>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the District everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special presentation of Nutanix NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost for the two days of coverage at this event. Adam Japhet is here. He's the head of infrastructure at Scholastic Corp. Adam, thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, is this your first .NEXT? >> This is my first .NEXT. >> Dave: What do ya think? >> There's a lot of energy here. It's a tremendous amount of energy. Just even in the size of the place. But the number of partners that you've got here and the number of customers, I'm really excited to be here. >> Well, the best is yet to come. Nutanix always does a really good job with the keynotes. >> Adam: Yeah, you haven't even opened the keynote yet, and it's already this much energy. >> Yeah, always very crisp messaging. They have great outside speakers. Robert Gates last year, Condi Rice and then, who was the illusionist? They had a-- >> Oh yeah, the guy in the box, David Blaine. Yeah, David Blaine held his breath for like nine minutes. >> He was holding his breath under water while the SE configured-- >> For the entire session? >> Yeah while the SE configured because the argument was it only takes eight minutes to configure a Nutanix solution. >> Wow. And then he came out, after eight minutes. You know he was able to configure the solution. Big hugs afterwards. Wet hugs. But anyway, it's a fun show here and it really hasn't even started yet. It started with Cube interviews. >> We've been interviewing. >> Now I'm even more excited. >> Dave: Yeah, so we've been interviewing practitioners all day. So tell us about Scholastic Corp. What do you guys do? >> Sure, so Scholastic, if you went to school in the US, you probably heard of Scholastic, but I'll reiterate it. It's the, actually, the world's largest, not just in the US, the world's largest children's book publisher and distributor. It's also a major education technology firm, so we do a lot of work within the education space with administrators, librarians, and other educators in your school system. But we're probably most recognized for our trade businesses. Which, Book Clubs, which is now called Reading Clubs, fairs and trade, and just the access to so many of the titles that so many kids in the US have grown up on. >> So, you're making sure the next generation will at least have the opportunity to read. (laughing) >> It's interesting, because I don't know if you're aware of this, but it was actually just two days ago, was the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book. What was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in England and now it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US. And actually they did some analysis. Some of the articles I was reading about it about literacy and they actually think that the Harry Potter series has contributed to, I guess we're calling them Gen Z or the post millennials or whatever, they grew up with Harry Potter, really improving literacy in the US. That's how important some of these books that we publish over the years have been. >> So you actually said, used to call it Book Club, now you call it Reading Club. So, that's sort of an indication that your business model's evolving, going digital. So when we talk about some of the drivers there. >> Absolutely, I mean that was really one of the key drivers, I think. I've been at Scholastic a long time now. 17 plus years. So I've seen lots of different evolutions have been evolved and a lot of different technology projects have been evolved, different launches. And I think in particular in 2011, when the iPad came out, and we saw such a rapid transition with newspapers, and periodicals, and magazines. Myself included, I felt myself going through it. Switching to using electronic devices for consumption. The next immediate question is, is this going to make all physical books go away? And so, you know, we really pivoted hard into the digital arena at that time, because we wanted to be where our constituencies are. And interestingly, we found that actually digitization in the children's book space, maybe a little bit in the young adult space, but especially in the elementary school space, it actually has been fairly resistant of digitization. It's there. We've got a number of excellent products there. With Storia and a number of other products for delivering digital content to our consumers, but primarily children. But ultimately kids still read physical books. My kids are 11 and nine, and our house is full of physical books and we really kind of segregate the two together so that they have both the digital reading experience, which is somewhat different from the physical reading experience. Nevertheless, it is continuing to transform our industry. >> We were talking to to Virginia Gambale before. She's an advisor, a strategic advisor, to a number of companies, board member, investor. And she was talking about capital allocation and one of the questions I have is when you guys sort of look at this digital disruption, the change, at what point do you decide, okay hey, we've got to change or we'll be changed. Or we need to get ahead of this. How does that all take, how did it take place in your organization? Was it more reactive, proactive, and sort of where are you headed? >> I mean, I think the proactive elements around it is that we want to make sure that when our consumers are ready to go digital, we've got a viable product that responsive to as many devices as we think our consumers are going to use. And parallel information there, we've been watching really in the last three years how much Google has sweeped into the educational space and they have kind done that at the expense of Microsoft and Apple. And so, we see trends like that and we see how quickly digital can move into the educational spaces which is where the primary customers are and how we sell our products to children. And we knew that we needed to have a viable product there, so I think a lot of things for us are looking at different channels. Making sure that we've got a singular view of our customer and recognizing that our primary customers are really educators. That we're connecting with them and we're understanding how they're using our different models, our different lines of businesses. How they're communicating our products to the parents and children that consume them. And really getting that right balance of physical and digital products in front of every kid. I mean, our core mission is to get kids to learn to love to read. It's to generate literacy so that kids become young adults and full adults and they love to read, and that's really what the core mission is behind Scholastic. And however we can deliver the products to satisfy that mission, we're prepared to do that. >> Adam, reaching the ultimate user in that whole digital transformation, that tends to put a lot of stresses on infrastructure which is the hat you wear. So, maybe explain a little bit some of those challenges you were having and what you've done to transform on the infrastructure side to meet the requirements of the business. >> Absolutely. So in my role, in my various roles that I've had at Scholastic over the years, one of the things I've been able to experience is how different parts of the company move at different speeds. And some of it is just the nature of the function of the company. You know, your back office corporate spaces obviously are going to move somewhat slower than your digital engagement and your e-commerce space. In a role I had several years ago, where I was delivering e-commerce and digital services, I quickly realized that the traditional infrastructure models simply wasn't going to cut it at this point. We were delivering infrastructure trying to scale it out for very seasonal demand. Three, six month lead times trying to stack text stacks all stuff that end up being undifferentiated heavy lifting. So ultimately, for us, we took a couple of big leaps. One of the big leaps that we took was really moving into the public cloud several years ago and that worked out tremendously for us and we've really been able to find the right infrastructure model for delivering our customer engagement experiences has been the public cloud. But when we started to pivot towards the fact that we move physical products, you know a lot of companies don't necessarily deal with physical products anymore. I could be wrong but I don't know that Facebook has a physical, Well I guess they have their VR. They acquired, I forget the name of the VR company now but generally, companies don't deal with physical products. An all in public cloud model can work pretty well for them. But when you're dealing with physical products, latency matters. Geodata locality matters. And some of the applications that you're dealing with can be very centric to the delivery of your manufacturing and your warehouse operations. So, that's actually part of why we've been investing in Nutanix. Because we want to have that same kind of agility with our infrastructure and get out of mixing and matching various vendors text stacks deliver essentially what's a foundational platform for us to deliver business value out of. I'd rather go with one vendor, right? And have a finite set of vendors where we're delivering network and compute and storage and the service delivery of our applications on top of that, and Nutanix has worked out very well for us. >> Appreciate that Adam, and it's really interesting. We talk to customers, the two terms that get thrown out are hybrid or multi-cloud and you laid out where you're using public cloud. Do you consider your Nutanix solution, is that private cloud, hybrid cloud? (speaking over each other) Does that interact with multi-data center or any other services? >> I've kind of avoided the term hybrid cloud because what was originally marketed to us as hybrid cloud was the idea that your workload is seamlessly portable between all these different cloud providers. And we kind of realized that was never really our intent. I think multi-cloud is probably a better model for us, because we're finding that our various cloud provider services, and if you even scale beyond just the basic IS, you get to the pads and the especially SaaS layer, they're all cloud services but they're fairly fit for purpose. And a lot of what our role is as a technology organization has moved towards assembling all of these fit for purpose cloud solutions together into a service delivery that we from a technology group can deliver to our internal and external customers. And so I prefer the term multi-cloud. >> So if we could follow up on this, if I may, skepticism on hybrid cloud, but this idea of a control plane that spans multiple physical clouds, including on-prem. Is something that, am I understanding that you don't feel that that's needed in your organization or that's not feasible technically? >> I think it really depends on the applications that will be delivered to that. So for example, we're finally making our first real foray into containers. And so, we've looked at a couple of different technologies. There's a number out there like OpenShift and Kubernetes and that's really we feel the best opportunity for us to find a way to deploy a true hybrid cloud model where you can actually provision your workload. Maybe not to get so far as to the Priceline type Kayak type view of I want to deploy this workload right now and GCP is the most optimal at this point in time for that. That could be a potential future state, but again, even that feels like it's still a fair amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting for our service delivery. So we find the right mix of products so that we can deliver a kind of a cost optimal workload. And in many cases, I think that technology vendors still haven't quite figured out how to handle state. It works great with the stateless part of your applications but you need to persist your state somewhere. We're probably in the earlier stages, I would say, around utilized service delivery. >> What I heard I think is, you chose by application whether this is going to be something we do in-house because whether there is the locality, the analytics or data processing, something I need it for a reason, as opposed to other things. It's undifferentiated. Public cloud can take care of it and there's not a need to own it in town. >> Yes, you said it better than I said it. >> So the question, I think Dave's asking is how do you manage across? Do you manage them separately or do you want to manage it together? >> Probably at our maturity level, at this point we're probably really only at the governance stage. So we understand what we've got. We've got a good understanding of our cost structures in the public cloud. We don't nearly have as good as an understanding of our cost structures when we're doing hybrid deployments or on-prem deployments. And so that's probably as far as we've matured at this point, I would say. I think we do want to get to a future state where if we take other considerations in particular latency, the particular nature of that application or any other sovereignty or legal concerns outside, that we want to maintain maximum flexibility. Part of my role in the infrastructure group is to provide that kind of foundation. So, hoarding that workload is seamless across these different cloud providers and those application teams can really position the application where it is the best fit for purpose aligned with the price performance I have in mind. >> So bring it back to Nutanix for a little bit. Where do they fit? Talk about your journey a little bit. Maybe paint of picture of the infrastructure of the before, the after, what business impact it had. >> So there were really a couple of drivers for us through Nutanix. One of them is that as we moved a vast majority of our assets out of our data centers to these various cloud providers, we were left with a number of physical data centers and in many cases now, the only data centers that we're actually left with are our on-prem data centers that were no longer sized in accordance with the workload we want to maintain. Additionally for us, a lot of the investment of moving to the public cloud, we deferred a lot of the regular capital investments that we made in traditional infrastructure and we accepted the aging of that infrastructure but we recognize now that there is a fair amount of infrastructure there we need to maintain for these more local applications. And so, I wanted my team, I challenged my team last year to really take a modern approach, right? I don't want to necessarily assemble everything that we've done in the past, but in a much smaller scale to manage the local applications. I know that conversion, in particular hybrid converge, had matured pretty far by 2016. You know, what are the options out there? And so when we do our due diligence and we settled on Nutanix, we really felt that, it's both pioneering, at times even a little bit scary, because it was moving into a new foray with us. But I think it's worked out tremendously. We've started in our back office so that was actually really for that location if some mission critical workload in terms of how we actually do the fulfillment of our physical books, and we're in the process of bringing on a number of those applications off of traditional infrastructure with your segregation between your blade servers, and your chassis, and your racks, and your fiber storage, and your inline networking switches, and your storage array, and just having one condensed box that's going to run that system. >> So, for your in-house deployments, is that all Nutanix today or what's your mix? >> I'd say Nutanix is probably more, I'm getting up to the 20% range, and so 80% is still on traditional. But my goal is about a year from now that we'll, I don't know if they will be necessarily flipped but it will be more than 50 percent Nutanix. >> Is there anything that you're waiting for from Nutanix to be able to move those or is it just kind of budgets. >> It's our own people and process. >> Yeah, people and process. At this point, we're not, with any of these cloud providers, we're not as much hindered by the technology. The technology at this point is in many cases lapped our ability to actually consume it. We're drinking from several simultaneous fire hoses now, and it's which one we turn our mouths to, so. >> And you're taking advantage of Acropolis hypervisor or? >> Absolutely. That was also one of the key drivers. That was the hyper part of it really. I challenged the team. I said I want a solution where we can present a general purpose operating system and our application stack and to me bringing on a third party hypervisor at this point, it just felt like undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> And the container discussion, is Nutanix part of that too? >> Probably in our early stages. When we look at our workload right now, we don't have any on-prem workload that's been designated with containers. But I know having made the choice of Nutanix, if and when we come to that time, we'll be able to provision that on Nutanix and Acropolis. >> Not sure if you heard actually. This morning there was an announcement of partnership between Google and Nutanix so that should accelerate us on containers. >> I saw. That's very exciting. >> What's exciting about that to you? >> Well Google Cloud is one of the cloud providers we actively use today and I think they've really been a great thought leader in this space. We use a number of their services and I know they've really advanced the community around containers with Kubernetes and some of the technologies that they're working on. They have a very mature cloud offering today. And so I think the opportunity for us, that Google and Nutanix to work more closely together, I think a company like Scholastic is really only going to see the fruits, the benefits, of that relationship, and ease our growth into both platforms. >> Right. Adam, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCube and sharing your insights and your story. >> Adam: Appreciate it, appreciate it. Thanks having me on. >> You're very welcome. >> Adam: Okay. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix.Next. We'll be right back. (techno music)