>> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, CUBE nation, I'm Sam Kahane. Thanks for watching the CUBE. Due to popular demand from the community, I will be interviewing the legendary Stu Miniman, here today. He is S-T-U on Twitter. Stu and I are going to be digging in to the 2019 predictions, and also recapping 2018 for you here. So, Stu, let's get into it a little bit. 2018, can you set the stage? How many events did you go to? How many interviews did you conduct? >> Boy, Sam, it's tough to look back. We did so much with the CUBE this year. I, personally, did over 20 shows, and somewhere between 400 and 450 interviews, out of, we as a team did over a 100 shows, over 2000 interviews. So, really great to be in the community, and immerse ourselves, drink from the fire hose, and some of the data. (laughs) >> So, over 400 interviews this year, that's amazing. What about some of the key learnings from 2018? Yeah, Sam,my premise when I'm going out is, how are we maturing? My background, as you know, Sam, I'm an infrastructure guy. My early training was in networking. I worked on virtualization, and I've been riding this wave of cloud for about the last 10 years. So, about two years ago, it was, software companies, how are they living in these public clouds? Amazon, of course, the dominant player in the marketplace, but we know it will be a multi-cloud world. And the update, for 2018, is we've gone from, how do I live in those public clouds, to how are we maturing? We call it hybrid clouds, or multi-cloud, but living between these worlds. We saw the rise in Kubernetes, as a piece of it, but customers have lots of environments, and how they get their arms around that, is a serious challenge out there, today. So, how are the suppliers and communities, and the systems integration, helping customers with this really challenging new environment, that we have today. >> I'd love to hear any OMG moments from you. What surprised you the most this year? >> It's interesting, when I wanna think about some of the big moves in the industry, I mean, we had the largest software acquisition in tech history. IBM, the company you used to work for, Sam, buying Red Hat, a company I've worked with, for about 20 years, for 34 billion dollars. I mean, Red Hat has been the poster child for open source, and the exemplar of that. It was something that was like, wow, this is a big deal. We've been talking for a long time, how important developers are, and how important open source is, and there's nothing like seeing Big Blue, a 107-year-old company, putting in huge dollars, to really, not just validate, cause IBM's been working in open source, working with Linux for a long time, but how important this is to the future. And that sits right at that core of that multi-cloud world. Red Hat wants to position itself to live in a lot of those environments, not just for Linux, but the Middleware, Kubernetes is a big play. We saw a number of acquisitions in the space there. Red Hat bought CoreOS for $250 million. VMware bought Heptio, and was kind of surprised, at the sticker shock, $550 million. Great team, we know the Heptio team well. We talked to them, some of the core people, back when they were at Google. But, some big dollars are being thrown around, in this space, and, as you said, the big one in the world is Amazon. One of the stories that everybody tracked all year was the whole hq2 thing. It kind of struck me as funny, as Amazon is in Seattle. I actually got to visit Seattle, for the first time, this year, and somebody told me, if you look at the top 50 companies that have employees in Seattle, of course, Amazon is number one, but you need to take number two through 43, and add them together, to make them as big as Amazon. Here in Boston, there's a new facility going up, with 5,000 employees. I know they're going to have 25,000 in Long Island City, right in the Queens, in New York City, as well as Crystal City, right outside of DC, 25,000. But, the realization is that, of course, Amazon's going to have data centers, in pretty much every country, and they're going to have employees all around the world. This doesn't just stay to the US, but Amazon, overall. So, Amazon, just a massive employer. I know so many people who have joined them. (laughs) Some that have left them. But, almost everything that I talk about, tends to come back to Amazon, and what there are doing, or how people are trying to compete, or live in that ecosystem. >> You're always talking to the community. What are some of the hottest topics you're hearing out there? >> So, living in this new world, how are we dealing with developers? A story that I really liked, my networking background, the Cisco DevNet team, led by Suzie Wee, is a really phenomenal example, and one of my favorite interviews of the year. I actually got to talk to Suzie twice this year. We've known her for many years. She got promoted to be a Senior Vice President, which is a great validation, but what she built is a community from the ground up. It took about four years to build this platform, and it's not about, "Oh, we have some products, and developers love it.", but it's the marketplace that they live in, really do have builders there. It's the most exciting piece of what's happening at Cisco. My first show for 2019 will be back at Cisco, live in Barcelona, and Cisco going through this massive transformation, to be the dominant networking company. When they talk about their future, it is as a software company. That actually, it blew my mind, Sam. You know, Cisco is the networking company. When they say, "When you think of us, "five to ten years from now, "you won't think of us as a networking company. "You'll think of us as a software company." That's massive. They were one of the four horsemen of the internet era. And, if Cisco is making that change, everything changes. IBM, people said if they don't make this move for Red Hat, is there danger in the future? So, everything is changing so fast, it is one of the things that everybody tries to sort out and deal with. I've got some thoughts on that, which I'm sure we'll get to later on. >> (laughs) As is Suzie Wee one of your top interviews of 2018, could you give your top three interviews? >> First of all, my favorite, Sam, is always when I get to talk to the practitioners. A few of the practitioners I love talking to, at the Nutanix show in New Orleans this year, I talked to Vijay Luthra, with Northern Trust. My co-host of the show was Keith Townsend. Keith, Chicago guy, said, "Northern Trust is one "of the most conservative financial companies", and they are all-in on containerization, modernized their application. It is great to see a financial company that is driving that kind of change. That's kind of a theme I think you'll see, Sam. Another, one, was actually funny enough, Another Nutanix show, at London, had the Manchester City Council. So, the government, what they're doing, how they're driving change, what they're doing with their digital transformation, how they're thinking of IOT. Some of my favorite interviews I've done the last few years, have been in the government, because you don't think of government as innovating, but, they're usually resource-constrained. They have a lot of constituencies, and therefore, they need to do this. The Amazon public sector show was super-impressive. Everything from, I interviewed a person from the White House Historical Society. They brought on Jackie O's original guidebook, of being able to tour the White House. So, some really cool human interest, but it's all a digital platform on Amazon. What Amazon is doing in all of the industry-specific areas, is really impressive. Some of these smaller shows that we've done, are super-impressive. Another small show, that really impressed me, is UiPath, robotic process automation, or RPA, been called the gateway drug to AI, really phenomenal. I've got some background in operations, and one of the users on the program was talking about how you could get that process to somewhere around 97 to 98% compliance, and standardize, but when they put in RPA, they get it to a full six sigma, which is like 99.999%, and usually, that's something that just humans can't do. They can't just take the variation out of a process, with people involved. And, this has been the promise of automation, and it's a theme. One of my favorite questions, this year, has been, we've been talking about things like automation, and intelligence in systems, for decades, but, now, with the advent of AI machine learning, we can argue whether these things are actually artificial intelligence, in what they are learning, but the programming and learning models, that can be set up and trained, and what they can do on their own, are super-impressive, and really poised to take the industry to the next level. >> So, I wanna fast forward to 2019, but before we do so, anything else that people need to know about 2018? >> 2018, Sam, it's this hybrid multi-cloud world. The relationship that I think we spend the most time talking about, is we talked a lot about Amazon, but, VMware. VMware now has over 600,000 customers, and that partnership with VMware is really interesting. The warning, of course, is that Amazon is learning a lot from Vmware, When we joke with my friends, we say, "Okay, you've learned a lot from them means that "maybe I don't need them in the long term." But in the short term, great move for VMware, where they've solidified their position with customers. Customers feel happy as to where they live, in that multi-cloud environment, and I guess we throw out these terms like hybrid, and multi, and things like that, but when I talk to users, they're just figuring out their digital transformation. They're worried about their business. Yes, they're doing cloud, so sassify what you can, put in the public cloud what makes sense, and modernize. Beware of lift and shift, it's really not the answer. It could be a piece of the overall puzzle, to be able to modernize and pull things apart. An area, I always try to keep ahead of what the next bleeding-edge thing is, Sam. A thing I've been looking at, deeply, the last two years, has been serverless. Serverless is phenomenal. It could just disrupt everything we're talking about, and, Amazon, of course, has the lead there. So, it was kind of an undercurrent discussion at the KubeCon Show, that we were just at. Final thing, things are changing all the time, Sam, and it is impossible for anybody to keep up on all of it. I get the chance to talk to some of the most brilliant people, at some of the most amazing companies, and even those, you know, the PhD's, the people inventing stuff, they're like, "I can't keep up with what's going on at my company, "let alone what's going on in the industry." So, that's the wrong thing. Of course, one of the things we helped to do, is to extract the signal from the noise, help people distill that. We put it into video, we put it into articles, we put it into podcasts, to help you understand some of the basics, and where you might wanna go to learn more. So, we're all swimming in this. You know, the only constant, Sam, in the industry is change. >> Absolutely. (laughing in unison) >> So, things are changing. The whole landscape, as you said, is changing. Going into 2019, what should people expect? Any predictions from you? Any big mergers and acquisitions you might see? >> It's amazing, Sam. The analogy I always use is, when you have the hundred year flood, you always say, "Oh gosh, we got through it, "and we should be okay." No, no, no, the concern is, if you have the hundred year flood, or the big earthquake, the chances are that you're going to have maybe something of the same magnitude, might even be more or less, but rather soon. A couple of years ago, Dell bought EMC, largest acquisition in tech history. We spent a lot of time analyzing it. By the way, Dell's gonna go public, December 28. Interesting move, billions of dollars. As Larry Ellison said, "Michael Dell, "he's no dummy when it comes to money.' He is going to make, personally, billions of dollars off of this transaction, and, overall, looks good for the Dell technologies family, as they're doing. So, that acquisition, the Red Hat acquisition, yeah, we're probably gonna see a 10-to-20 billion dollar acquisition this year. I'm not sure who it is. There's a lot of tech IPOs on the horizon. The data protection space is one that we've kept a close eye on. From what I hear, Zeam, who does over a billion dollars a year, not looking to go public. Rubrik, on the other hand, somewhere in the north of 200 million dollars worth of revenue, I kind of remember 200, 250 in run rate, right now, likely going to go public in 2019. Could somebody sweep in, and buy them before they go public? Absolutely. Now, I don't think Rubrik's looking to be acquired. In that space, you've got Rubrik, you've got Cohesity, you've got a whole lot of players, that it has been a little bit frothy, I guess you'd say. But, customers are looking for a change in how they're doing things, because their environments are changing. They've got lots of stuff in sass, gotta protect that data. They've got things all over the cloud, and that data issue is core. When we actually did our predictions for 2018, data was at the center of everything, when I talked about Wikibon. It was just talking to Peter Burris and David Floyer, and they said there is some hesitancy in the enterprise, like, I'm using Salesforce, I'm using Workday I'm using ServiceNow. We hear all the things about Facebook giving my data away, Google, maybe the wrong people own data, there's that concern I want to pull things back. I always bristle a little bit, when you talk about things like repatriation, and "I'm not gonna trust the cloud." Look, the public clouds are more secure, than my data centers are in general, and they're changing and updating much faster. One of the biggest things we have, in IT, is that I put something in, and making changes is tough. Change, as we said, is the only thing constant. It was something I wrote about. Red Hat, actually, is a company that has dealt with a lot of change. Anybody that sells anything with Linux, or Kubernetes, there are so many changes happening, on not only weekly, but a daily basis, that they help bring a little bit of order, and adult supervision, to what most people would say is chaos out there. That's the kind of thing we need more in the industry, is I need to be able to manage that change. A line I've used many times is, you don't go into a company and say, "Hey, what version of Azure are you running?" You're running whatever Microsoft says is the latest and greatest. You don't have to worry about Patch Tuesday, or 08. I've got that things that's gonna slow down my system for awhile. Microsoft needs to make that invisible to me. They do make that thing invisible to me. So does Amazon, so does Google. >> What's your number one company to watch, this upcoming year. Is it Amazon, Sam? Look, Amazon is the company at the center of it all. Their ecosystem is amazing. While Amazon adds more in revenue, than the number two infrastructure player does in revenue. So, look, in the cloud space, it is not only Amazon's world. There definitely is a multi-cloud world. I went to the Microsoft show for the first time, this year, and Microsoft's super-impressive. They focus on your business applications, and their customers love it. Office 365 really helped move everybody towards sass, in a big way, and it's a big service industry. Microsoft's been a phenomenal turnaround story, the last couple of years. Definitely want to dig in more with that ecosystem, in 2019 and beyond. But, Amazon, you know, we could do more shows of the CUBE, in 2019, than we did our first couple of years. They have, of course, Amazon re:Invent, our biggest show of the year, but their second year, it's about 20 shows, that they do, and we're increasing those. I've been to the New York City Summit, and the San Francisco Summit. I've already mentioned their Public Sector Summit. Really, really, really good ecosystems, phenomenal users, and I already told you how I feel about talking to users. It's great to hear what they're doing, and those customers are moving things around. Google, love doing the Google show. We'll be back there in April. Diane Greene is one of the big guests of the year, for us this year. I was sorry to miss it in person, 'cause I actually have some background. I worked with Diane. Back before EMC bought VMware. I had the pleasure of working with Vmware, when they were, like, a hundred person company. Sam, one of the things, I look back at my career, and I'm still a little bit agog. I mean, I was in my mid-20s, working in this little company, of about 100 people, signed an NDA, started working with them, and that's VMware, with 600,000 customers. I've watched their ascendancy. It's been one of the pleasures of my career. There's small ones, heck. Nutanix I've mentioned a couple of times. I started working them when they were real small. They have over a billion in revenue. New Cure, since the early days. Some companies have done really well. The cloud is really the center of gravity of what I watch. Edge computing we got into a bit. I'm surprised we got almost 20 minutes into this conversation, without mentioning it. That, the whole IOT space, and edge computing, really interesting. We did a fun show with PTC, here in Boston. Got to talk to the father of AI, the father of virtual reality. It's like all these technologies, many of which have been bouncing around for a couple of decades. How are they gonna become real? We've got a fun virtual reality place right next door. The guy running the cameras for us is a huge VR enthusiast. How much will those take the next step? And, how much are things stalling out? I worry, was having conversations. Autonomous vehicles, we're even looking at the space. Been talking about it. Will it really start to accelerate? Or have we hit road blocks, and it's gonna get delayed. Some of these are technologies, some of these are policies in place, in governments and the like, and that's still one of the things that slows down crowded options. You know, GDPR was the big discussion, leading into the beginning of 2018. Now, we barely talk about it. There's more regulations coming, in California and the like, but we do need to worry about some of those macro-economical and political things that sometimes get in the way, of some of the technology pieces. >> I'd love to put something out into the universe, here. If you could interview anyone in the world, who would it be? Let's see if we can make it happen. It's amazing to me, Sam, some of the interviews we've done. I got a one-on-one with Michael Dell this year. It was phenomenal, Michael was one. It took us about three or four years before we got Michael on the program, the first time. Now, we have him two or three times a year. Really, to get to talk to him. There is the founder culture John Furrier always talks about. Some of these founders are very different. Michael, amazing, got to speak to him a couple of times. There's something that makes him special, and there's a reason why he's a billionaire, and he's done very well for himself. So, that was one. Furrier also interviewed John Chambers, who is one of the big gets I was looking at. I was jealous that I wasn't able to get there. I got to interview one of my favorite authors this year, Walter Isaacson, at the shows. When I look at, Elon Musk, of course, as a technologist, is, I'm amazed. I read his bio, I've heard some phenomenal interviews with him. Kara Swisher did a phenomenal sit-down on her podcast with him. Even the 60 Minutes interview was decent this year. >> The Joe Rogan one was great >> Yeah, so, you'd want to be able to sit down. I wouldn't expect Elon to be a 15-minute, rapid-fire conversation, like we usually have. But, we do some longer forms, sit down. So he would be one. Andrew Jassy, we've interviewed a number of times now. Phenomenal. We've got to get Bezos on the program. Some of the big tech players out there. Look, Larry Ellison's another one that we haven't had on the program. We've had Mark Hurd on the program, We've had lots of the Oracle executives. Oracle's one that you don't count out. They still have so many customers, and have strong power in new issues, So there are some big names. I do love some of the authors, that we've had on the program, some thought leaders in the space. Every time we go to a show, it's like, I was a little disappointed I didn't get to interview Jane Goodall, when she was at a show. Things like that. So, we ask, and never know when you can get 'em. A lot of times, it's individual stories of the users, which are phenomenal, and there's just thousands of good stories. That's why we go to some small shows, and make sure we always have some editorial coverage. So that, if their customers are comfortable sharing their story, that's the foundation our research was founded on. Peers sharing with their peers. Some of the most powerful stories of change, and taking advantage of new technologies, and really transforming, not just business, but health care and finance, and government. There's so much opportunity for innovation, and drivers in the marketplace today. >> Stu, I love it. Thanks for wrapping up 2018 for us, and giving us the predictions. CUBE nation, you heard it here. We gotta get Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison on the CUBE this year. We could use your help. Stu, thank you, and CUBE nation, thank you for watching. (electronic techno music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. (techy music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost Joep Piscaer, and this is Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Always happy to have a customer on the program, and even more when we've got a CIO, the ones that are sitting in the hot seat. Bob Brown, who's the CIO of information, communication, and technology with Manchester Gov. Thank you for having, you know, the show in your home country, and a pleasure to talk with you. >> Great, thanks for letting me be joining your panel today. >> So, Bob, you know, I've been an analyst for about, coming up on nine years now, and the role of the CIO is something that just gets, you know, looked at under a microscope. It's, you know, how's the role changing, you know, is there a future for the CIO? Does everything does just go away? Does the CMO take it, who takes your budget? So, I'm sure in your role things are, you know, nice and mellow. You kind of sit in a comfy chair, everybody comes and asks you for things nicely and throws money at you, did I get things right? >> That's completely at the different end of the scale of where my business is. >> Yeah. >> Completely untrue. >> Yeah. >> There's no comfy chair, to start with. Let's be honest, right? (chuckling) Our business is 24 by seven, so within the context of what most people think of local government, we're providing critical services that are fundamentally helping our entire 600,000 residents in Manchester to interact with our council services, and they need to do that at a time that's convenient for them. >> Yeah. >> So, it's constantly evolving, constant challenges, and inevitably public sector life, financially, hugely difficult for us to balance the books. >> You know, bring us insight to this. You've got 600,000 customers, you know. >> Yeah. >> Are they all stopping you at the, you know, local grocery and being, like, you know, "Hey, I need this done," or "This isn't working right?" What are, you know, some of the big things that are, you know, impacting you? What's happening in your space? >> Yeah, okay, well look, we've got 7,500 colleagues that work at the council, and we're supporting 600,000 people, nearly 600,000 people that live in the area, and they live in the area for all sorts of reasons, okay. Some of them are part of the digital transformation that is going on, some of them are moving to the area because of the economic buoyancy that we have within the region. I think outside of London, Manchester is the place that people want to be, and they're seeing a big explosion of new jobs and innovation, and we've got big brands, Google are there, Amazon have just launched new services that they're bringing, 600 new, high quality digital jobs into the area. We've got Microsoft there, this is an enormous digital economy that's constantly evolving, and inevitably, those people that are studying at our big universities want to live and work in an environment that is conducive for their personal development, their career direction, but they live in the city, they want to be using services in a way that is more modern than ever before, and they want to take the experiences that they perhaps had in different cities and different countries and know that they can get those, and beyond, in Manchester. >> And so, you know, if people... You know, I'm betting they have different expectations now. So, you know, it used to be you go up to an office, you get a ticket, and you ask your question, right? I'm assuming that experience has changed as well for Manchester, for the government, so servicing your customers in a more digital way, basically? >> Yeah, very much so. Look, I've been at Manchester City Council now just over three years, and in that time I think it's true to say that the services weren't quite where they needed to be. There was some element of investment that was needed, and we've had to pull, really, a good transformation approach together. We've had to up skill many of the team. We've had to look to attract some new people with some new experiences into the group, and we've had to fundamentally change the relationship between what was the technology function, and somewhat isolated from frontline business into it being a critical enabler of transformation for our entire council. That's really what we've had to do. >> I love that, Bob, you've kind of teed up the digital transformation story, which has been, you know, at the heart of a lot of the discussions we've been having for the last couple of years. I wonder if you can help us walk through that a little bit, you know, what have you done kind of on the, you know, foundational platform infrastructure layer to change-- >> Yeah. >> What's happening on the applications on top of that, and then the people side, of course, is you know, immensely-- >> Yeah, of course. >> Important that you raise. >> Look, in our world I think it's helpful, I think, to firstly, set the agenda, and our agenda is predicated on service and availability of our services being our number one priority, so therefore, any down time, any lack of availability, any service failure has a core direct relationship impact with the people who are using our services. When you work in local authority terms, some of your others may be aware of this, or maybe others that are listening to this today, we're not dealing with inconvenience factors if services fail. This isn't an ATM card not working to give you £20 from the hole in the wall. Whilst that's hugely frustrating, I get that, in my world, if certain services aren't available, we're not helping some of the most vulnerable people that need our services to work. We could be making decisions that affect their lives. We could be making decisions that are also helping people to process, unfortunately, those that have passed away. Our coroner's service, a critical service that we provide at the council. You must remember, we're dealing with, truly, the lives of the people who use our services, and those, not just that emotional connection that we therefore have as residents, it really extends beyond technology. Technology, for me, is an enabling function for us that has got to be always available, hence why we make some of the decisions that we do around the core infrastructures that we have. So, for me, the core infrastructure is our foundation level, of which we build our reputation, we build our services on, we build the reliance that we have as an organization. Our use of Nutanix as a technology enables us to be able to build greater levels of resilience, also, so that if we do have a failure, the reality is that our user base will likely never know it's happened, only my team may, but for us, that foundation level gives us the ability to then start more strategic conversations with our business. It's very difficult to have a strategic relationship about change when you fundamentally can't provide the core service, so you've got to start there. >> So, tell us a little about, you know, what is your use of Nutanix. How do you use it and how does it improve that foundational level to actually deliver those services to your customers? >> Well, for us, our journey started about six months ago, and we're already transitioning, in fact, nearly getting to the end of the first stage of our journey of transitioning into the hyperconverged infrastructure, which is critical for us for many, many different reasons. Our fundamental business case was around our ability to be able to clearly change our whole dynamics around resilience, but also reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the number of servers that we have to power so our power consumption has changed. We're already delivering on some of those business case values in a very, very short space of time, so for us, the ability to pick up our infrastructure and be able to now put that in a new environment has created, already, a significant change for our organization, and one that we can build on. >> Okay, yeah, Bob, since it's so recent, you know, give us, paint us a little picture kind of the before and after, like did it reduce the amount of people that needed to focus specifically on infrastructure? Did you have to do some rescaling? You said you've done some, you know, changes in personnel and hiring and training recently. Help us understand. >> Yeah. Yeah, look, in our case, we needed to look at technology enabling us to be able to demonstrate and deliver on our core strategic objectives. So, for me, our data center is very much about how we house and how we service with keeping our data safe and secure and always available. That enables us to be able to also support some elements of our social value, so for us, the ability to be working with a partner who are absolutely strategically aligned with where our strategic direction is as an organization is fundamental for us, and our ability to be able to therefore then no longer need some of those personnel who were providing day-to-day services around the data center, because those skills now can be used elsewhere within my service. We've got a situation where we can now be confident that the resilience of that new infrastructure is such that we no longer need to have an individual babysitting those services, now where that technology enables us to be able to do it automatically. >> All right, you mentioned that you're finishing phase one, so maybe can you step back and whatever you're allowed to share, a little bit of-- >> Sure. >> What is the phased approach, you know, where do you go with Nutanix and the surrounding solutions with it? >> Well, look, our use of Nutanix and our ability to be able to partner with what is clearly a recognized Gartner Magic Quadrant, top right organization, enables us to be able to get access to some further elements of innovation. The difficulty in the public sector of having an R&D function is frankly, it's impossible. Our relationship with our partners is how we leverage, frankly, innovation, and where we get some of that from. So, the first stage for us was very much about getting some of the core foundations there, but beyond that it's about how they can help us also unlock other elements of our strategic goals and objectives, and one of those is about how we can use our new relationships. In Manchester we have devolved budgets from central government, enabling our health colleagues and our local authority colleagues come closer together, for us to share information, share data, and for us to be able to make even greater, richer decisions about the care and support of people. In some cases, that is going to enable us to be able to use assisted living technology that's going to be housed and run in our new data center environment that is going to fundamentally change the way that we provide healthcare services in the future. That's a real strategic aim for us. >> You know, how does IoT fit into your future plans? I don't know if it's tied with, if you've talked to Nutanix about what they're doing there. >> Yeah. >> But it's been something I've found a lot of governments similar to yours are looking in that space. >> Look, I think IoT is inevitably something that people like me have to consider and think about. I guess I would say that IoT is, at one level, a whole bunch of individual devices that work on their own platforms that don't talk to each other, and in the healthcare space, that ain't going to work for us. That's just not going to be it. We're going to have to have a platform by which those that are providing the healthcare services, using technology that's deployed in a patient, and now a resident scenario, to fundamentally change that dial from it's providing what is a reactionary healthcare service and being much more proactive, so those data sets have got to come together, and that ability for us, then, to be able to use that data to help us do predictive analytics in the future, and for us to be able to stop the ability for somebody to get so ill they have to go back into the acute care scenario is crucial, and that's, again, for us is how we think IoT has to, for us, develop a relationship with our various partners who discretely provide those services by bringing those things together, and that's where I think our relationship with Nutanix will help us unlock, and really discover, how we might be able to manage that and deliver some of those things quickly. >> So, one of the things that you do as a CIO is, you know, think about the hybrid cloud strategies, right? So, you're talking about these separate data silos that you and your partners have now, so what is your strategy to, you know, combine those data sets, or open them up so that you as a government can actually leverage that data from, you know, no matter where it runs, no matter where it is stored? >> Yeah, I think we're at early stages of our data strategy for the council. We certainly have a federated business model that is evident for all to see, and most local authorities are somewhat similar. I think the challenge for us in the future's going to be how we unlock the power of the data that we capture and the relationships that we have today. At the council, one of the key strategic objectives over the next few years is for us to deliver a new customer relationship management function. That will fundamentally enable us to change the way that we are structured internally, the way our organization responds to the way that the different interactions are going to come. Roughly, today, about 50% of our interactions with our customers, with our residents of Manchester, are through a digital channel. That means there's about 50% that have a different experience, and we know we need to change that. So, you know, for us, by really having a strategic vision in terms of where our data strategy needs to be is it enables us to think about that technology that's going to enable us to get there in the future. >> All right, Bob, last thing I want to ask you is it sounds like you've got a lot of moving pieces. If you could go to kind of the vendor ecosystem, so not just Nutanix, but you know, other companies you work with, you know, what could they be doing to make your life easier? >> Look, I think that's a double-edged sword, right? I think the first thing as a public sector, we've got to learn how to get the best from our partners. I think we've got to also create that situation where our partners meet with leadership on a regular basis, and that they've got the opportunity to then talk about, not just the contracts and the SLA and the regular series performance stuff, but much more beyond that. I think as a public sector we've got to open ourselves up to having those conversations more, and I would like our partners to push us to deliver that, if I'm honest. I had our partner event yesterday. We shared a lot about what's going on in the city, a lot about the challenges, but it's true to say today that I'm probably one of, if not the only, local authority doing that. I think I'd like more local authorities to be doing that, and I'd like our partners to be pushing us. It's true in that environment I saw yesterday Nutanix mixing with people from Google, mixing with people from Dell, mixing with people from other brands, for them to be able to also recognize how they can collaborate to bring solutions through to us. >> Well, Bob, really appreciate you sharing with our community what's going on. Congratulations on what you're doing, and wish you the best of luck. >> Many thanks, great tea time, thank you. >> All right, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London, thanks for watching theCUBE. (techy music)