(calm music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, and today, I'm talking to Ivanti again and Intel, some breaking news. So please welcome two guests, the EVP and Chief Product Officer of Ivanti, Nayaki Nayyar. She's back, and we've also got the VP and GM of Business Client Salute Platforms for Intel, Stephanie Hallford. Nayaki and Stephanie, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's great to be back here with you Lisa, and Stephanie glad to have you here with us, thank you. >> Thank you, we're excited >> Yeah, you guys are going to break some news for us, so let's go ahead and start. Nayaki, hot off the presses is Ivanti's announcement of its new hyper-automation platform, Ivanti Neurons, helping organizations now in this new next normal of so much remote work. Now, just on the heels of that, you're announcing a new strategic partnership with Intel. Tell me about that. >> So Lisa, like we announced, our Ivanti Neurons platform that is helping our customers and all the IT organizations around the world to deal with this explosive growth of remote workers, the devices that would work is used, the data that it's getting from those devices, and also the security challenges, and Neurons really help address what we call discover all the devices, manage those devices, self-heal those devices, self-secure the devices, and with this partnership with Intel, we are extremely excited about the potential our customers and the benefits that customers can get. Intel is offering what they call Device as a Service, which includes both the hardware and software, and with this partnership, we are announcing the integration between Intel's vPro platform and Ivanti's Neurons platform, which is what we are so excited about. Our joint customers, joint enterprises that are using both the products can now benefit from this out of the box integration to take advantage of this Device as a Service combined offer. >> So Stephanie, talk to us from Intel's perspective. This is an integration of Intel's Endpoint Management Assistant with Ivanti Neurons. How does this drive up the value for the EMA solution for your customers who are already using it? >> Right, well, so vPro is just to step everyone back, vPro is the number one enterprise platform trusted now for over 14 years. We are in a vast majority of enterprises around the world, and that's because vPro is essentially our best performing CPUs, our highest level of security, our highest level manageability, which is our EMA or "Emma" manageability solution, which Ivanti is integrating, and also stability, so that is the promise to IT managers for a stable, the Intel Stable Image platform, and what that allows is IT managers to know that we will keep as much stability and fast forward and push through any fixes as quickly as possible on those vPro devices because we understand that IT networks usually QUAL, you know, not all at one time, but it's sequential. So vPro is our number one enterprise built for business, validated, enabled, and we're super excited today because we're taking that remote manageability solution that comes with vPro, and we are marrying it with Ivanti's top class in point management solution, and Ivanti is a world leader in managing and protecting endpoints, and today more than ever, because IT's remote and Intel. For instance, our IT over one weekend had to figure out how to support a hundred thousand remote workers, so the ability for Ivanti to now have our remote manageability in band, out of band, on-prem, in the cloud, it really rounds out. Ivanti's already fantastic world-class solution, so it's a fantastic start to what I foresee is going to be a great partnership. >> And probably a big target install base. Now, can you talk to me a little bit about COVID as a catalyst for this partnership? So many companies, the stuff they talked about a great example of Intel pivoting over a weekend for a hundred thousand people. We're hearing so many different numbers of an explosion of devices, but also experts and even C-suite from tech companies projecting maybe 30 to 40% of the workforce only will go back, so talk to me about COVID as really driving the necessity for organizations to benefit from this type of technology. >> Yeah, so Lisa, like Stephanie said, right, as Intel had to take hundred thousand employees remote over a weekend, that is true for pretty much every company, every organization, every enterprise independent of industry vertical that they had to take all their workforce and move them to be primarily remote workers, and the stats of BFC is what used to be, I would say, three to four percent before COVID of remote working. Post-COVID or during COVID, as we say, it's going to be around 30, 40, 50%, and this is a conversation and a challenge. Every IT organization, every C-level exec, and, in most cases, I'm also seeing this become a board conversation that they're trying to figure out not just how to support remote workers for a short time, but for a longer time as this becomes the new normal or the next normal, whatever you call that, Lisa, and really helping employees through this transition and providing what we call a seamless experience as we employees are working from home or on the move or location agnostic, being able to provide a experience, a service experience that understands what employee's preferences are, what their needs are, and providing that consumer with experiences, what this joint offering between Intel and Ivanti really brings together for our joint customers. >> So you talked about this being elevated to the board level conversation, you know, and this is something that we're hearing a lot of that suddenly there's so much more visibility and focus on certain parts of businesses, and survival is, so many businesses are at risk. Stephanie, I'd like to get your perspective on how this joint solution with Intel and Ivanti, do you see this as an opportunity to give your customers not just a competitive advantage, but for maybe some of those businesses who might be in jeopardy like a survival strategy? >> Absolutely, I mean, the, you know, while we both Ivanti and Intel have our own IT challenges and we support our workers directly, we are broadly experienced in supporting many many companies that frankly, perhaps, weren't planning for these types of instances, remote manageability overnight, security and cyber threats getting more and more sophisticated, but, you know, tech companies like Ivanti, like Intel, we have been thinking about this and experiencing and planning for these things and bringing them out in our products for some time, and so I think it is a great opportunity when we come together and we bring that, you know, IP expertise and IT expertise, both IP technical and that IT insight, and we bring it to customers who are of all industries, whether it be healthcare or financial or medium businesses who are increasingly being managed by service providers who can utilize this type of device as a service and endpoint manageability. Most companies and certainly all IT managers will tell you they're overwhelmed. They are traditionally squeezed on budget, and they have the massive requirement to take their companies entirely cloud and cloud oriented or maybe a hybrid of cloud and on-prem, and they really would prefer to leave network security and network management to experts, and that's where we can come in with our platform, with our intelligence, we work hard to continue to build that product roadmap to stay ahead of cyber threats. Our vPro platform, for instance, has what we call Intel Hardware Shield to set up technologies that actually protects against cyber attack, even under the OS, so if the OS is down or there's a cyber attack around the OS, we actually can lock down the BIOS and the Firmware and alert the OS and have that communication, which allows the system to protect those areas that need to be protected or lock down or encrypt those areas, so this is the type of thing we bring to the party, and than Ivanti has that absolute in Point Management credibility that there's just, I think, ease, So if IT managers are worried about moving to the cloud and getting workers remote and, you know, managing cyber threats, they really would prefer to leave this management and security of their network to experts like Ivanti, and so we're thrilled to kind of combine that expertise and give IT managers a little bit of peace of mind. >> I think it's even more than giving IT managers a peace of mind, but so talk to me, Nayaki, about how these technologies work together. So for example, when we talked about the Neurons and the hyper-automation platform that you just announced, you were talking about the discovery, the self-healing, self-securing of all these devices within an organization that they may not even know they have EDGE devices on-prem cloud. Talk to me about how these two technologies work together. Is it discovering all these devices first, self-security, self-healing? How does then EMA come into play? >> So let me give an analogy in our consumer world, Lisa. We all are used to or getting used to cars where they automatically heal themselves. I have a car sitting in my garage that I haven't taken to a workshop for last four years since I bought it, so it's almost a similar experience that combined offering things to our customers where all these endpoints, like Stephanie said, we are, I would say, one of the leading providers in the endpoint management where we support today. Ivanti supports over 40 million endpoints for our customers, and combining that with a strong vPro platform from Intel, that combined offering, which is what we call Device as a Service, so that the IT departments or the enterprises don't have to really worry about how we are discovering all of those devices, managing those devices. Self-healing, like if there's any performance issues, configuration drift issues, if there are any security vulnerabilities, anomalies on those devices, it automatically heals them. I mean, that is the beauty of it where IT doesn't have to worry about trying to do it reactively. These neurons detect and self-heal those devices automatically in the background, and almost augmenting IT with what I call these automation bots that are constantly running in the background on these devices and self-healing and self-securing those devices. So that's a benefit every organization, every company, every enterprise, every IT department gets from this joint offering, and if I were on their side, on the other side, I can really sleep at night knowing those devices are now not just being managed, but are secure because now we are able to auto-heal or auto-secure those devices in the background continuously. >> Let's talk about speed cause that's one of the things, speed and scale, we talk about with every different technology, but right now there's so much uncertainty across the globe, so for joint customers, Stephanie talked about the, you know, the large install base of customers on the vPro platform, how quickly would they be able to leverage this joint solution to really get those endpoints under management and start dialing down some of the risks like device sprawl and security threats? >> So the joint offering is available today and being released the integration between both the platforms with this announcement, so companies that have both of our platforms and solutions can start implementing it and really getting the benefit out of it. They don't have to wait for another three months or six months. Right after this release, they should be able to integrate the two platforms, discover everything that they have across their entire network, manage those, secure those devices and use these neurons to automatically heal and service those endpoints. >> So this is something that could get up and running pretty quickly? >> It's an AutoBox connection and integration that we worked very closely, Stephanie's team and my team had been working for months now, and, yeah, this is an exciting announcement not just from the product perspective, but also the benefit it gives our customers, the speed, the accuracy, and the service experience that they can provide to their end user, employees, customers, and consumers, I think, that's super beneficial for everyone. >> Absolutely, and then that 360 degree view. Stephanie, we'll wrap it up with you. Talk to us about how this new strategic partnership is a facilitator or an accelerant of Intel's device as a service vision. >> Well, you know, first off, I wanted to commend Nayaki's team because our engineers were so impressed. They, you know, felt like they were working with the PhD advanced version of so many other engineering partners they'd ever come across, so I think we have a very strong engineering culture between our two companies and the speed at which we were able to integrate our solutions, and at the same time start thinking about what we may be able to do in the future, should we put our heads together and start doing a joint product roadmap on opportunities in the future, network connectivity, wifi connectivity, all sorts of ideas, so huge congratulations to the engineering teams because the speed at which we were able to integrate and get a product offering out was impressive, but, you know, secondarily, on to your question on device as a service, this is going to be by far where the future moves. We know that companies will tend to continue to look for ways to have sustainability in their environments, and so when you have Device as a Service, you're able to do things like into end supporting that device from its start into a network to when you end of life a device and how you end of life that device has severe, some sustainability and costs, you know, complexities, and if we're able to manage that device from end to end and provide servicing to alert IT managers and self-heal before problems happen, that helps obviously not only with business models and, you know, protecting data, but it also helps in keeping systems running and being alert to when systems begin to degrade or if there are issues or if it's time to refresh because the hardware is not new enough to take advantage of the new software capabilities, then you're able to end of life that device in a sustainable way, in a safe way, and, even to some degree, provide some opportunity for remediation of data and, you know, remote erase and continue to provide that security all the way into the end, so when we look at device as a service, it's more than just one aspect. It's really taking a device and being responsible for the security, the manageability, the self-healing from beginning to end, and I know that all IT managers need that, appreciate that, and frankly don't have the time or skillsets to be able to provide that in their own house. So I think there's the beginnings today, and I think we have a huge upside to what we can do in the future. I look at Intel's strengths in enterprise and how long we have been, you know, operating in enterprises around the world. Ivanti's, you know, in the vast majority of Fortune 100s, and when you've got kind of engineering powerhouses that are coming together and brainstorming it's, I think, it's a great partnership for relief for customer pain points in the future, which unfortunately there's going to be more probably. >> And this is just the beginning. >> I think that's one thing we can guarantee. It's what, sorry? >> Yeah, and it's just the beginning. This partnership is just the beginning. You will see lot more happening between both the companies as we define the roadmap into the future, so we are super excited about all the work, the joint teams, and, Stephanie, I want to take this opportunity to thank you, your leadership, and your entire organization for helping us with this partnership. >> We're excited by it, we are, we know it's just the beginning of great things to come. >> Well, just the beginning means we have to have more conversations. The cultural fit really sounds like it's really there, and there's tight alignment with Ivanti and Intel. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me. Nayaki, great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for hosting us, and, Stephanie, it's always a pleasure talking to you, thank you. >> Likewise, looking forward to the launch and all the customer reactions. >> Absolutely. >> Yes, all right, thanks Nayaki, thanks Stephanie. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. 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>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018, three days live coverage, kicking-off day two. On the right set, Michael Dell himself is talking. But I'm even more excited, because when we get to talk to the users here. That's what we love doing; talking, peers talking to their peers. I'm Stu Miniman, my guest host for this segment is, Joep Piscaer. Who's actually a user himself, and joining me, first time on the program, is PJ Romero who is the Principal IT Engineer at Turnitin, out of Oakland. >> Out of Oakland. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu. >> All right, so, PJ, first of all, your forth year at VMworld. Give us your initial impressions, and what brings you back to VMworld? >> VMworld is just getting, re-upping my education, so I'm learning more stuff, seeing what's new on the horizon, to get implemented in my situation. >> All right, you talk about learning more stuff. Tell us about Turnitin. Explain what this is and, you know, I think it'll resonate with a lot of our audience. >> Right. Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. So we're probably in most major universities throughout the world, really big in Europe and here at major universities. >> Okay. >> And we are also in the high school, high school down. >> Okay. Ya, I was wondering about that. My daughter actually starts high school tomorrow, so, make sure she understands that this is serious stuff. I mean, talk about education, I mean, heck, in this community when you talk about certification people are always worried about you know, tests getting out. >> Exactly. >> Things like that. >> Exactly. >> We take education seriously. >> Exactly. >> As a community, as we should. And your role at the company? >> My role; I'm the Principal IT Engineer, so basically I architect the corporate infrastructure, aside from the Turnitin papers. So I manage global infrastructure. >> Before we get into, you know, kind of the infrastructure itself, the business itself. How long has it been around? How long have you been in there? And what is the kind of, you know, mobile-web, digital-transformation impact your business? >> Oh, so everything's mobile now. Everything's on the web. We've migrated out there. We've moved out to the Cloud. And how it's migrated us, so, Turnitin's been around for about 20 years. We just uploaded our billionth paper a few weeks ago. So we have about nine petabytes worth of data to pull from. >> Oh wow. >> So you can imagine how we're getting that from our data centers into the Cloud. With nine petabytes, it's been a challenge. So recently we virtualized some VMware and to make that transition, we had rows and rows of servers to move them out; to virtualize. >> So nine terabytes. That's a lot of data. >> Petabytes. >> Petabytes even. >> Petabytes, ya. >> So tell me, how does that work from a tech perspective? What are you, what are you running, what's that tech stack look like? >> Well, Turnitin is actually a home-grown infrastructure from the ground for the storage. So it's highly available, it's highly redundant, we have multiple data centers new with the GDPR requirements. Now we have data centers in Europe, and we're moving all over the country. We're looking at EMA, APAC, and then South America. (laughing) Get it out there somewhere. >> So you're running your own data centers? >> Yes. >> I presume. >> Yes, we're running our own data centers. >> What does that mean for your hybrid cloud strategy? How much is in your data center? What are you considering to move to the Cloud? How does that impact your business? >> So right now we're probably 75%, 25% and, you know, with the Cloud being elastic as it is, as term papers come up, we're spinning them out. You know, so we're moving. >> Great, okay. So you're virtualized. Do you know what percentage of your applications are virtualized? And maybe walk us through a little bit about the stacks that you have, both on premises, as well as who you use for a public cloud. >> Oh, so we're using AWS and we're also, I think we use, some Google stuff. And Desrrve for some of the development. So we're using all of them, basically; to make sure we're fluid that way. We also do, all the applications, all the web servers are virtualized, and put up in the Cloud. But the main guts of it is still on premise. >> Okay, and what's that stack look like on premises? Who are you using today? >> As far as. >> Like, your whole infrastructure stacks? >> All the infrastructure has been super micro. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> But you're using like, an HCI solution? >> The corporate is. >> Okay. >> The corporate. Ya, I manage the corporate infrastructure. >> Right. >> Ya, we use HCI Solution. >> So whose are you're using. >> I'm using Nutanix. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> Great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got to Nutanix. What apps you use that for? What apps you don't use that for? Maybe help to ease that out a little bit for us. >> Ya, of course. So I have the corporate infrastructure started out when I got there three years ago. I had server-sprawl. I had all physical serves. They weren't virtualizing yet and I got in there and was like, why not? So I did a small PoC with a couple of servers in a NAS that I built homemade and put VMware on it and said, look, this stuff works great. I can move stuff back. I can kill this box. And they were like, wow, that's pretty cool! And then I got a business intelligence project for the financial services. So they were doing some really high-end modeling based on Oracle database, and needed something redundant, powerful and fast to deploy. Well, that was the problem. It was going to take six weeks to get servers in, get them configured, stacked. I got Nutanix in within two weeks. So got Nutanix in there, I think I spent more time convincing them that this is really a to you box and I'm going to stick all our stuff in there, we started out with the three node unit, and got VMware on there to show them what I was doing, and then we deployed our Oracle stack in no time. >> So tell a little about the cost-model behind it. Has it changed the way, using HCI, has it changed the way you do business? Has is made it easier, cheaper faster? >> It's made it cheaper and faster. For me, easier, I don't say the easy part too much 'cause then they wonder what I'm doing. But it's really easy. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's interesting. When you talk about you've had homegrown stuff before. >> Yeah. >> Verses now. I've talked to some Nutanix customers they say, like hey, I got my nights and weekends back. >> Yeah. >> I don't have to worry about so many of the other pieces, maybe you talk a little bit about that dynamic. Did you have any change in personnel? Or who manages what after, or is it you? >> So I'm it. But with the ability to put Nutanix in there and ease of use, I give them access to the dashboards and show them how things work. It's been really simple, especially for some of my newer guys, the younger sys admins, who don't understand virtualization and it's still kind of magic for everybody. But now they got one dashboard. Green heart means good. Everything else, look at it. >> So you're saying you're the wizard now. >> I'm the wizard. >> Pay no attention behind the curtain. (laughing) It got really easy, but I'll just keep that behind. I can do more stuff and I'll just be the superhero. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. It made my monitoring easier for them and my guys love it. They really love it. >> Tell a little bit about how you're using Nutanix. So Nutanix started-out as a virtualization, pure HCI company, but they've broadened their portfolio. So tell us a little bit about how you're using the Nutanix solution inside of your data centers. >> Right, so originally I put Nutanix with a virtualization product or the financial product. I was able to get a forth node. So I was able to use their analytics in there and say, hey, we're going to run out of space. So I'm running 47 machines on four nodes and I still have high redundancy. But I had no back-ups. So what do we do? So I got a second box, I put it inside of one of my other data centers and used that for replication in the back. And now with the Zy coming out, I'm going to start pushing that up to the Cloud, and start moving my single data center, toothpick as it were, it's going to be in the Cloud quickly. >> And you mentioned Oracle's, the application that catalyzed this. All certified, didn't have any issues. >> No issues. >> That's awesome. >> It was great. >> Those of us in the virtualization community, how many years did we spend just virtualizing Oracle, let alone, every new platform. It's challenging. >> Exactly. >> Your peers? All clear? They don't have to worry about it? >> Oh ya, they love it, they love it. They can't believe I got it all in the to you box. I like to take the picture of it and say, here's their stuff. I don't need this big stack, I just need the little box. (laughing) >> So basically, your whole operational model changed I'm guessing? You're not spending as much time anymore on operational issues. >> No. It's more of architecture now. We start moving the Cloud. I'm getting away from virtualizing more of the applications that we use. We just use basic active directory and DNS and that stuff. So it's all fine but, I'm going to start moving it so I push the button it will be in the Cloud, and I can literally lose my data center. >> Talk a little bit about the Zy. We've heard a lot the vision, so what's the roadmap for you to kind of embrace, adopt that? What's interesting to you about it? >> For me, I'm going to take the financial stack and really moving it right now in the tip is re-iping, it's a lot of back-end work. With the Zy, it should be a click and I mean, I've seen the database, so we're talking right now to get that done. It should be a click of the button and it's going to spin me up an AWS. So that's where I'm going next with my next project. That looks pretty cool. >> Okay, the rest of your applications, will you expand your Nutanix environment? Is this something to help you deal with that hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah. >> What does the future look like? >> If I have my way, as I age-out my remote sites, we'll be putting more Nutanix out there. And then I can do more three to one back-ups. >> That frees-up even more time to be spending on future architecture. >> Yep, exactly. >> Instead of just the operational stuff. >> Yep, I'm making it so we can lose any leg and we're going to be fine. >> One of the things that everyone's poking at at this show is that whole multi-cloud environment. We said, I can make my data center kind of simple today. >> Yeah. >> But, multi-cloud, most people, at least I talked to, it's not simple. The Cloud is a little bit complex, it's not just swipe a credit card anymore. Managing between multiple environments, depending on how many clouds you have. What have you seen today? What would you like to see get even better over time? >> I'd like to see where Nutanix is going really, with the single-environment. I want to go one-spot. And right now I'm going to one-spot for my virtualization and all my on-prem stuff, but as I move up to the Cloud and spin stuff up, I want to go to the same spot. I don't want to have to think about it so much. Simple is good for me. I'm big in the KISS system. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Keep it simple. >> That's right. >> Engineering design, absolutely. >> I imagine your role is changing as well, right? It is becoming simpler, you get to spend more time on new projects. How is your role changing as an IT Engineer? >> I'm getting to think more. I'm not reactive anymore at all. When I got there it was a very reactive environment. And now it is more on design and how we can make sure we can tighten-up securities. We went through a whole bunch of new sox audits. And it's made it simple. It's made it simple for me. We're all in compliance now within the physical hardware and security and now, some of the other touches I'm able to think about and get those implemented. >> So outside of the Nutanix stuff, at VMworld, what kind of things are you digging into, learning, anything excite you that you either heard from your peers or announcements or sessions you've been in? >> VDI is still exciting to me. I'm still looking at those projects, and I have just enough space to do a PoC on my stuff, so I'm talking to management about that. As soon as I can show them they can do anything, from a web browser, I'd like to give them Chrome Books, and say, have a nice day. (laughing) >> It's funny you say that, because most people think of the HCI space and like, you start with VDI. And now you're like, oh well now I've got some fair capacity, I'm guessing. I can put in environment, manage it. Yeah, do some of the dynamics inside the company sounds like they're some of the bigger challenges. Always for VDI, has been a challenge. >> Yeah, it's always a challenge but so far, everything I've said's worked for them, so I've got a good trust-base. >> PJ Romero, really appreciate you talking about Turnitin. No plagiarism at this show, right? (laughing) >> That's right. We'll check. (laughing) >> PJ Romero, Turnitin, really appreciate you joining us. For you, Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage. Wall-to-wall, here at VMworld2018. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)