>> Live from Washington, DC, it's TheCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to TheCube, Silicon Angle Media's Production here at the NWS Public Sector show in Washington DC, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this week will also be Dave Vellante and John Furrier, doing a day-and-a-half worth of programming, I've covered lots of Amazon ecosystem shows, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, and first-time on the program Dan Fallon, who's the director of Public Sector Systems Engineers at Nutanix, Dan, great to see ya. >> Thank you, Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so you know, you and I have known each other for a number of years. I've been at every .NEXT actually that Nutanix has has, really most of the time at Nutanix, you know, we're talking about people's data centers, but you know, we've been watching how Nutanix really went from, you know, that hyper-converged term that we through out, but now you know, the messaging is around Enterprise Cloud, the portfolio has definitely expanded, as have the partnerships. Give us, Dan, why Nutanix is at the show, and a little bit about your role at the company. >> Yeah, yeah. So, I lead our public sector technical groups systems engineering, so we have all our government business, state, local, and federal, rolled up into one group. So, local show for me in the DC area, and this is our second year attending the Public Sector Summit, so you know, last year it was after our Calm acquisition, we're really starting to step into the space of, I'd say, solving the cloud problem for organizations, and blending your on-prem environment into your public cloud. So, that was you know, kind of our focus last year when the marketing team and we kind of get together, and figure out what shows we're at, we're like "Let's do, you know, AWS", it was kind of a new one, we're like "Alright, we'll be good." I would say it was a hit last year, and then this year, you know, we made some additional acquisitions, and now it's at our large .NEXT conference, and really focusing on Beam and cost optimization. >> Dan, I remember back a couple of years ago, people would, you know, knock on Nutanix, they're like "Ah, they're just VDI, and really, they only work on the government sector." You know, it's like federal is like a big thing, cause they can get to a certain price point that, you know, some person can sign off on, and we're like "Um, government's pretty, you know, pretty impressive segment." You know, you look at this show, I hear we're expecting about 10,000 people, which is typical for these regional shows, but this is more than that, the Public Sector, so tell us a little bit about your customers, and love to hear you talk about what use cases they are, and how they think about cloud, and look at Amazon, and look at Nutanix and how that fits for them. >> Yeah, and I actually just heard from our director of marketing here that it's approaching 14,000, so they're blowing up the attendance. Yeah, and I mean, definitely government is unique, that's kind of why we have it divided into a vertical, and Nutanix was very early on in the federal, and unlike a lot of startup small companies, instead of running away from the additional security burden, the compliance requirements, the leadership, Dheeraj, leaned into it. They said "Alright, let's build out our federal team, let's go our and do common criteria compliance.", some certifications that cost a lot of money. So they really, you know, leaned into that, and helped the organization grow in federal, and that kind became our beach head, and then obviously Nutanix has just grown around the world since then, but across public sector, really a couple different verticals. They actually combined the government units about a year ago, now, so I'm getting more and more familiar with the state and local business, as well as the education, and you can kind of look at those as three separate verticals, and then my kind of background is federal, I've been here doing contracting consulting work for the federal government, and now Nutanix. So, they all kind of have a different spin. In the federal government, since we're in DC, start there first. Really big focus on data center optimization, and Cloud First mandates, so you know, I get into discussions, cause there's really a larger conversation to be had on, like, what is cloud. A lot of people see it as a destination, but really they have scorecards that they need to close, consolidate data centers, and part of that involves moving to the cloud, part of that involves just refactoring their on-prem, and you know, could be hyper-converged, just really getting to a better optimized state in their on-prem data centers. >> Yeah, and one thing I like is when you talk to customers, they don't get into these arguments over, like, "Well, what is a private cloud? How do I measure these public clouds?" They're like "Yes, I have a cloud strategy", and you're right, the government has certain, here's the criteria we need to follow, here's the services you can buy, you know, I'm sure they've got GSA contracts for lots of different things that they can buy off of, but Nutanix has a tool that you're talking about at the show called Beam, why don't you explain how that fits into helping customers understand, you know, what applications they put where, and how they manage their entire infrastructure. >> Yeah, and I think whenever I get into those conversations with cloud, I always like to understand "Alright, why cloud, why are you moving into cloud?", and a lot of times it is higher-level mandates, you know, that there's a presidential memo, there's a new, you know, so there are laws they have to follow in terms of optimization of the data center, but if you peel it back, there are, you know, agility, and getting rapid time to market, but the cost is a big thing, and a lot of times because of those mandates, the cost kind of has to be a second factor, and so it might end up being more expensive because they're not really taking that into consideration. Cause, they're being told to go, so when Nutanix launched Beam at .NEXT, I really see it as a very good play in the public sector space, because I hear agencies kind of get the bill after the fact, and then they have this shock of like "Well our budget for cloud spend this year is going to be eaten up in our first couple months, you know, based on this first bill." So, with Beam, we have a lot of governance and cost control, but also the budgeting aspect, which I think will be huge in government, cause they have a fixed budget, they're not as used to doing things opex, they're very capex minded, so the cloud spend, they kind of have to change how they're thinking, and beam gives them that budget analysis so they can say "Alright, I'm going to spend this much a month", and do the allocation and break it down. >> Yeah, it's funny, for people that don't work with the government, they always hear like "Oh, well they've spent, you know, $100 for a hammer, they're overspending", and on my career, I've worked with government, and you get the calls at the end of the quarter, which is like "Oh my gosh, I haven't actually used up my budget, and I better use it now or I won't get it next quarter, or next year", so, you know, cost absolutely a key concern. Maybe drill us in one down level as to, you know, what kind of things, how does Beam help them, you said understand, optimize what they have, as well as plan for the future. >> Yeah, yeah, so you know, Beam hooks into the public cloud providers, as well as your on-prem staff. There are a couple different views, we've already refactored it into the nice Nutanix UI, so that you have the same look and feel. But, you have a couple different views, you have the cost visibility view, so your spend per day, per month, per year, and then you have an analyze view. So, there's a spend efficiency view, so you can actually get a quick visualization of "Am I getting the best value out of my cloud contract?", and this is, you know, really common in government. They'll cut some type of ELA or longer-term contract, but if you're not using all those credits, or taking the best benefit, you're not getting your RLI. So the spend efficiency will help in that aspect. You know, Beam goes beyond just visibility, so you have ability to do one-click cost controls. So maybe, you know, change things from spot to reserve instances. You can also drill down into the sub-services, so "Oh, that's costing more than I thought, you know, is it my NAT service or my load balancer service, like which exact spot is taking all that cost?" And then, the budget allows you to build cost centers within your org. So, build out and you know, charge back is hit or miss in government, sometimes it's way up at the top of the command, but you know, we are seeing more and more orgs, and especially on the service provider and fed integrator side, you know, common scenario is government contract awarded to a fed integrator, and they build out a private cloud and need to do charge back. So that's another big aspect. >> Yeah, it's so funny. Remember, you know, just a few years ago it's like "Oh, public cloud, it's super easy and super cheap, and like well, when you actually dig into it, well it's different.", is I guess what they would say. Simple isn't necessarily what I would say, and cost depends on what you're doing with it and how you do it, so we talked a little bit about federal. You were telling me off camera that you were seeing a lot of SLED customers here. Give a little insight as to what are some of the concerns, what are some of the real things that, you know, that segment of public sector are looking for at this show in the ecosystem. >> Yeah, it's one reason we love doing this show, and it's a great spot that brings together, cause state and local is so regionalized, you know, 50 states and then all the different counties, and cities, and a lot of them attend here. I, you know, kind of just gotten into public sector when this show happened last year, and I met a lot of our SLED customers here for the first time, so you know, bring them all to one spot, which is rare in state and local, it's a lot more regional conferences. So, the challenge of staying local is because it's so regionalized, and then you really have four verticals within state and local, you have the state business, which kind of mirrors federal in more large enterprise. Some states are adopting Cloud First strategies, some states are kind of still figuring it out. So, some states are mirroring fed government, and they have this kind of Cloud First, and trying to figure out how to make that work. And then, at the local level, you have the county and cities, and they're very scattered on their approach. We have some significant size counties that are using Nutanix with things like CloudConnect to backup into AWS, and then I would say higher ed is probably the most forward leaning in terms of their cloud usage. A lot of higher ed pushing aggressively in the cloud. Actually, where I used to work, Maryland, University of Maryland, aggressive push there. So, they still have a lot of fragmented IT on-prem though, they have different orgs, business school, engineering school with their own kind of little IT fiefdoms, and then you have central IT trying to standardize and make more public cloud usage. So, they have a lot of the same challenges of a big enterprise, where they need to kind of get that visibility and cost control across, not only, the on-prem, but also as they move into public cloud. >> Yeah Dan, one of the things I've loved when I dig into, you know, whether it's the federal government or even the local government, how technology and IT are helping drive innovation. You know, we often think of, you know, you think about government, you know, just mired in bureaucracy, wonder if you have any, you know, customer stories you can share about, you know, fun and interesting things people are doing, you know, on top of the infrastructure transformational type of activities? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you know kind of the buzzword maybe of this year seems to be a lot around the IOT and machine learning, so it's still a lot in the pilot phases, but Nutanix, we announced Project Sherlock at .NEXT, so kind of our approach to really a PAS IOT at the edge, so PAS machine learning at the edge, and we actually just deployed our first customer on the commercial side a week ago. So, still early days, but I would say the interest at the state and local level is huge, you know, Smart City initiatives, self-driving car initiatives, and just the data is overwhelming. So, they're planning ahead, some of them are pretty far along, but there's obviously starts and stops on where these initiatives are going, but the amount of data, and it's all dispersed, and just how to get their arms around that, how to control that, and then in federal there's a lot of requests for machine learning out at the tactical edge, so we have our, you know, soldiers forward deployed, how do they take their imagery and analyze that, and not have to wait 24 hours for someone to come back from the main data center, and that's real lifesaving, game changing. For them to be able to analyze it right then and there, and also big in disaster relief scenarios, so you know, being able to analyze. I was talking to one customer we had at a CXR round table last week at our local .NEXT event, and they were talking about after the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, just how to analyze like, where's there even power, where's the water good, and overlaying all that on imagery. But, right now, that's like 15 different sources that they were trying to pull together into one system, so a lot of challenges like that, that people are trying to address. >> And I love that, Dan. I think you hit right on it. It's data at the center of it. How can I leverage it? How can I get new value out of it. I've talked to some government agencies that are like, you know "How do I transform how we do parking in a city? I have the data, the have some sensors, oh wait, we can actually make an app." Sometimes it's partnering with the commercial side and business, but other times it's government just driving these. Dan, want to give you the final word, you know, we're just kicking off the event, but you know, give us a final takeaway for Nutanix AWS here at Public Sector Summit, what you want the takeaways to be. >> Yeah, well I mean, we're here both days, I encourage everyone to stop by and talk to Nutanix, and really, Beam was just launched, so the great thing is it's our first SAS offering, which is obviously a mind shift for us, but you can demo it just by signing up. But, it's kind of you know, traditional where we've been in the infrastructure market, where we get customers that are like "Oh, I want to try it out", and you have to ship them a system, or they have to download software. Now, it's just "Oh, go sign up on the SAS offering", so I think that'll be a great new delivery vehicle for Nutanix, and I think as we kind of shape our ecosystem of not only different ways to consume with Xi Cloud Services, Beam being SAS, but also different capital models in terms of way the customers purchase. I think that's another big driver around cloud is how the finance side consumes IT, so I think it's great to see, you know, we're kind of expanding, blending into the AWS ecosystem as well, but tying it all together, so people can manage everything from one spot. >> Alright, well Dan Fallon, pleasure chatting with you this morning helping me kick things up, and absolutely, the diversity of technologies, the how we are going to purchase things changing quite a lot, everything from, you know, modernizing our data center to SAS application. You know, I remember at .NEXT I said "Modernize the platform, then we can modernize the applications on top of it", so working through its customers through changes. Alright we have, just like Dan said, day-and-a-half work of coverage here on TheCube, of course, check TheCube dot net for all the recordings, as well as all the shows we'll be at. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching TheCube. (techno music)