>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]