>> Narrator: Live, from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Daniele Mancuso who's fresh off the keynote stage. The Director of Innovation and Engineering at TI Sparkle. According to your website, TI Sparkle's the world's communication platform, so thank you so much for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So for those of us that aren't familiar, give us a little bit of outline of the company first. >> Yeah, so TI Sparkle is a fully-owned company belonging to Telecom Italia Group. Spinoff by the mother company back in 2003 with a mission to develop wholesale and corporate multinational retail and enterprise business abroad. 37 countries present office. 125 pubs all around the world that becomes around 1000 if we consider also the partnership with other operators. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optics spreads between southeast Asia to Europe to North America and also South America via private backbones via [Inaudible] cable in consortia bilateral. In the top rank for IP transit with our Seabone Backbone, we are number 7 in the world and I think number 9 at the moment for voice in terms of minutes exchanged with international carriers. >> And so, innovation and engineering, what's under your purview, what's the relationship with kind of the IT Department? >> Basically, I am a peer within a division called ICT Engineering. I am a peer with IT responsible. Her role is basically to develop the new digital OSS and BSS of the company as well as the, let's call it, East/West API for the internet working with other peer operators. My role is instead to make this world speaking with the network elements, the network domains. The cloud domains, all the infrastructure. We are undergoing a severe transformation altogether because things much be very much synchronized in this new crazy world that is accelerating day by day. >> Yeah, I follow Telecom. A lot of my careers I worked for one of the companies that spun out of AT&T back in the US, so many companies talk about digital disruption. Digital has had a huge impact on telecom. You know, transformation, you talk about fiber roll outs used to be. I remember in the 90's it was like, oh, we're going to have infinite band width, and you know, prices are going to go there. >> The bubble. >> Things like that, so what are some of the key drivers, you know, what's changing in your business, the stresses and opportunities? >> Well, we need to realize in two part rationale, One is the wholesale business in which we were a pioneer, we are still having a severe, big role in the market But the issues is that wholesale is starting not to pay anymore. We face a severe, dramatic price decline year over year and therefore, in order to get sustainability of the company, you need to start turning the bar in a strong way toward the enterprises because it's there that is the money. So, this doesn't mean that of course you go out from the wholesale. We are a wholesale player. Our strategic plan involves us to consolidate and to reach the offering of wholesale services. As well as developing the new services focused for the enterprises, therefore with high capability of execution, very strong and fast time to market and enriched with a plethora of plugins that make the customer feeling the Sparkle Experience, as we call it. Most of the actions of which we are active at the moment, are the new dynamic services that are provided as part of the Metro Internet Forum, therefore the on demand paradigm, new connectivity, connectivity towards the cloud platforms, connectivity and reach by cloud experience. In order to reach these targets, you need to abandon a little bit the concept of network infrastructure. You need to scale it up. You need to softwareize it. You need to make it closer to IT. And at the same time, IT needs to come closer to the network And the two need to interwork together in an orchestrated way. This is the new world. The fashionite work, orchestration. In reality we like to speak more of choreography because orchestration is something that we see just residing within the company. Meaning, if you think an orchestra director is making all the instruments, all the artists that are within the company to play in a harmonized way, but in reality we want to export towards our customer this experience, and therefore we see it more as a ballet. So the orchestration is the baseline, but in reality we want the customer to feel embraced by what Sparkle can offer to him. >> Alright, so connect the dots for us as to where Nutanix came into it, how that discussion started and what you're using with them. >> So, this let's say paradigm of the digital transformation at Sparkle started around 2 years ago. We stopped one moment and said, okay, what should we do? How can we do it? How can we embrace it? Of course there are a lot of issues that are related to business processes, organization skills, but also the technologies a fundamental driver and these are most important, so, we started to design a new data center initially for our internal purpose, and we decided that in this data center, all new technology, all new software driven capabilities of the company should be deployed, but if you see the numbers of Sparkle, Sparkle is a lean and clean company. We have just 700 people, despite a global presence and so we cannot approach the transformation using the old paradigm of the best of breed, which is a traditional way of approaching things for tech providers. We instead decided to go completely to a new world. We started to do strong analysis on IPEX convergence and we came to term with Nutanix. Finally the new data center for works on all unit application is based on Nutanix notes and we forced all our vendors to certify their application on Acropolis so everything is AHVA based. And when we say everything, we're speaking about applications like Voice over IP Monitoring probes, we're speaking about lifecycle service orchestrator, we're speaking about Network Domains Orchestrator, cloud automation and brokerage platform, everything is running on Nutanix on this huge cluster with different nodes that are, more or less, powerful depending which application we been offered. But the main driver there is easier views, predictability, easy capacity management, everything runs in a very orchestrated and simple way. >> So, you know, relatively lean organization, simplicity is something we talk about, kind of, base hyper converged. I have to imagine one of the reasons you looked at HCI and is that way Nutanix is the one that you chose? >> Yeah. Absolutely. Those are fundamental features for us and in the development that we are doing with Nutanix, we are working very close with their engineering to develop also new feature that our customized for our solutions, we see that at the moment they are a perfect fir for our working model. They are also very fast company in developing things. Agile development. They are kind of having some predictability of what customer needs in future. Back at the keynote a few minutes ago, we were discussing about the usage of Nutanix for arranging public cloud environments, we just said that HV needs a further step of maturation, but Sunile was immediately coming out with Microsoft implementation and multi features that, in our opinion, were the small missing tip to complete HV as a complete cloud solution, so we are going there, also, this is our direction. >> Yeah, so absolutely, in your keynote you spoke a lot of HV, getting certified on all the platforms, want to talk about the cloud strategy, what are you using from Nutanix, are you, do public clouds fit into your picture? Kind of paint us your cloud strategy. >> So, let's always remind that we are a telecom. Are we going to compete with the big guys? It's not in our court. It's not in our interest and it's not possible for ISP. >> Let me ask, there's lots of telecoms that tried and failed >> Yeah, we're not even trying we're not even trying. In a telecom like us, that basically does not have a real captive market, we are operating abroad, so theoretically, we are the small guy that is going to face the incumbent in the market. But we have regions in which we have a consolidated presence especially in Europe, and we have data centers In Italy, Greece and Turkey. These data centers were traditionally addressing co-location business both for [Inaudible] and enterprises. So we decided when, the direction was, let's focus on enterprise to start the cloud journey but focusing initially on those markets. Again, we started with the best of breed approach, because this is what is in the telco court. The telco, needs to provide a service with a guaranteed SLA with an infinite number of 9 behind it. So at the beginning the first choice is okay, let's choose and let's pick the best pieces from each technology. It works. You arrange the solution. The problem is that you need to operate in the service. And when you create a cloud infrastructure with the best of breed approach, but you want to maintain lean and clean operations, then it's becoming complicated because you need to have a plethora, a bunch of specialists for each technology that you are going to implement. Meaning that you have storage specialists, storage network specialists, backup specialists, it cannot work like this. If you don't have the ability to scale globally, you will never be able to get sustainability there. So, in our cloud 2.0 strategy, which we are started already to apply from last year, Nutanix came to help because basically we did the analysis, we did several proof of concepts and we found out that we can get the same SLA, the same predictability, the same, or even better quality of service to our customer but using something that first of all is manageable by generalist IT skilled people, you can simply expand by scaling more bricks and at the end of the day, it's also more cost effective in terms of ratio between [Inaudible] You don't have [Inaudible] of optics. You have only one player to speak, fight, negotiate but finally get results. So that is the current scenario. On the cloud, as I said, we are still visphere shop, but we are starting already to move to HV, especially after this announcement of Microsoft implementation coming through. What is our future in cloud? We are going to address a transformation of our pubs all around the world. They will essentially become micro data centers from which we can offer data proximity, data locality to customers. Especially taking into consideration the GDPR entering from next year on world, I expect that many customers will feel a little it more relaxed and to disperse their data on centralized data centers without their having control of where really the data stays. So, we are starting also with Nutanix very small and compact solution that we can install in one of our cabinets in the pubs. And this will come also with the strategy of integrating the services with network vitralization solid balancing firewall, everything residing on the same stack. And SD1. In this way, we are quite confident that we can for sure leverage on our existing customer bases but also try to attract more customers that at the moment are not interconnected to our network via local loops. Simply using the internet as a new means of communication. >> Alright, so Daniele, lot of pieces here, just a final, get a brief statement from you, looked like you're looking at Nutanix, you know, they would call it kind of the core, their cloud, even the Edge, starting there, Why Nutanix? >> We have done some analysis, we have done a few proof of concepts also with competitors or with former competitors, let's say. What we really missed in our opinion, was the comprehensive vision. We understood from Nutanix, I mean, apart the numbers of performances, that somehow you can also get with other solutions, but what was missing in the others was that focus, the strategy, the vision and the certainty of the target they wanted to get. Speaking with Sunil, speaking with Benny Hill, speaking with all the guys, we see that they have a strong vision of where they want to be in a couple of years from now, and we have seen that they have a high capacity of execution and fast. And we basically have the same targets, we want to get the same achievements, so for us, it is a very reliable partner to work with in the next few years. >> Alright, well Daniele Mancuso, really appreciate you joining us. We know Nutanix always looks for the customers that are helping to move that digital transformation, be a partner with them. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from the acropolis in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.