>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of dot. Next Nutanix. We are here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We're joined by Karen Openshaw. She is the head of engineering at Zen intranet and Justin fielder, the CTO at Zen internet. Thank you both so much for your first timers on the cube. So welcome. We're gonna. We're really excited to have you. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about Zen internet, who, who you are, what you're all about. >>Yeah, sure. So, um, Zen is um, a UK based where up in near Manchester, um, managed service provider. Um, we turned over this year about 76 million pounds, um, which is, um, a great achievement for us that spout. Um, that's double digit growth we've had for the last few years. So we're really starting to motor as a business. Um, we employ about 550 people. Um, we have about 150,000 customers split across retail, um, indirect. So we have a very big channel business. We have a wholesale business where we sell our infrastructure, um, that then other people productize and put into, um, solutions for their customers. And then we have a corporate business, which is where Nutanix really comes in. Um, so we offer managed services both in networking, um, hosting the value added services that are required to make all of that safe and secure and, um, a solution for a corporate. Great. >>So managed service provider, uh, your company has been around for quite awhile. Predates when everyone was talking about cloud. Maybe give us a kind of the update today as to where you really see yourself fitting. What differentiates your, uh, your, your company in the marketplace? >>So I suppose, um, I mean Karen can add sort of what her team does, but I suppose the, the big difference is Zen is a very people first company. So Richard Tang, our founder, he founded the company nearly 25 years ago. Um, he stated publicly, he's never going to sell it. It's, it's, it's a, it's a very, very people orientated company, which of course has great, um, affinity to Newtanics his own, um, people first values. And fundamentally we believe that we always want to do the right thing for the customer even if that is difficult. Um, and so I still do whatever you want to say about, you know, how you pick up some of the, the, the hardness about keeping up with customers. >>Yeah. So we have customers that come to us asking for things that we don't necessarily sell at the time. And uh, we, we put quite a lot of effort into adapting our products at the time to deliver them what they need. Um, some of those challenging conversations can be about making sure the customer is getting the right product for what they want. So understanding what they need, making sure that we can support them not only in taking that product, but coming onto the product in the first place. And that's what we use a lot of our Nutanix infrastructure for. >>Good. Can you maybe, can you dig us in a little bit? Do you know, what does Nutanix enable for your business that ultimately then has an impact on your ultimate end user? >>It's done two things for us. So the first is our it operations. So we've been on a journey, I guess over the last three, four years, consolidating all our legacy and um, physical 10 onto virtual, uh, services. We've used Nutanix to do that. So with, with collated all of our services, we've got about 90 odd percent of all our legacy services on that it infrastructure now. So operationally it saves us a lot of time, effort, uh, costs, et cetera, much more reliable as well. But conversely to that, we also use it for our, our products offerings as well. So we used to be, um, managed hosting where a customer would come, give us a spec and we'd, we'd go and build a physical server hosted in our data center, host their applications on there, support them with that. We don't really do that anymore. We now use Nutanix as our hosting environment. So we've reduced our environmental footprint, we've reduced the amount of space that we need in a data center. And the power that we put through there again, operating that is, is it's easier for us because we can consolidate where the skills are from in terms of both it ops and in terms of the infrastructure for the managed services as well. >>One of the things that you said Justin, is that you're very people first company and that really fits in well with the culture at Nutanix. Can you, can you riff on that a little bit and just describe what it is to be working so closely with a company like Nutanix and how important it is that your cultures mesh? >>Yeah, sure. Um, I mean Nutanix has been part of Zen for, for many, many years. Um, and you know, we work in Israel, watched this industry for 25 years. Nothing stands still, literally nothing stands still. And therefore whatever you fought was a good idea last year, probably is now the worst possible idea because there's some great new idea. And I think it's that pace of change. And so what we've really found with Nutanix is as, as they've got to know us and we've got to know them and they can see that we're starting to really be able to take some solutions to the market that really resonate the, what they've done is they've literally embedded their people in our company. So we have, um, our systems engineers or account managers, they come up to our offices, they sit down, they understand our people, they understand where we're trying to go, they understand our propositions. >>And this is a journey for Nutanix. I mean Nutanix in the MSP land is not where it really, where they started. They started like Karen just said like we use them. That's actually where we started was Oh my God, I've got a thousand servers or this is just too much. Yeah, it's too much hassle to try and segment it yourself. Um, and it, it, it's that, it's that sort of hypervisor of hypervisors of hypervisors type approach. It just makes it easier. But conversely, it's therefore really important that you work out how take that value proposition to a customer. Because if you can't explain it, cause it's so easy, how do they know where, whether this is going to solve their problems. So that's been a fantastic part. Nutanix, it's really the Nutanix team felt like the Zen team and they're saying that they also feel the same. >>So you know, things like nothing ever goes 100% right. But it's always, you know who to call. They're all work because you've got that personal relationship and that's really important to us. >> It's more than that. So what we found with the Nutanix guys is that they'll help us fix problems that aren't necessarily Nutanix problems as well. So that's something we don't get from any of the, uh, of our suppliers. It's normally, no, that's nothing to do with me. You need to phone someone else, get support on that. It's done. It's guys will, they'll bring in their own experts on that particular combo and they'll support us through that. So that's good. >> At six speaks very much to the partnership that you're saying. They're not just a supplier of a product to you. Um, no, no. When I talked to the customer base, one of the biggest challenges and you know, any company has these days is a really understanding their application portfolio. >>What needs to change, what needs to stay the same, you know, Microsoft pushing everybody to office three 65, you know, changed a lot of companies out there. You know, what do I Salsify, what do I put in managed service provider? What do I just, you know, build natively in the public cloud. Can you bring us through kind of, you know, what you're seeing at your customer base and you know, where, where that does interact with the journey that Nutanix is bringing people on? Yeah, I mean maybe I can say that like the, all of our customers are on a journey, um, and they need help. They seriously need help for the, exactly. That reason that you've said. Um, I mean, this is, this is my, this is my job to understand this stuff. That's, that's what a CTO of an MSP is required to do. Um, the problem is is if you're a CIO of, we were really good in construction, you can revolutionize the construction in C by the application of it, particularly during the sales cycle. You know, the ability to VR walk through, you know, argument or, all of that sort of really cool stuff. >>And then you've got a thousand sub-contractors that you're trying to manage from an it perspective. And that juxtaposition of the problem is really problematic I think for a lot of people. And so what we've done is we said the first step you can do is just take what you've got and get rid of the management overhead. That's the easiest, simplest, straightforward. And some of the Nutanix, the sort of lift and shift capability that has got that, they will go and inspect a work load somewhere else. They will work out what resources are required for it. They will pick it up and then we'll move it. And we've had some fantastic success of our customers. They're, they're, they're our greatest advocates. They just say, Oh my God, it just happened one day it was over that and next day it was over there. Um, and then you can start to analyze what that is, what's happening. >>And that's where we can really add value because this is not as simple as just an application because it's about your security posture. It's about your Dar requirements. It's about what, what your appetite for risk versus reward versus cost. And that's really hard to do when you don't have the simple thing which is there, which is, Oh, that serve, that piece of tin costs me $10,000 and therefore you can work that out yourself. So I think the key to all of this is giving tools to the end users so that the CIO in that company and their it team so that they can make those choices in collaboration with an MSP like us. Um, and that goes back to what you were saying. It's about, you know, when we hit problems, we might not even know there's a problem before we've hit it. And therefore having Nutanix deeply embedded within us is really important to them. Being able to go back to the customer and sometimes to the customer, you actually have to go, what are you doing that isn't going to work in the longterm? >>And, and, and as you said, you also have to provide the value so that the customer understands what they're actually getting to in terms of a customer's future needs are we are living in this multicloud world. How are we, how would you describe the customer mindset and how are you coming in with solutions that work for the customer and then having to break that, break the news to them on occasion that what on earth are you trying to do here? This is not gonna work. >>Yeah, we have a few, um, interesting. I sort of like, okay, are you going or am I going to tell them? You know, and I actually can tell, I always send Karen, I'll be going. He doesn't. Um, I, I think it, it's, and, and this is where I think we weren't really, well, you know, it is about what is going on. Karen. Work with your engineering teams. Try and understand deeply actually what is going, why is it not a good idea to do that? And that's the, that's the thing. Once you're going to explain why most of it, Oh God, thank God for that. Finally someone's telling me why what I'm trying to achieve isn't the best way to do it. Because I think a lot of, a lot of people's just sort of, you know, it's a bit buzzwordy and they just think that they need to do this. And you know, it's, I mean, talk about, you know, the journey we've been through. Just sort of how do we move stuff onto there? What's that for years. I mean, you know, it's a huge amount of work. Carry any, any lessons learned maybe that you could do it for one 50 years. >>Are there any that I could repeat here as practices? Okay. It is, I think one of the biggest challenges is the, the reskilling of your teams. So I'm guessing everybody, first of all, to understand this, this bright new future that you're moving into. And then getting them trained upon it and training is >>not just going and sitting in a classroom. It's going and working on this thing and seeing problems occur and understanding how to fix them. That's the, that's the biggest problem that we, that we probably went through. I guess we want our customers to not have that though. So we, we want them to give us the, their work loads in there. It will solve that for them and that that's where we wanna we want to take it, I think in the future, helping them understand what they can do with cloud. So we, we don't just do private cloud, we do public cloud as well. So we could introduce um, opportunities and concepts from a public cloud perspective as well. Um, that will, that will, AWS is a, is a really good one and we are looking at other providers as well, so we help customers solve their problems, whatever that problem is. >>One of the things that's so salient about Zen internet is that it has a really strong culture. You said it's a people, people first culture, but it's also a very diverse culture. Uh, bringing in multiple perspectives, uh, women in technology, LGBTQ, uh, other races. Can you talk a little bit about what it means to work at a diverse company and how it changes how you think about problems and go about solving, >>solving them? Yeah, I guess it's a good question. I guess working in a company we're not as diverse as we'd like to be. We were not where we're at in terms of balancing out the number of women in the tech roles in particular. Um, and, and the diversity. If we give everybody a voice, which is the main thing, then uh, we will see a more, a more wide range in set of inputs there. So, um, developing our teams, high performing teams, you need that mixture of input there, not just about women by the way. It's about, it's about, we have a private zone network for example, where we try to ensure that diverse diversity and diverse people feel included in what we do as a business and work as well and have an opportunity to have an input into that. So where does it add for us? >>I guess people just think differently when they're from different cultural backgrounds. They're from different, um, different nationalities, different, um, races I guess different sexuality, different gender. They've all got different life experiences. So solving problems is probably the main thing that you get the benefit from that. And this industry is full of people trying to solve problems, um, and bring in diverse teams, not just about women in tech. Cause w we saw three women speaking this morning or the keynote, which was fantastic to see. Um, but it is about the diversity as well. So, uh, innovation is the key there, I guess. And I think, I think it's, it's not just about your staff. Um, if you've got the ability to think differently, that applies for out >>the entire ecosystem. Um, and you, you know, you can, you can take a different view. So we work very closely with the TM forum because you know, that that's sort of our industry and it's the sort of the, the, the whole application stack about how you approach that. And the TM forum of have really done some fantastic research that that now proves that the output is different if you have a diverse input. And that I think for our customers is really different. It's really important because then it's different. We're not one of the big guys. We're not BT, we're not Deutsche Telekom, we're not, you know, we're not one of these people. We think differently. We act differently, we behave differently. We have a different approach and the people first, I mean, you know, that doesn't mean we're, you know, we're, we're just here for a good fun time. >>We're here to drive this business forward, to try to generate profitability that we can reverse back in the business to enable us to get onto bigger and greater things. And we've got a five year plan which will see us, you know, at least double revenues quite happily. And we've very confident now that we can execute that. Assuming we can get that diversity in the business. And it's a huge challenge. It's how do you reach out to those people? How do you use the right language? How do you overcome unconscious bias? Yeah, that's a massive thing and it's great. Again, it Newtanics just resonates with us. Just some of the little stickers around that they are diverse, they've got different representations of people and it shows that someone has fought about that and that will resonate. And it's always the classic thing that, you know, you do something wrong once people remember it forever. You do a hundred things right. People won't even notice it. And that's the, that's the type of approach. So, um, for us, we, you know, we think it's a really exciting bear and it's something that the entire executive at Zen are absolutely focused on is getting this right because we know it will secure off. >>It'll make all the difference. Great. Justin and Karen, thank you so much for coming on the cube. That's great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of.next from Copenhagen.