perspective on that. We also had the CEO of FlyWheel, she talked about failing fast and pivoting, and that to me was great little lessons and tidbits that we can provide our customers to say let's empower you to be even better and to build your network even more effectively. >> And if I can add to that, I think, what we're always looking for is a diversity of ideas, and those diversity of ideas is not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have because it actually drives positive business outcomes from us when we start to represent what our community of users and what our community of customers is. And that diversity of ideas comes from people who have had a diversity of backgrounds, across a wide range of dimensions of diversity, and that's what we're really looking for. We're not necessarily solving for outcomes, we want to solve for opportunity, and make sure that everybody has that equal opportunity to engage and participate, and the more we do that, the richer we get, the more powerful we get, the more alive we become, I think, with diversity. >> Right, I mean, you think about that, you know, our traditional influencer was in the data center side, but we've found now in terms of diversity of our portfolio, the developer is going to be just as important of an influencer for Nutanix, so we're looking at it from not only our customers and who but what they do. >> Stu: Inder, I was wondering if you could get some colla rosso on the vertical side of things, we know you started early very much in the public sector phase, had a lot of strength there, so speak to how else you're growing in the vertical space. >> Inder: Yeah, one of the things we're doing is as we get into bigger and larger customers, as you know, we have 9000 customers, adding a thousand every quarter, we have about 642 after global 2000 customers and so, as we get into those, those customers want us to be able to talk to them in their language, around their issue. So I'll give you a great example, you know, recently, we hired a guy, his name is Don Mims out of Baylor Scott & White as a Customer Success Manager. Here's a guy who's done everything the Nutanix products, implemented them all through Baylor Scott & White, 7000 beds, 48 hospitals, and here's a guy who's implemented Nutanix, he's implemented AHV, he's implemented Epic. I got 40 other customers in the US alone who want to implement Epic and AHV in the healthcare sector among the provider community, and we're going to go towards those customers with that kind of verticalized expertise. Same thing around financial services, same thing around retail. I mean, when you look at retail, Walmart, Home Depot, Tractor Supply Company, Nordstrom, Target, you know, Best Buy, Kohls, we've got a wide range of customers who give us insight into their operations, and when we engage with them, when you're talking to a retailer, you're talking about dollars per square foot, you're talking about same store sales, you're talking about a flexible workforce and then you translate that into IT, which translates into a hybrid public-private flexible infrastructure. So as we have these conversations, they're very engaging, and we are starting to verticalize if you will, in terms of our overlay expertise. Sales force of course is going to be geographic first, because of the proximity that's required, but we're going to have overlay both in the services and in the sales organization that's going to be very noticeable as well. >> And we have found that there are certain geographies and areas that we can verticalize in the field, so, for example, Tennessee or in California, we can build healthcare verticals which has been very effective cause customers want us to talk in their language, understand what critical business applications they can leverage with Nutanix. So we're trying to mirror, as best we can, the vertical point of view in the field. >> Public sector of course is the first vertical that gets carved out for many companies, service providers, the second, we've already got public sector carved out, and one of the things, great kudos to Sherry and her team, you were proactive, Sherry, with Brad Rhodes in kind of carving out healthcare as a dedicated sales region in the West where people have nowhere to hide, you just live and die by the healthcare success, customer success. >> Well, and also, the familiarity on the use cases, right, cause a lot of the use cases are repeatable, so it just makes a lot of sense for us to bring teams together that can go to market that way. >> Keith: So, let's talk about the speed of Nutanix. I love the story, the impromptu meeting, CIO in an elevator, you guys are wowing me with the technologies in ways I never thought of. Let's talk about the other end of it. Where are customers pushing you, saying, "You know what, you guys need to move faster." You have one customer that's on NSX, you have a bunch that are looking way past that. >> Sherry: Right, no that's a great question, and the great thing about Nutanix is we really don't say no a lot, I mean, we've got to be very thoughtful in what we sign up for, but we will innovate and collaborate with customers in every instance. So what is it that you need, you need a support on a platform? We'll give you the right timeframe to do it, but yeah, we're going to do what we can to deliver on that, so, there is a lot that's coming at us from a speed standpoint with our customers and the demands that they have but I think that's a testament to the adoption and the delight that they have of using Nutanix and wanting to expand that in their enterprise. >> Inder: And I think, to some extent, Keith, I think your question is more about where are we perhaps falling short a little bit, and I'll tell you one area where perhaps we could do better, which is for support of a wider array of platforms. So for example, when we go to Asia Pacific, a lot of our customers are telling us, gosh you got support for Dell or Lenovo or IBM, etc., but what about other platforms that are local, Hitachi or Fujitsu or Inspira or Avia, etc.? So we're going to get very disciplined and structured around it, we don't want to over commit and let anybody down, because extending support to multiple platforms is not trivial, but we want to make sure that when we commit, we say what we'll do and we do what we say. And that's a guarantee that we'd like to provide to our customers. >> Stu: Inder and Sherry, I want to give you both an opportunity: just final takeaways you want your customers to know about Nutanix as they leave the show this year. >> Well, we'd love for more customers to come onboard, one thing I've seen with our customers that are here is that they love our technology, they're delighted. We've helped change jobs and careers with many of our customers and for me that's a huge privilege. >> I'd just say that customer success is the single most important thing for us, for our customers, we might make a mistake every once in a while, but you will never find anybody who works harder on your behalf. We've got the energy, we've got the fire in the belly, we've got the agility, and we're going to do everything that it takes to make you successful, no matter what. Period, end of story. So we're all in, we hope you can be all in with us as well. >> Alright, Inder and Sherry, obviously the passion is here from you, from your customers and the team. Thanks so much for joining us today. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here coming from Nutanix.NEXT, New Orleans, 2018. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back at Nutanix .NEXT. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my longtime co-host Stu Miniman. Don Mims is here as the director of infrastructure and virtualization at Baylor, Scott, & White Health. Don, great to see you. Thanks for comin' on The Cube. >> Thanks for havin' me. I appreciate it bein' here, it's very nice. >> Yeah, so Baylor, Scott, & White Health, we weren't familiar with that before we met you. Tell us a little bit about the organization. >> Sure. So, Baylor, Scott & White Health is based in Dallas, Texas. We've recently had, over the last couple of years, a merger opportunity. We merged with Scott & White that is down in Temple, Texas which is a little farther east, or west and south of Dallas. And we've grown our organization to around 40 hospitals, over 500 clinics and we continue to grow and make strives in the healthcare space. >> Dallas is booming. I mean, obviously-- >> It is. World-class city with world-class healthcare. Talk about some of the things that are happening in healthcare that are sort of driving your strategy, the challenges that you guys are having. I mean, obviously, there's, there's EMR, there's meaningful use, there's, you know, changes in the Affordable Care Act, all that stuff. That and or other things that are really driving strategy and creating challenges for you. >> Yeah, one of the biggest things that we're doin' right now is movin' into the digital space. So, the patient, centered focus being in a traditional brick and mortar facility, is shifting. Patients wants quicker access to data, quicker access to physicians. So, bein' able to create solutions that can deliver a physician and patient experience, possibly from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet, a PC, is where we're movin' the market towards. So, some of the solutions that we're building and delivering are enabling a faster delivery of technology for healthcare. >> You know, sort of, when you think about last decade, docs were, sort of, averse, somewhat to technology. >> You're right. >> And mobile really changed that, hasn't it? >> It has. >> How has that affected your, the backend infrastructures? >> So, it definitely has to be more robust. As you're delivering content now, video, web chats, things like that that have to be reliable because now patient outcomes depend on that type of data delivery, the backend has to be available more than ever at this time. >> So it's kind, you actually kind of have an IOT use case in the hospitals, right? >> We're gettin' there. >> And then when you start pushin' video around it's got to be very challenging. Now you're also doing some projects around DNA sequencing. Is that right? >> We are. It's very exciting space. We recently delivered a solution on Nutanix to create a DNA sequencing platform that hasn't been done before as we know it. The vendor, this was the first time for the vendor, a first time for Baylor, and it has been very successful implantation and it's, it's a very robust system today. >> Don, can you bring us inside a little bit? What were the requirements you were lookin' for? What led you down the path to Nutanix? Had you been usin' them before or was this the first-use case? >> It's actually not the first-use case. The project actually started out as a, it was a migration. The customer was using a hosted solution. It was slow. Their sequencing data was taking a long time. Their results were being held up because of the way their architecture was set up. So, we decided to bring it in-house and put it on a platform that was kind of new to us and try to deliver it with better speed and it definitely has done that. >> And does that trickle down to, you know, what does that mean to the cost of solutions? I mean, I think we all know it, you know, DNA sequencing used to take a long time and a lot of money and it's now, you know, kind of, do a swab type things and it's done a lot less. >> Yeah, so with this platform, the customer, the physician is now not only going to use this platform to get results quicker, we're also going to start potentially offering this as a service to others and help other physicians and other clinics also get their results quicker as well. So, it's going to grow over time to just an in-house solution to maybe something more broad-scale. >> So you saw the keynotes this morning. They're pushin' a lot of information at us. Obviously, we, Stew and I talked about it in our open. Nutanix, a couple years ago, sort of pivoted beyond hyper-coverged infrastructure, tryin' to position as cloud even though they still a lot of hyper-converged infrastructure, let's face it. But, as a consumer, as a practitioner, how does that message relate to you? You have a lot of vendors tryin' to sell to you. You got cloud, different cloud strategies, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. Dev-ops, containters. So, do you, what do you want to see from a company like Nutanix? Do you want them to, like, stick to their knitting, hey just give me hyper-converged infrastructure, or do you want them to take you on, on a journey? I wonder if you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and where you're goin' with that question is exactly the reason we chose this solution because it's way bigger than just a hyper-converge, you know, solution. That was, for me, that was kind of the first thing. That's what got us hooked and then the innovation that's come, you know, since then, and things that we've learned about the product and where they're goin' with automation, migration strategies of current workloads, the ease of management, the cloud strategy, the partnerships that they're makin' now with other, with other partners. That's really what I like to see and that continued growth is why we chose this product 'cause they have that vision and it's really appealing. >> And so, do you, are you using public cloud today? >> We are in a very limited manner. As you can imagine, health care and personal health information in the cloud can be kind of scary to some people so we have started that roadmap and we continue to try to expand that as we go. >> Is it fair to say that as an infrastructure professional that you're, you're, can I summarize your infrastructure strategy is you want, like, to, substantially mimic the attributes of a public cloud where it makes sense on prem. Is that fair? >> That's exactly what we're tryin' to do. Speed to delivery, server provisioning, resiliency of the infrastructure, invisible infrastructure, you might have heard that term today or over the past few days. That's what we're tryin' to accomplish. >> Self-service or no? >> Self-service internally right now. So, my own staff are going to use the automation internally to deliver quicker and then eventually as we perfect that, we'll let our customers self-service. >> So be as cloud-like as possible but not too cloud-like too soon? >> Exactly. >> So do you feel as though, as an IT pro, that you are on the path to achieving that vision? >> I do. We are, at Baylor, we're breaking new grounds with what we've done recently and I think the longterm vision to where we want to be is going to be, is going to be big over the next few years. >> So we get, we get into a lot of discussions with folks in our community that are, you know, kind of, cloud bigots, I'll call them and they say, "Hey, the vendors like Nutanix "and even more so vendors like IBM and HPE "and, you know, EMC, and their customers "will never be able to achieve what Amazon achieves." My question to you is, and you probably agree with that, I mean, Amazon's ahead of you, I bet. But, I would hope. But, how do you feel about that? Is that okay? Do you lose sleep over that or do you feel as though, "Hey, we've made so much progress." I wonder if you could comment on that as an IT pro. >> Yeah, sure. So, briefly on that topic, Amazon's business model is a little different than the industry that we're in, right? >> Yeah, sure. >> And, we're not really in the technology delivery business, right? We're in healthcare and patient servicing but what we do behind the scenes to enable the patient satisfaction and patient outcomes using this web-scale technology or this Amazon-like infrastructure is something that we're going to continue to build and grow on. We'll never be in that position, like Amazon is. But behind the scenes with automation and the infrastructure resiliency, using that same technology is what we're going to, how we're going to accomplish that. >> So a big part of that, 'cause you mentioned some of the digital transformation you're doin' up front, a big part of that cloud-like on prem, is makin' your people more productive and not, you know, focused on provisioning LUNs and servers and-- >> That's right. >> You know, pluggin' in cables. It's really automating as much as possible. So, have you seen the affect on non-differentiated IT labor in your shop? >> We have. So, just within our team, the amount of time the engineers have to spend on just this specific infrastructure has been greatly reduced so we get to spend more time doin' things like protectin' our environment. You know, a lot of these, these viruses have been comin' out lately. These, these exploits. So, we've been able to patch more diligently, remediate issues, and then we've seen other reduction in time for other teams. Storage team, they don't have to deal with our stuff anymore. They can focus in other areas. So it's really been a shift in the way we do business. >> So just one more followup, I know that Stu wants to jump in. So, and this is a hard question to be precise on, but, in rough terms, if you think in, you know, rough percentage terms, how much, you know, sort of, of the labor effort you've been able to shift to more interesting, the fun stuff, as Stu calls it. Is it a 5% factor or a 20%, 50%, you know, 100% factor? I wonder if you could just give us some anecdotal-- >> Right now the impact has been pretty small. If you look at the, our Nutanix infrastructure today, it's a very small portion of our overall infrastructure since it's fairly new. >> Right. >> But, I can tell you, the time that we spend on that right now is very minimal. I have one engineer that oversees the entire infrastructure at this point. I'm freein' up multiple other resources to do other things, so it's been an improvement. >> And so, and so pre-, pre-hyper-converged, if you didn't go that direction you'd have more than one engineer or? >> Oh, I'd have, I'd probably have at least three times as many. >> So three x factor, wow. >> Just because there's so many other components that you have to manage that aren't just specific to that one stack. >> David: Mhm, right. >> Don, you've got virtualization in your title, how do you look at virtualization today? Where are you in that journey? We've been hearin' at a lot of these shows that we've been at that, you know, virtualization feels like it's played out for the most part. We know where it is. Cloud has been the big discussion. Where is it in your job? >> So, kind of two paths in my infrastructure. We have server virtualization which is traditional, you know, virtualizing the compute workload. And then also on application virtualization, so app delivery. And I think there's still a lot of room for growth in both of those aspects. Application delivery is going to continue to morph and it can be delivered from multiple different platforms and I can see it doin' that over time. Server virtualization is a way to go and what we're doin' there is tryin' to continue to deliver the capacity, you know, that we're at or continue to grow it but at the same time shrinking that hardware footprint and relieving some of the stress in the data center and that's what we're lookin' for. >> On server virtualization what are you usin' today? >> For server virtualization we use VM ware, ESX. >> And have you looked at the HV stuff at all? >> We have and I'm very excited about that and it's kind of one of those things where you can't jump in with two feet right off the bat just because it is a little new and you feel like you need to really look at it really closely but at the same time, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a good, longterm replacement as we continue to look at it. >> One of the, Nutanix has really been looking out for their future plans. One, share, you know, what resonates with you, and what about yourself? What kind of future strategy do you have? What are you looking for from the vendor community to help you do even more with your resources? >> So, the vendor community definitely, this is kind of a new area for them. A lot of the application vendors we talked to aren't really familiar with this platform so I think as this product grows and as this space grows, I think more vendor awareness is going to come about and they're going to be more comfortable with this as a solution. >> Okay, yeah, especially healthcare. It's all those ISVs that need to integrate and support and say, "Yes, I'm okay with it." >> Exactly. >> We saw that with virtualization at first and... >> Yup. And health care is always traditionally a little bit behind 'cause it's a little more conservative space. So, I think it'll take a little bit of time for them to feel comfortable there, as well. >> So what are the big problems you're tryin' to solve today from an infrastructure standpoint? >> Well, you know, financial issues are always a topic, right? So, what we're tryin' to do is deliver infrastructure to support our patients in a cost-effective way. So bein' as frugal with the money that we do have and buyin' the right technology and not spendin' a lot of money on a diverse stack and wasting financials. >> I mean, you just basically, you know, reduced your IT labor in that little part of the world by, you know, a factor of, you know, 3x as we talked about. Is there a gain-sharing philosophy where some of that reduction comes back to you for innovation or is it just, sort of, go back to other parts of the hospital? >> It will go back, probably, just to the bigger, to the bigger team. I mean, there are benefits to us, you know, specifically that we're going to achieve, but overall, that time-saving goes back and allows, you know, different teams to do other things which overall will help improve our whole environment. >> So in the keynotes today, and I was talking to you off-camera about one-click migration, there was a database migration and, I think it was one-click DR as well, but I'm interested in the database stuff. You've got some experience with databases. Actually, let me ask you, is that part of the infrastructure definition is database on down? >> It is. >> Yeah, okay. So what was your reaction to the sort of one-click database migration? >> It's very exciting. I think that's going to help in the aspect of migrating workloads from, from Legacy or traditional to this new platform. There's, I think there's still some components that you have to consider. The migration is very nice but, you know, validation, testing, all those kind of components also have to be part of that whole plan. >> So if I looked at the, I mean, database migrations can sometimes be real hard balls. So if I, if I look at the cycle, you know, the anatomy of a migration, let's say it takes, you know, n amount of time, what is that amount of time, you know, on average, and I know it's a hard, it's one of those stupid average questions. >> It can vary based on size. >> Yeah, I know it's a big it depends. But what percent of that, that, that value chain, if you will, that sequence chain is Nutanix attacking with what you saw today in your view? >> So, what you do is reduce the execution part of that migration and you probably reduce a lot of the planning phase of that because in any kind of a database migration, there are so many factors that go into that and a lot of the discussion is around how are we going to move this workload to this new space? And Nutanix has solved that by taking care of the how and then, you know, you just need to figure out how you're going to validate, test it, and confirm that once it's there, everything continues to work as expected. So I think you've reduced the time of planning and execution both with that strategy. >> I mean, the planning piece has actually got to be a huge portion-- >> Huge. >> Is it half of the total? >> It's probably at least half. >> Yeah, I would think so. >> Because the better you plan, the better you're going to execute, right, so. >> Yeah, yeah, right, right. Okay, good. Well, Don, I'll give you a last word on futures. What kinds of things are you workin' on that, you know, you can share with us? >> So for us, the future is going to be to, to continue to converge this stack. We're going to continue to move forward with automation. Try to reduce the delivery time for applications and servers and infrastructure and eventually simplify our management layer and spend more time doin' other things, doin' more fun stuff. And that's what we're lookin' to do. >> Love it. As I always say, love havin' the practitioners on we get to pepper questions and get the real story. So Don, thanks very much for comin' on The Cube. >> Thank you for havin' me, I appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco It's theCUBE Covering PURE Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by PURESTORAGE. >> Welcome back to PURE Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is PURE Accelerate. We're here at Pier 70. Brian McDaniel is here he's an infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco Texas, anymore. Brian Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. >> So, Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas. We currently employ roughly 1,500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. >> So, it's kind of' healthcare morning here Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. These are big issues. >> We're not at the HIMSS Conference Dave? >> We should be at HIMMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It's just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So, I wonder if you can talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance, and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. >> Absolutely so first and foremost, we are an Epic system shop. That's our EMR. So, from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. It provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of solution if you will, the mobility aspect of it. Delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is upmost important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So, time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. >> Right so, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now, being able to harness that data and share it. Data explodes everywhere but in healthcare, there's so much data to the extent we start instrumenting things. What are you guys doing with all that data? >> Right now, it lives within the clinical application, right in Epic, but as you pointed out that is where the value is. that is where your crown jewels so to speak are at. That data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operation. So, it's environment is going to be even more important going forward, when you look to branch out into some of the basic sides in more of a research, to gain access to that clinical data. That historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. >> So, in the corporate we like to think of, from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. A lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and in kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely, particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with out partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Case in point, a year ago we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So, they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just , we want you to meet this. If you do then there's advantages to meeting it. So, they provided that to us and went though the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly we struggled to meet their requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructures, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So, Flash comes to mind immediately. So, there's a multitude of vendors that make Flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of 'em, doing our fact finding and our data gathering, meeting with all of 'em. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. Right? You're not certified. >> I would expect some of the startups especially. >> It did. Some of the smaller, Flash vendors, for example, one of 'em came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said what's Epic. And you kind of scratch your head and say thank you. >> Thank you for playing. >> Here's the door. So, it eliminates people but then when we meet with PURE, and we talked to them and we meet 'em and you get to really know that the family and the culture that they bring with the technology. Yes it's got to be fast but Flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on Flash, how it was native to Flash and so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there, where we're at running Epic on our Flash arrays. >> And Brian, you're using the Flash stack configuration of converge infrastructure. It sounds like it was PURE that lead you that way as opposed to Cisco? Could you maybe walk us through that? >> That's very interesting, so we're a UCS shop. We were before PURE. So when PURE came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the Flash stack infrastructure, made it all that more easier to implement the PURE solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the Flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it, we're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market, to get production work loads on it, very quick. >> And the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus PURE but was it healthcare Epic specific or was that the PURE had some knowledge for that that they pulled in? >> So, that was one of the value adds that we feel PURE brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do. There's seven Epic environments. And they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other so, >> So you have a window that you have to hit right. >> And you do right? And historically that window's been quite large. And now, not so much which makes everybody happy. >> Hey, that's what weekends are for. >> Absolutely, yeah, our DBAs attest to that right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable 'cause those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. Back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision makings from a support with the PURESTORAGE help desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on PURE, and then going forward knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and PURE and certainly Baylor College of Medicine as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and on to 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. >> And Brian I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while, Cisco has lots of partnerships as well as, they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and do they just let you choose and you said, I want PURE and they're like, great? Do you know? What was that like? >> To your point, there's validated designs for many customers and Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, the UCS. They liked the fact that we went with PURE 'cause it does me a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road, and how do they truly integrate with each other. 'Cause we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations and I think we did our due diligence and looked at 'em to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of Flash drives and call it good. Something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology. And that's what ultimately led us to PURE. >> Well, PURE has a point of view on the so called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Dietzen talking this morning. What's your perspective on hyper-convergence? >> Hyper-converge is one of those buzz words that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff if you will. But people hear it and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree, people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? If your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, it does it make sense to put it on hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture or the design. So, in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a, Epic support and b, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment and knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough, that was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. That made a significant difference from an operational perspective. >> Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. So from an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. >> We don't. The last thing we want in infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the Cache database or the Clarity database within the Epic system, or if was just all of are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will, we want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. >> Brian, PURE said that they had, I believe it's like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Curious, is there anything that jumped out at you, that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to do list that you're hoping for PURE or PURE and it's extended ecosystem to deliver for you? >> Great question, so at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes, and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that, and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So, we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, with replication being one of 'em. >> And then, I thought I heard today, Third Sight is a service. Right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. So, I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that one. >> To be determined right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA, PHI, that's your records, yours and mine, medical records right? You just don't want that, if I told you it's going to be hosted in a public cloud. Wait a minute. Where? No it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly could look at leveraging that technology. >> Excellent, we listen, thank you very much Brian for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry anyway. And have a great rest of the show. >> Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're back live right after this short break from PURE Accelerate 2017. Be right back.