>> Voiceover: Live from Washington, D.C., it's The Cube covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix .NEXT Con, this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage, and we're here just outside of Washington, D.C. John Walton is here, he's the CIO of San Mateo County, Cube alum, good to see you again, thanks for coming back on. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me. You're very welcome, so it was good show. You been to .NEXT Con before, or-- >> This is my second one. >> Second one, okay. It's good little meet-ups, still kind of intimate, but they're growing, good buzz, what's your sense so far? >> I think it's good, I like to see the partners here. I've been wandering around, talking to some of my fellow CIOs on the floor here. It seems like people are really starting to understand better where Nutanix is going. I think there's a little bit of, you know, concern in the CIO community when they went public what that would mean, would they going to get bought out? And I think people are just happy to see status quo, heading in the right direction, being stable. You know, we all feel like our money's well invested and they are going to be around for the long run. >> I wonder if we could talk, sort of about the CIO role specifically at the county. And, you know, CIO, a lot of jokes, career is over, and keeping the lights on, that's all you do, and kind of thankless jobs, etc. But times are changing, everybody's talking about digital disruption, everybody's talking about being data driven. The whole big data thing is actually starting to feel real. And a lot of CIOs tell us that, in fact the last guest was saying we were sort of able to shift our attention from doing just nitty gritty infrastructure management to doing fun stuff. Is that what you're seeing in your environment? What are some of the drivers, and what's the environment like for you? >> Yeah, it is that way in San Mateo County. I mean, San Mateo County is interesting 'cause we are kind of the forgotten county between San Jose and San Francisco, right? Everybody commutes through San Mateo to one place or the other. But it's an exciting county to work in because you have so many of the thought leaders who actually live in the county. They run the companies and things. So, you have a community that's a very embracing of technology, and as the CIO for the county, I have the opportunity to play a multiple number of roles. I think what you alluded to, sort of the traditional view of the CIO role was keep the lights on, make sure everybody's got a new PC, don't let anything go down. And in our county certainly there was an aspect of that when I first joined them. And that's how we met Nutanix, was really refreshing our infrastructure, getting our uptime up, getting compute up. But that's all invisible now. That is a thing that technologies like Nutanix have afforded a CIO like myself is after you go through that initial big lift of getting up into the 21st century, and getting your infrastructure modernized in government, then you're able to be that chief innovation officer, chief disruption person, and really say, "What can I do for the community?", "What can I do on a regional scale?", "What can I do through partnerships?", so... You know, I really feel like infrastructure really has to become invisible. Nobody cares what switch is transmitting their data, nobody care what WAP they're connecting to. I mean, the end users don't really care what hyper-convert solution we use to provide the solution. I care, 'cause I'm a geek, and I care about the budget, and I care that my staff are happy, but really at the end of the day, the people who I'm most worried about are, you know, that departments that provide services to the public I'm trying to show relevance to, the elected officials who want to see us heading in the right direction and really adding value as government to the public that pays a lot of taxes, frankly. They want to see benefits. So, I'm really excited about the coming, we just got out of our budget cycle, and sort of really setting that vision for what do we want to do in the coming years. Nutanix powers that, but I don't have to worry about it anymore. >> John, what are some of those drivers that are helping you to innovate or provide more services, what are some of the big things you can share? >> Well I think you have to look at it from a, when you have infrastructure that's robust and it's up and it's cost-affordable, then you don't spend 80% of your time worrying about that. That's not what's keeping you awake at night. I get asked that a lot, "What's keeping you awake at night?" It's no longer that hard work on a crash or fail, or become the thing that delays all of my projects. So now the value-adds we look for is connectivity. You know, we talk about SMC Connect, San Mateo County Connect. It's now that we've created the infrastructure, put all of the services online, how do we get people better to connect to those? Do we need to market them more, or do we need to help understand the value they add to the community more? Do we need more wireless connectivity, do we need fiber connectivity? It's more connecting the public to the backend solution, whether they live in my data center or the cloud, what I care about are, are the applications and data relevant to the public, are they making their lives better, and do they have the tools to connect to those? 'Cause, kind of like San Mateo, it's very diverse. You know, you have sort of a high-tech corridor down the 101 corridor, where you have a lot of high tech area, and then you have a very rural area out towards the coast, and very different population you have to serve. >> Sounds like you're a service provider. >> Yes >> Yeah, yeah. >> Talk about this notion of invisibility. How has it changed the way in which your team works? >> Well, I think, you know, everyone wants to feel valued. I think if you're a network engineer or a server engineer, you want to feel like you add value. The one thing I think we do well in San Mateo County is, you know, we have performance metrics that we publish, that we're trying to achieve. Whether it's uptime or customer satisfaction, those trickle down to every group. So, invisibility means you don't have to worry about it anymore. But we do try to keep some visibility on how every staff person contributes to the ultimate outcome we're trying to achieve. So if people can see how6 they're individual efforts add value to the end result, I think they feel valued and they feel important. Invisibility's important because when I go to board meeting now, I'm not talking about, "Oh I need millions of dollars for this server," "Oh, we need to do this big network refresh." That's too visible. That's making the infrastructure the cornerstone of all your conversations, and it takes about two seconds before the board member's or elected official's eyes glaze over. They don't want to hear it. They want to hear about what are the visible aspects, how are we helping youth and community centers better connect to educational opportunities or job or internships. So, I think there'll always going to be a spend on technology to make things better. But I think as CIOs, when we get trapped in talking about specific technologies or how important infrastructure is, that makes it too visible. That makes it seem like that's all we care about. And I think the biggest compliment I ever got, in a budget meeting, was somebody saying, "What I appreciate is we spent 30 minutes talking about IT, and you never used one technical term." You know, and I think that's the invisibility piece of it is. I think as a CIO, you know you've done your job when you never have to to talk about the technology, right? The people that we serve in the community and the elected officials, they need to assume we're making a good technical decision to make those solutions happen. So I think, in a sense, the technology should be invisible, it should be affordable it should be simple. It should enable the end results, but the nuances of the technology we use, should probably in large be invisible to the public 'cause that's not really their concern. >> So you've suppressed a lot of the mundane, complex infrastructure, kind of low value add discussion, it sounds like, with the board. I imagine one area that you still talk about a lot is security. Is that a topic that is a regular topic at board meetings? >> Absolutely, and I think all the ransomware and virus attacks and hacker attacks, you've seen recently. And, I tweet about those a lot, and we talk about those a lot because we've have real impacts on our organization about things like that, phishing attacks. And this again is back to the value add, I think the message I try to bring to the board is our weakest point in security isn't always necessarily the technology, it's the complexity of the technology, right? So, the more complex we make our systems, the more complex and difficult to manage our infrastructure is, the more opportunities for weakness there are. So, we've gone from taking about security in an ivory tower aspect to, I think the two areas where we can focus on is more simplifying our infrastructure so it's easier to manage and easier to secure from our staff's standpoint, and that really adds value. So, we're really able to rapidly react to and address security issues as they come up because we have simplified our infrastructure. The board doesn't really need to worry about how we've done that, but the staff feel more confident that they're able to react to and manage those things, and then we can do value add things like train the users to be more aware of how phishing attacks happen when there's threats. Communicate better. We spent most of our time in the back room hashing servers, now with the Nutanix infrastructure, it's the easy button upgrade to patch servers and to get things addressed, and we can spend more of our time communicating with the end users about threats that are out there, how they should react, how they should respond to it. >> So John, you're kind of an early adopter of this whole concept of convergence. When we first met at VM Worlds a couple years ago, I think we were talking about traditional converged infrastructure, if I can use that term. Are you still using that type of infrastructure, how does is compare with so-called hyper-converged infrastructure, do you see differences? Is HCI a buzzword, or is it substantive in your view? >> I think it's substantive, you know I was doubtful at first too. You know, I came from, like you said, a few years ago, I think every CIO faces this. Especially in the public sector. It's what I call project ware. You know, you do a project, you do an RFP, you got three or four racks of equipment in of the lowest bidder, and that becomes a little island. And then you do the next RFP and you kind of grow your data center like that. We had tried early on when some of the new, sort of converged infrastructures were coming out, and I spend a lot of time going to EBCs, and talking about reference architectures, and one throat to choke when it came to when there's a problem, is it a compute problem or is it a storage problem? I think the industry has recognized for a while now since we first had these conversations about, again, simplifying and collapsing the complexity of those infrastructures is important. You know, I was doubtful when we first did the pilot with Nutanix. We first did the pilot around just VDI. We just saw Nutanix three years ago as a point solution, sort of the project where this was going to be our VDI platform. We would still maintain these other infrastructures for really important projects that needed the more traditional architectures. And, you know, it's really credited to my staff and engineers, it only took about six months before we had failing infrastructure, they would say, "Hey, we can use Nutanix. Let's hyper-converge, and chime in for other things, for compute. And now we're 100% virtualized. You know, we have over 1,200 servers now, all running on the Nutanix. There hasn't been a time in two years where my staff came to me and said, "The hyper-converged infrastructure we've selected isn't going to work for this, we have to buy something else." And so, to me that's when it goes from the theoretical, it might work, it might just be a... to a reality. If I'm going to go all in, and my staff are going to go all in on something, they have to be pretty confident that that's going to work for 'em. >> Are you Acropolis Hypervisor? >> We are in some things, you know, we don't use it for everything. But I think, you know, it goes back. We still have a very good relationship with VMware, we still think in some cases that VMware tools are still slightly more mature than the Acropolis tools. We think Acropolis has been catching up, we've actually been pushing really hard on Nutanix, to make it mature. And that's one of the reasons we've went with this platform, is we like to see that competition. We'd like to think that the Acropolis product will continue to mature, and challenge Vmware to either continue to evolve ahead of it, or bring their prices down to compete with it. >> You know, John, what's still on your to do list for Nutanix and it's ecosystem in your mind? >> You know, we're really looking at, really now around our disaster-recovery strategy, we're doing local replication between two data centers that are about six miles apart, which from a local building failure standpoint's useful. But my county's on the San Andreas fault, so the likelihood that a large earthquake is going to take both local data center is pretty high. So, we're really looking with Commvault and Nutanix and Amazon Web Services now, sort of about, you know, we have over 200 applications we support, for both public safety, healthcare, really mission-critical things that we can have zero downtime on, and in a disaster situation, healthcare and public safety applications are probably going to be the most needed applications out there. So, we're really pushing to try to see what that future looks like in the next 12 months around the Nutanix infrastructure. I don't say we have everything solved locally, but we're very confident in what we've implemented locally for our local compute, but really that next thing, what is the right balance between cloud compute and local compute? And how does that fit into the DR conversation's important. And back to your question about security, we still have real concerns about how secure is the public cloud. You know, it's not is it going to get hacked, but can the public cloud infrastructure be compromised to the point where in a disaster, if that's not available, how are we still going to get the data and applications up and running we need? So, we really see that there needs to be a balance between the two things. >> It's a response issue for you, and in that case-- >> It is, and we don't believe it's less secure, but we believe there's a RTO we need to meet in a disaster, and having lived through the Japan earthquake when I was in Tokyo when they had the 9.0, response time was critical. You can't say, "Well, we'll have the internet connection back up by then," and be reliant on your partners to do that, you need access to that data right now. So you've got a synchronous connection today, between your two data center, is that right? >> We have two data centers, but not to an out-of-area data center yet. That's what we need to accomplish next. >> Okay, yeah, good. Alright, listen. John, thanks very much for coming to The Cube. >> It's my pleasure. >> Let me give you the last word here on Nutanix, your future with them, or other things that you'd want to share? >> Well, we're excited about it and I'd recommend to any CIO who's watching this or thinking about it, really consider it, and see how it fits into your ecosystem. >> Great, always good having you on. Thanks very much for coming. >> It's my pleasure, thank you gentlemen. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep right there, buddy. Stew and I back with our next guest. This is The Cube, we're live from Nutanix .NEXT Conf. Be right back. >> Voiceover: Robert Herjavec