>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience, really happy to welcome to the program, we have a returning guest. Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix, in a new role since the last time we had him on the program, and joining him, we have Herman Brown, who's the CIO for the City of San Francisco's District Attorney. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Tarkan, help set the stage for us. As I mentioned, we know you, our network knows you, but, new to Nutanix in the last year, and talk to us a little bit about this HPE Nutanix partnership. >> Yeah, if you noticed, first of all, thank you for hosting us, great to be here. This is probably, who knows, my fiftieth CUBE I guess, over the past two decades, especially the last twenty years have been crazy for us, obviously in the industry, lots of movement, lots of change. So let me go into the context, that led to Nutanix joining the company, about six months ago in the capacity of Chief Commercial Officer, a hybrid role with some product aspects, business development global market, our cloud infrastructure digitalizes and some of the Corp Dev we're working on. In that context, obviously, HPE is a very, very important strategic partner to us. As you know, the companies, the two companies have been working together for a long time, but especially the last, I would say, six to twelve months, we have this phenomenal relationship around what I call "three focused areas" of our business. Around our digital infrastructure, upward converge infrastructure, a business on top of that, our solutions from data center to DevOps and to this stuff, services, it's three specific segments, we built this really interesting really strong relationship with HPE with some of our philosophies and HPE's platform, now obviously, working through a multicloud channel, who are our own Nutanix cloud, our own hosted cloud, in addition to it, our Telco and SSP partners using their cloud infrastructure as well as some of the hyperscaling work we're doing, with Azure, AWS in addition to our direct SalesForce and private cloud approach, HPE and Nutanix are working hand in hand in this multicloud so to speak operating model. So it's a new relationship in some ways, from a multicloud perspective, but if it has to grow in segments, we had a phenomenal quarter in the last three months, we just released our results, and HPE is growing for us. And we're given definitely a great suite of solutions to our customers with the typical usual, simple to deploy, simple to use mechanics customer delight on the HPE platform. So I'm sure we've got a whole lot more, but glad to be here also with Herman Brown, from the DA's office in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world, so glad to be here. Thank you, Stu, again, for hosting us. >> Great, thanks so much, Tarkan. You know, Herman, we're going to get into a lot of the technology pieces, you with your CIO hat on, you know, want to understand how cloud, how modern infrastructure, your applications are changing, but, give us a little bit about your personal background and really the purview that you cover in the city of San Francisco District Attorney's office. >> Yes, well, you know, I've been with the DA's office for just over 3 years, it'll be 4 years I guess in August of this year, and I come from twenty plus years of private sector experience, some government experience. And, you know, the city and county, the government is really no different than any other organization other than we're known to be a little bit slower to adopt the technologies, which is why I'm here. I want to help government become more efficient, more productive through the use of technology, and so I'm excited to be here and thank you, first and foremost, for having me on the show. I appreciate it. >> I love that you brought that up, because we've been doing theCUBE for just over a decade now, and in the early parts of that, it's like, right, okay, I'm talking to a local government, we understand, your budgets are tight, you're using older technology, you've got duct tape and baling wire to keep things going. The last few years, some of my favorite conversations have been in the public sector, because you talk about some of the tools that are out there, and don't need a huge capital investment to get started, I can modernize, so Herman, digital transformation, is that a term that you've brought from the private sector over to the public sector, or what kind of transformations are you going through and what is it that's I guess driving the need for transformation in your world? >> So yeah, I've been with the city and county of San Francisco for nine years, so I'd love to say that I brought digital transformation or at least the term with me, but I was actually here in the DA's office or in the city and county's employment when that terminology came out. Being the CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney's office, I mean, we're essentially a law firm. And law firms are historically just paper intensive organizations, right, you have court filings and rap sheets, all these physical documents that have to be physically ink signed and transferred from one attorney to another to the courts, and between police departments and sheriffs and so forth and so on. And we just looked at, what are we doing, how can we work more efficient, you know? As a lot of organizations, we're always finding ourselves to be understaffed for the amount of work that we have going on, the city and county of San Francisco, the DA's office, we see roughly 26,000 cases a year, we try about half of those cases per year. And we're a staff of 320 people. That includes everyone, the attorneys, the paralegals, finance folks, IT, investigators. And so it was like, we need to really embrace technology and be able to help transform this paper intensive processes into automated, digital forms and documents that can minimize the physical transferring of data, especially now, during Covid-19. >> Yeah, Herman, that transformation process is often multi-step, there's a lot of people, there's technology, and then there's the applications. It was at a Nutanix show that the comment I made is, well, let's modernize the platform, then you can modernize the applications on top of it. Tarkan, maybe, I'd love to hear just a little commentary from you, you've got a great perspective on this. That modernization effort, where your customers are, some of the levers that Nutanix is helping them along that journey. >> Yeah, so everything Herman said is very interesting, and obviously, a delight to my ears, because as a technologist in the industry for the past three decades, we're dealing with this, what I call, transformational waves, and you know, in the last ten years, the cloud transformation from the server to transition transformation now, increasingly, we're seeing this very fast migrations from the old school legacy data centers with legacy infrastructure and apps, basically are lifting and shifting these applications to a new cloud, so to speak, opened the model. The cloud to us, in a sense, it's not a destination, it's an open model, so if we see the customer's needs at the end of the day, just like Herman outlined, Herman is not trying to do cloud or digitization for the digital cloud's sake, he's trying to lead his team and the DA's office, with the most DAs by the way, in the nation, making sure that they can process data faster. They can achieve their goals, working especially in this post-pandemic world, and the entire change that are happening in our country, in a big way over the past few weeks, the events, and how our country is going to change for the future. So there's going to be a lot of work going to be happening in the government, this transformation or digitization, migration to the cloud, is going to be a big deal, so as a company, it very quickly we've seen this as a huge opportunity for our customers, as we're partnering with them in a multi cloud way. We still believe our server partners are super important in this context with HPE, but the cloud services around HPE Greenlake, the things we are doing with them, at the same time, working with HPE and some of our partners delivering our own Nutanix cloud services as well as some of the things we have been doing with some of Telco's and service providers, to give choice to our customers to consume the services we provide on-prem, through our old cloud services through a third party telephone service provider, or the choice of hyper scale into the U.S. As your Google, unlimited oracle. So in this context this partnership is hugely important, so there's a lot going on with HPE with Antonio, with our CEO, with Tarak, our CFO, with Tom Black, it's Sonali. The entire executive team are working very closely with them, and with Hyko in the fuel organization, our fuel organization, and we really cherish customers like the DA's office who are doing the transformation, who are leading the transformation, during this pandemic and during this massive change in our country and hopefully it's going to make a transformative change to our world in terms of obviously not only technology, but social change, so you see this as a transformative time frame for companies like us and HPE and partners like Herman and DA's office. >> Herman, please! >> Yeah, I was just going to say, and absolutely I agree with Tarkan, and the way that we're able to react so quickly to this pandemic is the fact that we've already have started this digital transformation, that we've already been looking at these cloud services, we've already started down this path, and so it's made the transition with this surging overnight change of the office nine to five, five days a week to you know, everyone is remote every day now, we couldn't do that without having these cloud services such as Nutanix and HPE partnership, to make that possible. >> Yeah, is there something specific you talk, the work from home initiative, did you have to scale something out, did you have to, you know, bring us inside that change that helped enable your workforce that you wouldn't have been able to do without this technology. >> Yeah, we absolutely had to scale out the workforce. I would say that before the beginning of this pandemic, we had roughly 15 people that probably had VPN access from outside the office, now you have to also understand that the DA's office is very unique in the form of the types of data that we handle and deal with, so I have HIPPA data, I have CJIS, which is criminal justice information, that's managed by DOJ, so there are certain systems that we normally would not be able to access from outside the office that we had to be able to access now remotely. And so it's taken some time to get us there to that point, but you know, having this environment that allowed us to scale up easily, start looking at digitizing this process and being able to have the storage and compute and processing power to be able to support that initiative is really what we're talking about, and that's what we've been doing. We've been quickly scaling, adding in additional storage but popping in drives and making this all possible in a very quickly and seamlessly process. >> Excellent. Maybe we've talked a little bit about the results and how you can move faster, you know, digital information all about leveraging your data and be able to react more quickly, so you know, the pandemic definitely has put services to the test and it sounds like they're doing well. Maybe step us back a little bit as to what led you to HPE and Nutanix, how you made that decision. >> Well, you know, we went through a trial, a period, proof of concept, we looked at Dell, we looked at HPE and Nutanix, we looked at a few different solutions, and it really boiled down to cost, and what we were getting, bang for the dollar. I think there are some other great solutions out there or good solutions out there but none of them came to the value that the partnership with HPE and Nutanix actually have to offer to us. You know, one of the things is that with this partnership is when there's a support issue, I call Nutanix, I'm not calling HPE, I'm not calling this, the other third party vendor, I'm not getting the runaround of "oh, that's not our problem, that's someone else's problem, you need to call the software team, you need to call the hardware team," no. It's one person that you know, we call, as I like to say, "one throat to choke." And fortunately, we haven't had to go that route, Nutanix has been an excellent partner for ours and they have been great to work with, and on the ball, and that's what I always talk about, success is not just the success of the organization, but the success of the individuals and the success of the partnership between organizations. And that's what I looked for is a business partner that wants to help me at my role at my organization be successful. >> Great. Herman, we talked about modernizing the environment, bring us inside the applications, if you would, what applications you're using, you know, are there new initiatives that you're doing from an application standpoint? >> Yeah, so we're running the same standard applications that most organizations are running, with DHCPISS, you know, I have some other systems that we run just because of the CIO, CICA hat that I also wear within the organization, I'm very security conscious about talking about those applications. But we run pretty much the same basic applications as most organizations do. Those specialized applications that we also operate on, we do see an improvement in performance, we do see the speediness of the access, the more stability and reliability of the solutions, and so we're very pleased with the performance that we're getting. >> Excellent. You also, you talked about the efficiency of what you're doing. I mentioned earlier that, public sector, you can get started, you know, for smaller chunks using things like Nutanix, but budget, obviously, still a concern, I'm sure, anything you're doing with the verbalization in the infrastructure that is helping you keep budget under control? >> Absolutely, I mean, the Nutanix environment is scalable, it allows us to be able to look at other solutions such as CDI, which we're talking about and looking at, potentially doing for staff members that don't have laptops that may need laptops or need remote access into the system. We also have that ability to scale up with just another leg, more storage, it makes it very easy to go with where you're looking at cost-saving measures, currently running BMWare on the back end, but looking to convert that over AHV, yes, in the future, that can also help us reduce those costs in the future as well. Especially at this point in time, where city and county is looking for department budget savings. >> Excellent. Tarkan, I guess this would be a good point for you to chime in on, you know, generally, AHV and any other commentary you've got regarding-- >> I was just trying to hold my words back, because the things that Herman is doing are so exciting in a way, you know, techies like myself still get really excited. Like Herman talked about we're not doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. At the end of the day, Herman and his office like many government offices both in the fed as in state or local, have to do more with less. Obviously in this post-pandemic world, you get even more efficient, more innovative, and get most output from our input. In that context, bringing storage, compute, networking, all integrated in a converged way, it's smart, it's not just adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three, but one plus one plus one equals less than one, in terms of cost, making it make sure it's infrastructures are simplified, easy to deploy, easy to use, that's why we keep an NPS score of 90, by the way, part of the reason, a little bit of shameless plug there for you. I don't know many companies who have an NPS 90 because we make infrastructure simple. So if you settle this, to Herman's point, all those applications he's managing and building and then obviously digitizing, and in some way, lifting a shifting and creating a new cloud digitized model, he want to make sure Herman and companies and organizations like the DA's office under leadership, with innovative CIOs like Herman, making sure they have choice. They can choose the prem model they want, on-prem, off-prem, hybrid, or multicloud, or in a government cloud fashion, and deliver these services. To give you an example, we talked about home as the extended enterprise. Our home office is now part of the office. I have to secure my home the way I secure my Nutanix headquarters because I'm now running my business from home. So in the past, there was a delineation between home and office. Now home is part of the extended office. The way I manage my trash, the way I manage my peer flows, applications, the network, latency, everything has to be dealt with in a very smart way. But even our paper trash in our office, we manage it carefully because of the IP, you know, people steal IP. Guess what, now at home, I have to have the same vigor. Guess what, you know, DA's office, the things that Herman is dealing with, they have to be so careful, not only in the office, but at home. So in that sense, that's the better service, your two desktops, all these new technologies I'm going to deal with in this simple way. Our new solution, all requires a browser, that's it, and no deliver a browser-based application, integration, to home, in a secure way, the things that we've been praying for for a long, long time. So this post-pandemic world is going to make us more agile, is going to make us more efficient, and hopefully we're going to do much more with less. >> Excellent, well, Herman, I have one more question for you, if you can, give us a little bit of a look forward. We always love to hear from a CIO just, number one, what's on your plate, and as you look at this solution, what you'll be using it for and going, and secondly, if you've got anything, if you could have something more that the ecosystem, maybe HPE and Nutanix, or maybe just in general from the ecosystem out there, that would make your life and your staff's easier. >> Well, you know, that's a great question. We have over 30 projects on our project list right now that are active projects that's going on. I have a staff of 9 IT professionals with three open positions, so I should say, 9, I have six, actual staff members with three open positions, currently, and we're on a hiring freeze. So one of the great things about the Nutanix HP solution has been that I've been able to downsize from the two systems engineer to the one system engineer without necessarily losing any bandwidth or knowledge or experience because the environment is so easy to manage, which has been great. We will continue to move forward with the digitization of our records and utilizing the cloud services that are available, through the various channels, and it's just an unprecedented time. I see that this is going to be the new norm. >> Excellent, so Tarkan, we'll let you put the exclamation point on it, give us the final takeaway for HPE and Nutanix. >> So, look, at the end of the day, we are in this new software defined growth and multicloud fashion having a partnership within two companies which covers data center services, DevOps services, as well as end user services, end to end, both in private clouds, also in a multicloud fashion, through telco as well as hyperscalers and Azure, deliver the service, with the open end model the customer chooses. Again, end to end, from data center, to DevOps, to end user, is the perfect marriage that HPE and Nutanix's relationship delivers. So we are really looking forward to working with customers like Herman, to deliver on that dream, on that journey, making sure that cloud migration and cloud consolidation happens efficiently end to end. Again, from the data center, to DevOps, to end user, all the way in a fashion that we do more with less in this post-pandemic world, and we're looking forward to that partnership as we move forward, and thank you Stu and thank you, Herman, for the time today. >> Excellent, well, Tarkan Maner, always a pleasure to catch up with you, really great to get all the update from you and really appreciate HPE and Nutanix bringing us Herman Brown, CIO, Herman, thank you so much for joining us, really appreciate you sharing your story, hopefully, you'll be able to open up and hire those three people that you're looking to hire in your future. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you very much for having me, Tarkan, it's always a pleasure, thanks Nutanix and HPE for just making a solid, great solution that can help in the success of the DA's office. Really do appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, Herman, again, I really appreciate it. >> We'll be back with more coverage from HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020 the Virtual Experience, really happy to welcome to the program, we have a returning guest. Tarkan Maner is the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix, in a new role since the last time we had him on the program, and joining him, we have Herman Brown, who's the CIO for the City of San Francisco's District Attorney. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, Tarkan, help set the stage for us. As I mentioned, we know you, our network knows you, but, new to Nutanix in the last year, and talk to us a little bit about this HPE Nutanix partnership. >> Yeah, if you noticed, first of all, thank you for hosting us, great to be here. This is probably, who knows, my fiftieth CUBE I guess, over the past two decades, especially the last twenty years have been crazy for us, obviously in the industry, lots of movement, lots of change. So let me go into the context, that led to Nutanix joining the company, about six months ago in the capacity of Chief Commercial Officer, a hybrid role with some product aspects, business development global market, our cloud infrastructure digitalizes and some of the Corp Dev we're working on. In that context, obviously, HPE is a very, very important strategic partner to us. As you know, the companies, the two companies have been working together for a long time, but especially the last, I would say, six to twelve months, we have this phenomenal relationship around what I call "three focused areas" of our business. Around our digital infrastructure, upward converge infrastructure, a business on top of that, our solutions from data center to DevOps and to this stuff, services, it's three specific segments, we built this really interesting really strong relationship with HPE with some of our philosophies and HPE's platform, now obviously, working through a multicloud channel, who are our own Nutanix cloud, our own hosted cloud, in addition to it, our Telco and SSP partners using their cloud infrastructure as well as some of the hyperscaling work we're doing, with Azure, in addition to our direct sales floors and private cloud approach, HPE and Nutanix are working hand in hand in this multicloud so to speak operative model. So it's a new relationship in some ways, from a multicloud perspective, but if it has to grow in segments, we had a phenomenal quarter in the last three months, we just released our results, and HPE is growing with us. And we're given definitely a great suite of solutions to our customers with the typical usual, simple to deploy, simple to use mechanics customers like on the HPE platform. So I'm sure we've got a whole lot more, but glad to be here also with Herman Brown, from the DA's office in San Francisco, my favorite city in the world, so glad to be here. Thank you, Stu, again, for hosting us. >> Great, thanks so much, Tarkan. You know, Herman, we're going to get into a lot of the technology pieces, you with your CIO hat on, you know, want to understand how cloud, how modern infrastructure, your applications are changing, but, give us a little bit about your personal background and really the purview that you cover in the city of San Francisco District Attorney's office. >> Yes, well, you know, I've been with the DA's office for just over 3 years, it'll be 4 years I guess in August of this year, and I come from twenty plus years of private sector experience, some government experience. And, you know, the city and county, the government is really no different than any other organization other than we're known to be a little bit slower to adopt the technologies, which is why I'm here. I want to help government become more efficient, more productive through the use of technology, and so I'm excited to be here and thank you, first and foremost, for having me on the show. I appreciate it. >> I love that you brought that up, because we've been doing theCUBE for just over a decade now, and in the early parts of that, it's like, right, okay, I'm talking to a local government, we understand, your budgets are tight, you're using older technology, you've got duct tape and baling wire to keep things going. The last few years, some of my favorite conversations have been in the public sector, because you talk about some of the tools that are out there, and don't need a huge capital investment to get started, I can modernize, so Herman, digital transformation, is that a term that you've brought from the private sector over to the public sector, or what kind of transformations are you going through and what is it that's I guess driving the need for transformation in your world? >> So yeah, I've been with the city and county of San Francisco for nine years, so I'd love to say that I brought digital transformation or at least the term with me, but I was actually here in the DA's office or in the city and county's employment when that terminology came out. Being the CIO for the San Francisco District Attorney's office, I mean, we're essentially a law firm. And law firms are historically just paper intensive organizations, right, you have court filings and rap sheets, all these physical documents that have to be physically ink signed and transferred from one attorney to another to the courts, and between police departments and sheriffs and so forth and so on. And we just looked at, what are we doing, how can we work more efficient, you know? As a lot of organizations, we're always finding ourselves to be understaffed for the amount of work that we have going on, the city and county of San Francisco, the DA's office, we see roughly 26,000 cases a year, we try about half of those cases per year. And we're a staff of 320 people. That includes everyone, the attorneys, the paralegals, finance folks, IT, investigators. And so it was like, we need to really embrace technology and be able to help transform this paper intensive processes into automated, digital forms and documents that can minimize the physical transferring of data, especially now, during Covid-19. >> Yeah, Herman, that transformation process is often multi-step, there's a lot of people, there's technology, and then there's the applications. It was at a Nutanix show that the comment I made is, well, let's modernize the platform, then you can modernize the applications on top of it. Tarkan, maybe, I'd love to hear just a little commentary from you, you've got a great perspective on this. That modernization effort, where your customers are, some of the levers that Nutanix is helping them along that journey. >> Yeah, so everything Herman said is very interesting, and obviously, a delight to my ears, because as a technologist in the industry for the past three decades, we're dealing with this, what I call, transformational waves, and you know, in the last ten years, the cloud transformation from the server to transition transformation now, increasingly, we're seeing this very fast migrations from the old school legacy data centers with legacy infrastructure and apps, basically are lifting and shifting these applications to a new cloud, so to speak, opened the model. The cloud to us, in a sense, it's not a destination, it's an open model, so if we see the customer's needs at the end of the day, just like Herman outlined, Herman is not trying to do cloud or digitization for the digital cloud's sake, he's trying to lead his team and the DA's office, with the most DAs by the way, in the nation, making sure that they can process data faster. They can achieve their goals, working especially in this post-pandemic world, and the entire change that are happening in our country, in a big way over the past few weeks, the events, and how our country is going to change for the future. So there's going to be a lot of work going to be happening in the government, this transformation or digitization, migration to the cloud, is going to be a big deal, so as a company, it very quickly we've seen this as a huge opportunity for our customers, as we're partnering with them in a multi cloud way. We still believe our server partners are super important in this context with HPE, but the cloud services around HPE Greenlake, the things we are doing with them, at the same time, working with HPE and some of our partners delivering our own Nutanix cloud services as well as some of the things we have been doing with some of Telco's and service providers, to give choice to our customers to consume the services we provide on-prem, through our old cloud services through a third party telephone service provider, or the choice of hyper scale into the U.S. As your Google, unlimited oracle. So in this context this partnership is hugely important, so there's a lot going on with HPE with Antonio, with our CEO, with Tarak, our CFO, with Tom Black, it's Sonali. The entire executive team are working very closely with them, and with Hyko in the fuel organization, our fuel organization, and we really cherish customers like the DA's office who are doing the transformation, who are leading the transformation, during this pandemic and during this massive change in our country and hopefully it's going to make a transformative change to our world in terms of obviously not only technology, but social change, so you see this as a transformative time frame for companies like us and HPE and partners like Herman and DA's office. >> Herman, please! >> Yeah, I was just going to say, and absolutely I agree with Tarak, and the way that we're able to react so quickly to this pandemic is the fact that we've already have started this digital transformation, that we've already been looking at these cloud services, we've already started down this path, and so it's made the transition with this surging overnight change of the office nine to five, five days a week to you know, everyone is remote every day now, we couldn't do that without having these cloud services such as Nutanix and HPE partnership, to make that possible. >> Yeah, is there something specific you talk, the work from home initiative, did you have to scale something out, did you have to, you know, bring us inside that change that helped enable your workforce that you wouldn't have been able to do without this technology. >> Yeah, we absolutely had to scale out the workforce. I would say that before the beginning of this pandemic, we had roughly 15 people that probably had VPN access from outside the office, now you have to also understand that the DA's office is very unique in the form of the types of data that we handle and deal with, so I have HIPPA data, I have CJIS, which is criminal justice information, that's managed by DOJ, so there are certain systems that we normally would not be able to access from outside the office that we had to be able to access now remotely. And so it's taken some time to get us there to that point, but you know, having this environment that allowed us to scale up easily, start looking at digitizing this process and being able to have the storage and compute and processing power to be able to support that initiative is really what we're talking about, and that's what we've been doing. We've been quickly scaling, adding in additional storage but popping in drives and making this all possible in a very quickly and seamlessly process. >> Excellent. Maybe we've talked a little bit about the results and how you can move faster, you know, digital information all about leveraging your data and be able to react more quickly, so you know, the pandemic definitely has put services to the test and it sounds like they're doing well. Maybe step us back a little bit as to what led you to HPE and Nutanix, how you made that decision. >> Well, you know, we went through a trial, a period, proof of concept, we looked at Dell, we looked at HPE and Nutanix, we looked at a few different solutions, and it really boiled down to cost, and what we were getting, bang for the dollar. I think there are some other great solutions out there or good solutions out there but none of them came to the value that the partnership with HPE and Nutanix actually have to offer to us. You know, one of the things is that with this partnership is when there's a support issue, I call Nutanix, I'm not calling HPE, I'm not calling this, the other third party vendor, I'm not getting the runaround of "oh, that's not our problem, that's someone else's problem, you need to call the software team, you need to call the hardware team," no. It's one person that you know, we call, as I like to say, "one throat to choke." And fortunately, we haven't had to go that route, Nutanix has been an excellent partner for ours and they have been great to work with, and on the ball, and that's what I always talk about, success is not just the success of the organization, but the success of the individuals and the success of the partnership between organizations. And that's what I looked for is a business partner that wants to help me at my role at my organization be successful. >> Great. Herman, we talked about modernizing the environment, bring us inside the applications, if you would, what applications you're using, you know, are there new initiatives that you're doing from an application standpoint? >> Yeah, so we're running the same standard applications that most organizations are running, with DHCPISS, you know, I have some other systems that we run just because of the CIO, CICA hat that I also wear within the organization, I'm very security conscious about talking about those applications. But we run pretty much the same basic applications as most organizations do. Those specialized applications that we also operate on, we do see an improvement in performance, we do see the speediness of the access, the more stability and reliability of the solutions, and so we're very pleased with the performance that we're getting. >> Excellent. You also, you talked about the efficiency of what you're doing. I mentioned earlier that, public sector, you can get started, you know, for smaller chunks using things like Nutanix, but budget, obviously, still a concern, I'm sure, anything you're doing with the verbalization in the infrastructure that is helping you keep budget under control? >> Absolutely, I mean, the Nutanix environment is scalable, it allows us to be able to look at other solutions such as CDI, which we're talking about and looking at, potentially doing for staff members that don't have laptops that may need laptops or need remote access into the system. We also have that ability to scale up with just another leg, more storage, it makes it very easy to go with where you're looking at cost-saving measures, currently running BMWare on the back end, but looking to convert that over AHV, yes, in the future, that can also help us reduce those costs in the future as well. Especially at this point in time, where city and county is looking for department budget savings. >> Excellent. Tarkan, I guess this would be a good point for you to chime in on, you know, generally, AHV and any other commentary you've got regarding-- >> I was just trying to hold my words back, because the things that Herman is doing are so exciting in a way, you know, techies like myself still get really excited. Like Herman talked about we're not doing infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. At the end of the day, Herman and his office like many government offices both in the fed as in state or local, have to do more with less. Obviously in this post-pandemic world, you get even more efficient, more innovative, and get most output from our input. In that context, bringing storage, compute, networking, all integrated in a converged way, it's smart, it's not just adding them up, one plus one plus one equals three, but one plus one plus one equals less than one, in terms of cost, making it make sure it's infrastructures are simplified, easy to deploy, easy to use, that's why we keep an NPS score of 90, by the way, part of the reason, a little bit of shameless plug there for you. I don't know many companies who have an NPS 90 because we make infrastructure simple. So if you settle this, to Herman's point, all those applications he's managing and building and then obviously digitizing, and in some way, lifting a shifting and creating a new cloud digitized model, he want to make sure Herman and companies and organizations like the DA's office under leadership, with innovative CIOs like Herman, making sure they have choice. They can choose the prem model they want, on-prem, off-prem, hybrid, or multicloud, or in a government cloud fashion, and deliver these services. To give you an example, we talked about home as the extended enterprise. Our home office is now part of the office. I have to secure my home the way I secure my Nutanix headquarters because I'm now running my business from home. So in the past, there was a delineation between home and office. Now home is part of the extended office. The way I manage my trash, the way I manage my peer flows, applications, the network, latency, everything has to be dealt with in a very smart way. But even our paper trash in our office, we manage it carefully because of the IP, you know, people steal IP. Guess what, now at home, I have to have the same vigor. Guess what, you know, DA's office, the things that Herman is dealing with, they have to be so careful, not only in the office, but at home. So in that sense, that's the better service, your two desktops, all these new technologies I'm going to deal with in this simple way. Our new solution, all requires a browser, that's it, and no deliver a browser-based application, integration, to home, in a secure way, the things that we've been praying for for a long, long time. So this post-pandemic world is going to make us more agile, is going to make us more efficient, and hopefully we're going to do much more with less. >> Excellent, well, Herman, I have one more question for you, if you can, give us a little bit of a look forward. We always love to hear from a CIO just, number one, what's on your plate, and as you look at this solution, what you'll be using it for and going, and secondly, if you've got anything, if you could have something more that the ecosystem, maybe HPE and Nutanix, or maybe just in general from the ecosystem out there, that would make your life and your staff's easier. >> Well, you know, that's a great question. We have over 30 projects on our project list right now that are active projects that's going on. I have a staff of 9 IT professionals with three open positions, so I should say, 9, I have six, actual staff members with three open positions, currently, and we're on a hiring freeze. So one of the great things about the Nutanix HP solution has been that I've been able to downsize from the two systems engineer to the one system engineer without necessarily losing any bandwidth or knowledge or experience because the environment is so easy to manage, which has been great. We will continue to move forward with the digitization of our records and utilizing the cloud services that are available, through the various channels, and it's just an unprecedented time. I see that this is going to be the new norm. >> Excellent, so Tarkan, we'll let you put the exclamation point on it, give us the final takeaway for HPE and Nutanix. >> So, look, at the end of the day, we are in this new software defined growth and multicloud fashion having a partnership within two companies which covers data center services, DevOps services, as well as end user services, end to end, both in private clouds, also in a multicloud fashion, through telco as well as hyperscalers and Azure, deliver the service, with the open end model the customer chooses. Again, end to end, from data center, to DevOps, to end user, is the perfect marriage that HPE and Nutanix's relationship delivers. So we are really looking forward to working with customers like Herman, to deliver on that dream, on that journey, making sure that cloud migration and cloud consolidation happens efficiently end to end. Again, from the data center, to DevOps, to end user, all the way in a fashion that we do more with less in this post-pandemic world, and we're looking forward to that partnership as we move forward, and thank you Stu and thank you, Herman, for the time today. >> Excellent, well, Tarkan Maner, always a pleasure to catch up with you, really great to get all the update from you and really appreciate HPE and Nutanix bringing us Herman Brown, CIO, Herman, thank you so much for joining us, really appreciate you sharing your story, hopefully, you'll be able to open up and hire those three people that you're looking to hire in your future. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you very much for having me, Tarkan, it's always a pleasure, thanks Nutanix and HPE for just making a solid, great solution that can help in the success of the DA's office. Really do appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, Herman, again, I really appreciate it. >> We'll be back with more coverage from HPE Discover 2020, the Virtual Experience. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)