(lively brass music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's the Cube covering .NEXTconference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> So, you're watching the Cube and there's 55 hundred in attendance, here at the Nutanix .NEXTconference. Getting ready for a big party this evening at Mardi Gras world, get a flavor for the local cuisine and one of the things we always love at the show is, really, being able to dig in with the practitioners. Happy to welcome to the program, first, my guest Mike Spencer, vice president of hosting and managed services at ICF Olson, thanks so much for joining us. >> Well thank you very much for having me. It's been a great event, so far. Very inspiring keynote speech this morning. >> Awesome, so Mike. First of all, it's your first time here at .NEXT, tell us what brought you here and a little bit of background of yourself and your organization. >> Yep, so one of the reasons why we came here is my team is up for an award. We've been a user of the Nutanix platform for about three and a half years and it's done a lot to help us in our position in the marketplace, and so part of this is giving a little bit back, and some of it's, you know, coming to hear about what's next, so. >> So actually, could you tell us, what does this award mean to you, your team, and everything like, some people, like there's vendor awards, there's show awards, and like what's that like? >> Well, you know, I think my team is really excited to have some sort of external validation that, you know, the last three and a half or four years that we've been working towards this, you know, journey towards dev ops and infrastructures code, that somebody externally is starting to recognize that what we've done is great, and appreciating that work, so. >> Alright, so Kieth and I, I think are, you know, excited to dig in, we hear things like dev ops and infrastructures code. Something we've been documenting and talked to a lot of customers about, kind of digital transformation. Can you tell a little bit of the story? Bring us back. What was the challenge? What'd your organization look like and walk us through what you did. >> Yeah, so I think initially, very traditional IT team. Really managing things on a per-server basis, on a per-client basis and really needing that guy there to click next or to pay attention to a server. Really kind of that old adage of treating all of our servers like a pet versus more like cattle, which is where we are today and the efficiency around it. So we had some issues around stability, performance, availability, those types of things that really drove us to take a different look at the way we were doing things and so that's kind of what kicked us off on the journey to start looking at, how do we totally rethink this whole space and bring innovation in, in a space that historically doesn't have a ton of innovation. >> So let's talk about the innovation because, you know, the whole thing, whole thing services, you buy commodity hardware as cheap as possible, let it run as long as possible. When I think of Nutanix, I don't think commodity. Help bring the story together for us. >> Yep, so, you know, as architecturally, as we looked at everything we were doing, one of the unique things that we did is we decided to look at our infrastructure as more of a service-based architecture, which is very much more of a software development look at the world, versus an infrastructure look and some of the key tenants in that space are around driving for simplicity in your environment, and the Nutanix platform helped us eliminate a lot of the specialties that we needed in our area, right? So we are very much a commodity type person when it comes to servers, right? The name on the front of the server wasn't really important but what was really important for us and what Nutanix brought to the table was, they merged together all of the pieces in the server part of the stack down to the network stack. We no longer had to deal with things like storage. I didn't need to have SMEs on staff that were specialists in that space. It helped to simplify our networks. It helped us manage things through a single pane of glass, right? And we did it all in a very cost effective way. For us, it really helped us take that 25% of our labor in that space and refocus about 25% of it into really driving forward with the infrastructures code and dev ops methodologies. >> Mike, what does this mean for your business? Funny, I look at your website. It's a customer experience agency built to help you through this digital transformation. It's like, wow, it's what we're talking about at this kind of show. What does that mean to your company and, you know, your end users? >> So ICF Olson is the marketing services wing of ICF, our parent company, which is a large consulting wing but from a customer experience agency standpoint, we span everywhere from PR, brand, all the way down the stack, including managed services and hosting. A lot of our clients say, hey, you know what, you guys are really good at designing this. Why don't you guys go and run it for us? And so that's really where my art comes into place, is not just the hosting of something but also the running of something and working with the clients. It allowed us to become more of an end to end agency, right? It allowed our clients to focus on things more important like, you know, how they were going to change their brand, how they were going to look at the market, how they were going to advertise. And so from a business perspective, itself, one of the things that it did is it helped enable, you know, frankly we want a lot more business, right? Because we were willing to take these things on. We were able to repeat those types of things with a high level of success, so. >> How do you measure success? >> Success is... In our space, in particular? Honestly it is our clients not having to interact with us. (laughing) Right? We're not the sexy part of the digital ecosystem. (laughing) >> Modernization of data center is a critical piece of it. Clients are looking to you to basically make that invisible. The data center should be just something that they consume. As Nutanix has moved, you've been a customer for three years and Nutanix has moved from a hardware, software appliance, where they're selling you the entire platform to software only solution, how has, what has that meant to your business? >> Well, I mean, it's allowed us to take our focus off being experts in the hardware space. Again, something that didn't necessarily bring value, even in our private cloud. We do manage both public and private cloud but our private cloud space, it allowed us to not have to focus on the energy there and really allowed our infrastructure team to become more of a software development team. So that's been a big, big win for us. >> Talk to us a little bit about the organizational dynamics, rolling out dev ops. What did that mean for your team? You say things are invisible now. Was there a adjustment in head count, or roles, or retraining that you can share? >> Yes to all of that. In its simplest form, yeah. So a lot of people look at the implementation of dev ops being something that's kind of done to an infrastructure team. Right, it's designed to make an infrastructure team look more like a software development team or work more fluidly with a software development team and I think those things are all true but it also helped us transform our overall SDLC for software development. There's a lot of things. As we continue to build skill and trade out skill, right, continue to move up the stack, we basically became middleware developers, to where, now, our software developers for our core products and things that we sell for our clients, and support for our clients, those developers are now working on purely code and the aesthetics of things, the UX side of it. Where we are much more managing the middleware component, which interacts nicely with the hyper-converged platform. Right, Nutanix. There was a shift in labor, without a doubt. As you mature through the process you do a lot of investment in people. Right, making sure that they're kind of keeping up with the times, understanding the new methodologies. Huge shifts from the methodologies that a traditional IT team would use to what a software development team uses, right? It wasn't only moving an infrastructure team into that methodology, it was also getting the business and the software development team we work with used to us working more like them versus more like the old IT team. And so honestly, we probably caught the software development team more off guard than we did ourselves, so. (laughing) >> There's another side of that coin. As you develop that skill, as you develop that capability, retention becomes a problem. There's a natural headcount where, you know what, you don't need as many people to come in at midnight to do firmware revisions, do the low level work, but as they skill up, you look around, you know, you look at what happens in the rest of the dev ops movements, where you have entire teams leaving the fortune 500s to go to another fortune 500 to implement their dev ops. How do you encourage your team to stay? >> So to me, it's all about culture, right? Our team can work remote. They all choose to be in the office, right? They enjoy each other. It's also investing in people and investing in their growth. So it's not always about, necessarily, the size of a paycheck. It's also about work-life balance, the willingness of the organization to invest in their people, and giving them time to innovate. I mean, when you talk to the majority of infrastructure guys or even technology guys out there, what drives them every day is not necessarily their paycheck. That's a side effect of the good work they do. It's really the challenge, the pure problem solving of IT. We give them that opportunity to be able to innovate. >> Tell us a little bit about your Nutanix solution that you have, what you started with, how much you grew, what's not on your Nutanix today? >> So private cloud, we are 100% Nutanix today. We started with a four node environment that was, really, purpose built around our analytics platforms. We were looking for some way to isolate IOPS from our production environment. More of a standard, three tier architecture (clearing throat) and we did some research out there, this is at the same time that we're rethinking the architecture of everything, really kind of looking at the way we do business, and we came across several vendors, one of them being Nutanix. It was a very young company, fairly unproven, in at least our market, but their message was exactly the same message that we had developed and so we decided to take a chance on them. We put them in. You know, we did some load testing between that platform and our traditional platform and were very pleasantly surprised to find what we found. Almost a three X increase in disc IOPS and so we went live with this analytics platform, and really did a lot of testing there, right? And then we kind of started the natural process after we got comfortable with it for about six months of hey, why don't we start working through the life cycle process and bring through, bringing in Nutanix to offset? Instead of buying, you know, a storage shelf, right? I can go get a Nutanix cluster that has the same amount of storage but also brings compute with it. (clearing throat) So once we started doing that, we started putting production workloads onto the Nutanix platform and seeing great results. We expedited our journey. Within about a year and a half, we had replaced all of our traditional stand and compute plaforms. So the infrastructure guys, once they saw it in action, once the business saw the results, even the financial side of it, (laughing) you know, we were almost asked to expedite the process of moving towards Nutanix. Which, for us, it was great because it was less to manage. >> So as you guys moved to the Nutanix infrastructure, talk about the more advanced services that they've offered over the past few years. Specifically, the hypervisor, haven't you guys embraced AHV? >> So we have in dev. We are not running it as our primary hypervisor right now. In our architecture, we run VMware today. I'm not probably supposed to say that here but we run VMware. We have been looking at Acropolis. Really, the way we look at the hypervisor is as a component in our service space architecture. We are in a position where we can replace that because it's not an important part to us. We just haven't had the cycles in our roadmap to be able to put towards the replacement of VMware, yet. But it is certainly something on our roadmap and something we're marching towards because the APIs have continued to evolve on the Nutanix platform, we work quite closely with Nutanix on that. They seem to accommodate a lot of our asks but, yeah, it really has been more of a time thing, you know? There's so many things to code in this space, right now. >> You've got the award but what were you looking to really accomplish this week? Are there sessions you're looking for, are there products you're looking to dig into for you and your team? >> A lot of it was about vision, right? How well does the Nutanix vision align with our vision? And, like I said, from the keynote speeches this morning and some of the new services we see coming out, I think they're doing a great job. Their head is where our head is. They're headed the same direction we are. You know, in a lot of places where we're doing custom development, we can actually go in and say, hey, why don't we acquire this? You know, one of the exciting announcements this morning was around Beam. The ability to do compliance across our cloud platforms. We run today about 50% public cloud, 50% private cloud just depending on what the solution is we're providing, so it gives us that one pane of glass. >> What public clouds are you using and how does that, kind of the hybrid, hybrid world that Nutanix laid out this morning fit into your vision? >> Well, so. The right answer for me should be it shouldn't matter what cloud I'm running. But we are running Azure as well as AWS, just depending on the solution. So we have partnerships on both sides. But we don't necessarily look at them as being a long running relationship because, you know, this is a very, this space is changing at a very rapid pace. You know, who knows who the next person is that's going to stand up that we need to support. So we're very platform-agnostic when you look at it. When we deploy something, it really doesn't matter if it's on private cloud, public cloud, doesn't really matter. To us, it's just all building blocks that we plug in together and let code do its job. So, in that model, you guys do 50% public, 50% private. Nutanix has an opinionated view of cloud. How does that impact your business and services? >> Nutanix's approach? >> Yeah they're vision versus the...? >> Yeah, well I think their vision's great, right? Because it is a fairly agnostic vision. With them being, obviously, wanting the private cloud side of that but understanding that there is no 100%, you know, private cloud and 100% public cloud in today's world. It is all hybrid cloud environment and that certain workloads are better on prim, and certain workloads are better in the public cloud. I think that was in total alignment with everything we do. Our primary job is web hosting. So we deal with geographic workloads all the time. >> Well, Mike Spencer. I wish best of luck to the ICF Olson team. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. >> On the award this afternoon. You're a big winner in our books either way. Kieth Townsend, I'm Stuart Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the Cube. We'll be back with lots more. (electronic music)