>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to be joined by Wael Shawarab, who's with Warba Bank, a customer from Kuwait. Thank you so much for joining us. >> No problem, anytime. I mean, thank you very much for the asking. >> Okay, first set us up a little bit, tell us about Warba Bank, you know, how old's the company, how large? >> Well, Warba Bank basically a bank which is seven years old now. The bank has been coming up into a very challenging market, small market, full of banks. So the bank has set the strategy three years back is to go for digitization of the retail banking journeys, focusing on the core of the investment and commercial banking. >> Okay, seven years, I've interviewed some banks that are a hundred or hundreds of years old. >> Exactly, yeah. >> You know, very different when you talk about kind of the digital disruption that's going on. Before we get into it a little more, just tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been with the bank. >> Well I've been working in the IT industry especially in information security for the past maybe 17 years, handling the infrastructure role for the past seven years, and I've been working into financial sector, information security consultation, doing penetration testing, ethical hacking, secure checks, configuration networking, this is the background for me. >> Okay, and you have infrastructure and information security management, so security of course from a bank is pretty critical. So in IT is what it is? How do you fit in the organization? >> Right now the information security is the number one top priority for the whole financial sector wherever they are, not in the Middle East only, it's everywhere. The attacking landscape and the implementation and how complex the infrastructure has gone makes the information security now very challenging. So basically, it's one of our key roles to secure the financial sector infrastructure, especially in Warba Bank. >> Can you bring us inside a little bit. I mean, you know, ransomware of course is on everybody's lips this year, >> Oh, this is a lot. >> Dheeray in the keynote this morning was talking about hackers and the like, so what percentage of budget gets spent on security, and what are some of the main concerns that you have? >> Well if you go with the international trends and the surveys, information security is taking most of the budgets for the IT right now because, as I told you, the landscape of the attacking has been rising very much, the people have been very much aware about information security in news, they're coming up every day. So basically, enterprises now are allocating a lot of budget for information security. But it's a bit challenging when it comes to banks in the size of Warba Bank, the priority for the information security, the priority for the cost-effective solution, this is where you have to do the most effective choices when you are doing the implementation for technology. >> Okay. Bring us into, tell us a little bit about your IT environment. I understand you're looking at, you were the first customer of Nutanix in Kuwait, had been looking at them before. So what did it look like before, and you know, how come... >> I mean before it's not us only, it's everybody. It's everybody was implementing the traditional way of implementing infrastructure. Servers, storage, different technologies, complex networks, and that was the way till we joined Warba Bank, things have been changing, we're looking to different strategy digitization and hit the market as soon as possible. That demands make the information infrastructure, information security something that need to be evolved, actually, in the implementation of the technology inside financial sector. So that's why we moved to a cloud-like platform, where we have all of the flexibility of moving, implementing workloads as much as we can, expanding it, east to west, south to north, I mean it depends on whether you really want to put your workloads. So with that direction, Nutanix have been looked for as a vendor. From a strategical perspective, they were going into the same direction where everybody's looking at, and whenever we started to look at the expanding of the infrastructure on the cloud level, they were there. So that's why the Nutanix have changed the infrastructure part when it comes to the implementation of infrastructure inside Warba Bank. >> And tell us about Nutanix expansion into your country. When did they get there, what kind of resources do they have? >> Well we were the first customer in Kuwait. I think we are also the first customer in the Middle East. The implementation was very much scoped because the technology was not really tested at that specific time, so we scope it in a very minor scope, tested, successful, then we started expanding that to go all the way to cover the infrastructure. Little bits and pieces still there, but I mean we're going into production properly. >> Yeah, so how many nodes, what's kind of the scope of your environment? >> We're speaking of almost 30 nodes, so the distribution... >> Stu: How many clusters, how do you break that up? >> It's current three clusters mainly. So the implementation was being segmented properly, security adapted, because I mean when it comes to information security and we combine all your infrastructure in our boxes, security get more complex. So basically, this is where you have to structure, even when you are implementing upper conversion infrastructure, you need to be very careful and you do segmentation for that. >> Okay, so you've been pretty aggressive rolling this out. I understand you're a beta customer for testing, you've been... >> Yes. >> Talked to other you know, potential customers out there. A lot of announcements came out of kind of 5.5. You know, were there certain pieces that you were super-excited about, that you were kind of ready to roll out production, maybe talk a little bit about that. >> Well I think the keynote today was talking about the 5.5 version and the rolling out of new software basically integrated inside the Nutanix platform. For us, we are a beta tester for most of it. So basically, there was nothing much new about it for me, especially, or for Warba Bank, because we've been testing that right now into our environment. We've been collaborating with Nutanix about the bugs, what need to be fixed, and stuff like that. So I mean, I think pretty much the strategy of the 5.5, and today we had a one-to-one meeting about the coming strategy again. It's very much aligned with, if you're going for digitization, the strategy is aligned. >> Were there any special features in 5.5 that jumped out at you or just is it the whole platform? >> Well, the calm is very bit interesting, the microsegmentation implementation for the security of the infrastructure is very much interesting. The expansion for the insights inside the infrastructure, because I mean that specific thing, if you look for other vendors who can provide the same services, basically it can be third party integration, and you'll see some other people are looking at infrastructure. I mean Nutanix, when they look at it, they said, "Okay, we provide everything, so why don't we give that?" So they give the insights where you can do the prediction for the machine learning for the server performance. This is pretty impressive. >> All right. Well, you talked about going forward, what are you looking for for Nutanix, either new functionality, or kind of expansion? >> Well, I mean now because we are beta testing the calm, and this is the first stage for the DevOps implementation, getting people in the automation era, basically this is where they need, I'm looking for, for Nutanix, to start implementing, to start getting stacking the DevOps cycle, the application lifecycle management, right from the provisioning till the application production, pushing deployments, rolling it back, I mean I'm expecting that this is to happen maybe like in two years. That's supposed to be it. I mean, with the vision I can see, that has to be it. >> Yeah, so you mentioned microsegmentation. Is there anything else you know with your security hat on, how does Nutanix make things easier for you >> Well, basically >> within the ecosystem? >> Well they start working on data trust encryption, that makes a lot of leverage for the information security, because basically, in a standard implementation, once that has been arrested on the disk, now we need to secure it, you have to apply your encryption, and you have to see the compatibility with the hardware, with the software. I mean these people have been integrating the data trust encryption along with their frameworks, so basically you don't have to get into all of this struggle when you're looking for data trust encryption. Even during the data transfer, encrypting that has been there, so I think the 5.5 is going to make a big change. >> Okay, well, you told me that this is the second time that you attended. You attended the other European show in Vienna last year. What brings you back to the show? What do you get out of it? If you tell your peers that haven't come, why should they come to an event like this? >> I mean the change, the things we've been seeing in last year, the implementation and the vision, and when you look at, this is the past 365 days, and when you look at that 365 days, you'll see a lot of people planning, and they can see the strategy, and they are moving towards it, they are achieving. So that makes the... I mean last year I've seen people, they are almost like 750 people they were planning for, they were doubled in the last conference. This year I was amazed with the number of people who are attending, the keynote size, the kind of customers, the customer base who came from the Middle East, with me because I'm part of them. So I've seen the people are coming to see the strategy and the implementation of that company. So that was really impressive, and that makes me looking forward, actually to see what's next. >> All right, well, it is .NEXT, so Wael Shawareb, thank you so much for joining us. Have a great time at the rest of the show. >> Thank you very much. >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE. (jet engine roaring) (phone vibrating) ♫ I had a drink so big and loud ♫ I jumped so high I touched the clouds ♫ Whoa oh oh oh oh