>>from >>around the globe, >>it's the >>Cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM >>Well, good to have you here on the cube. We continue our conversations here as part of the IBM think initiative. I'm john Walsh your host here on the cube, joined today by Marco Novakovich, who is the co founder and Ceo of an stana, which is an IBM company they specialize in enterprise observe ability for cloud native applications. And Merkel joins us all the way from Germany near cologne Germany. Merkel good to see you today. How are you doing >>and good. Hi john nice to be here, >>you bet, thank you for taking the time today. Well, first off, let's just let's just give some definitions here. Enterprise observe ability. Um what is that? What are we talking about here? >>Yes. So observe ability is basically the next generation of monitoring, which means it provides data from a system from an application to the outside so that people from the outside can basically judge what's happening inside of an application. So think about your a big e commerce provider and you are, you have your shop application and it doesn't work, observe ability, gives you the ability to really deep dive and see all the relevant metrics, logs, uh, and, and application flows to understand why something is not working as you would expect. >>So if I'm just listening to this, I think, okay, I'm I'm monitoring my applications already right. I've got a PM and force and, and I kind of know what things are going on, what's happening, where the hiccups are all that, how, what is the enhancement here than in terms of observe ability taking it sounds like you're kind of taking a P. M. To a much higher level. >>Absolutely. I mean that's essentially how you can think about it and, and, and we see three things that really make us and stana and enterprise observe ability different. And number one is automation. So the way we gather this information is fully automated, so you don't have to configure anything. We get inside of your code, we analyze the flow up the application, we get the errors, the logs and the metrics fully automatic. And the second is getting context. One of the problems with monitoring is that you have all these monitoring data silos. So you have metrics on the one side locks in a different tool. What we build is a real context. So we tie those data automatically together so that you get real information out of all the data. And and and the third is that we provide actions. So basically use ai to figure out what the problem is and then automate things. Is it a problem resolution restarting a container or resizing your cloud? That's what we suggest automatically out of all the contacts and data that we've gathered. >>So you talk about automation context intelligence, you combine all that in one big bundle here, then basically um that's a big bundle, right? I'm not a giant vacuum if you will. You're ingesting all this information, you're looking for performance metrics. So you're trying to find problems um what's the complexity of tying all that together instead of keeping those functions separate? Um you know what or and what's the benefit to having all that kind of under one roof then? >>Yeah. So from the complexity point of view for the end customer, it's really easy because we do it automated for us as a vendor building this, it's super complex but we wanted to make it very easy for the user and I would say the benefit is that you get, we call it the mean time to repair, like the time from a problem to resolve the problem gets significantly reduced because normally you have to do that correlation of data manually and now with that context you get this automated by a machine and we even suggest you these intelligent actions to fix the problem. >>So so I'm sorry go ahead. >>Yeah. And by the way, one of the things why IBM acquired us and why we are so excited working together with IBM is the combination of that functionality with something like what's in a I ops because as I said, we are suggesting an action and the next step is really fully automating uh this action with something like what's new Ai Ops and the automation functionality that IBM has so that the end users are not only gets the information what to do the machine even does and fix the problem automatically. >>Mm Well, I'm wondering to just about about the kind of the volume that we're dealing with these days in terms of software capabilities and data, uh you've got obviously a lot more inputs, right, a lot more interaction going on, a lot more capabilities. Uh You've got apps uh they're kind of broken down the microservices now, so I mean you've got you got a lot more action basically, right, You've got a lot more going on and and um and what's the challenge to not only keeping up with that, but also building for the future for building for different kinds of capabilities and different kinds of interactions that maybe we can't even predict right now. >>Absolutely, yeah. So uh I'm 20 years in that space. And when I started, as you said, it was a very simple system. Right? You had an application server like web sphere, maybe a DB two database. So that was your applications like today. Applications are broken down and hundreds of little services that communicate with each other. And you can imagine if, if something breaks down in a system where you have two or three components, it's maybe not easy, but it's handled by a human to figure out what the problem is, if you have 1000 pieces that are somehow interconnected and something is broken. It is really hard to figure that out. And that's essentially the problem uh that we have to solve with the contacts with the automation, with ai to figure out how all these things are tied together and then analyze automatically for the user where issues are happening. And and and by the way, that's that's also when you look into the future, I think things will get more and more complicated. You can see now that people break down from micro service into functions. We get more serverless. We got to get more into a hybrid cloud environment where you operate on premise and in multiple clouds. So things get more complex, not less complex. From an architectural perspective, >>you bring up clouds to is this diagnostic I mean or do you work with a an exclusive cloud provider or you open for business? Basically >>we are open for business but but we have to support the different cloud technologies. So we support all the big public cloud vendors from, from IBM to amazon google Microsoft. But on the other hand, we see with enterprises Maybe there is 10 20 of the workload in the public cloud, but the rest is still on premises. And there's also a lot of legacy. So you have to bring all this together in one view and in one context. And that's one of the things we do. We not only support the modern cloud native applications, we also support the legacy on premise world, so that we can bring that together and that helps customer to migrate. Right? Because if they understand the workload in the on premise world, it's easier to transform that into a cloud native world. But it also gives an end to end view from the end user to we we always say from mobile to mainframe, right from a mobile app down to the mainframe application. We can give you an end to end view. >>Yeah, you talk about legacy uh in this case it may be cloud services that people use but there but you know, a lot of these legacy applications right to that are running that that are, they're still very useful and still highly functional, but at some point they're not going to be so would it be easier for you or what do you do in terms of talking with your clients in terms of what do they leave behind? What do they bring with them? How what kind of transition time frames should they be thinking about? Because I don't think you want to be supporting forever. Right. I mean, you you want to be evolving into newer, more efficient services and solutions and so you've got to bring them along too. I would think. Right. >>Yeah. But to be really honest, I think there are two ways of thinking. One is as as a vendor, you would love to support only the new technologies and don't have to support all the legacy technologies. But on the other hand, the reality is especially in bigger enterprises, you will find everything in every word. Right? And so if you want to give a holistic D view into the application stacks, you have to support also the older legacy parts because they are part of the business critical systems of the customer. And yes, we suggest to upgrade and go into a cloud native world. But being realistic, I think for the next decade We will have to live with a world where you have legacy and new things working together. I think that's just the reality. And in 10 years, what is new today is legacy then? Right. So we'll always, we will always live in a kind of hybrid world between legacy and and new things. >>Yeah, you got this technological continuum going on right. That you know that you know what's new and shiny today is going to be, you know, old hat in five years. But that's the beauty of it all. Obviously you talked about Ai Ops. Um, I mean let's go into that relationship a little bit if you would. I mean eventually what is observe ability set you up to do in terms of uh your artificial intelligence operations and what are the capabilities now that you're providing in terms of the observe ability solutions that Ai Ops can benefit from? >>So the way I think about these two categories is that observe abilities, the system of record. That's where all the data is collected and and put into context. So that's what we do as in stana is we take all the data metrics, locks, traces, profiles and put it into a system of record by the way in in in very high granularity. It's very important. So we, we do not sample. We have second granularity metrics. So very high quality data in that system of record where Ai ops is the system of action. This is a system where it takes the data that we have applies machine learning, statistical analytics etcetera on it to figure out for example root cause of problems or even predict problems in the future and then suggests actions. Right? What the next thing that AI does is it suggests or automates an action that you need to do to for example scale up the system, scale down the system scaling down because you want to safe cost for example these are all things that are happening in the system of action which is the IOP space >>when I think about what you're talking about in terms of observe ability. I think well who needs it? Everybody is probably the answer to that. Um Can you give us maybe just a couple of examples of some clients that you've worked with in terms of of particular needs that they had and then how you applied your observe ability platform to provide them with these kinds of solutions? >>Yeah I I remember a big e commerce vendor in the U. S. Approaching us. Uh last october they were approaching the black friday right where where they sell a lot of goods and and they had performance issues but they only had issues with certain types of customers and with their existing APM solution. They couldn't figure out where the problem is because existing solutions sample, which means if you have 1000 customers you only see one of them as an example because the other 999 are not in your in your sample. And so they used us because we don't sample with us. If you have they have more than a billion requests today. You see every of the one billion requests and offer a few days they had all the problems figure out. And that's what that was. One of the things that we really do differently is providing all the needed data, not sampling and then giving the context around the problem so that you can solve issues like performance issues on your e commerce system easily. So they switched and you can imagine switching the system before black friday, you only do that if it's really needed. So they were really under pressure and so they switched their A P. M. Tool to in stana to be able to to fulfill the big demand they have on these black friday days. >>All right. So uh I I before I let you go you were just saying they had a high degree of confidence. How are you sweating? That went out because that was not a small thing at all. I would I >>assume. Uh Yes, it's not a small thing. And to be honest also it's very hard to predict the traffic on black Fridays. Right? Uh And and in this case I remember our SRE team, they had almost 20 times the traffic of the normal day during that black friday. And we because we don't sample, we need to make sure that we can handle and process all these traces. But we did, we did pretty well. So I have high confidence in our platform that we can really handle big amounts of data. We have >>one >>of the biggest companies in the world, the biggest companies in these worlds. They use our tool to monitor billions of requests. So I think we have proven that it works. >>You know, I say you're smiling to about it. So I think it obviously it did work. It >>did work. But yeah, I'm sweating still. Yeah. >>Never let them see you sweat merkel. I think you're very good at that and obviously very good at enterprise observe ability. It's an interesting concept, certainly putting it well under practice and thanks for the time today to talk about it here as part of IBM think to, to share your company's success story. Thank you. Marco. >>Thanks for having me, john >>All right. We're talking about enterprise observe ability here. I P. M. Thank the initiative continues here on the cube. I'm john Walton. Thank you for joining us. >>Yeah. Mhm. >>Yeah.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back live >> here on the Cube Of'em world 2019 that Mosconi Center, Downtown San Francisco along with stew Minimum. I'm John Walton. Thanks for joining us here Day one of our three days of coverage here via World 2019. We're now joined by the CEO of equity. Ex Charles Myers is with us and a cube rookie. We >> love that. Nice to have you on the ship here. Pleasure. Thanks for >> being here with us. Let's let's talk about first big picture here from the higher level, the whole multi cloud hybrid cloud movement. What's going on now with the Enterprise? Your perspective on kind of where we are in that shift, if you will, or that transformation and what's what's driving it? What what's what's creating all the. >> But you get that question a lot, right? People ask me what inning O'Ryan question. Um, you know, it's a regular >> is so what way? Well, >> you know, said I would say a couple of years ago, you know, people said, I don't think that I think the national anthem is still being played kind of thing, you know? And, uh, I think the game has probably started to know, but But I still think we're very early innings. Um and, uh, you know, I think I'd actually bring it up to even a higher level and talk about what's happening in terms of how companies were thinking about digital transformation and what I what I think is happening is it's becoming a board level priority for cos they can't afford to ignore it. Um, you know, digital is changing the U no basis for competitive advantage in most industries around the globe. Um and so they're investing in digital transformation. And I think they're gonna do that, frankly, independent of whatever macro economic climate we operated, Um, and so Ah, and I think you know the big driving force. Probably, you know, individual transformation today. So the cloud on DSO and what we're seeing is there is that, you know, is a particular architecture of choice that's emerging for customers. >> So, Charles, give us a little >> bit of a scope of your world because, you know, there was a move many years ago. We used to say in the I t industry, you know, friends don't let friends build data center because there's only a handful of companies in the world that are good at it. I believe your company's one of s O and not only, you know, even, you know, you talk about the megastar providers like, you know, Google and Amazon. They actually don't build many of their own data centers. They partner with certain companies and and you're one of the first companies that I talked to that was, You know, when you talk about how we position multi cloud today, well, you know, let me put some gear in an equinox environment, you know, have that direct fiber you know, into AWS or Azure in the lake s O. That was early, and we've been talking for a while, so it gives a little bit that that that broad look, you know, because from the big public cloud, you know, they're spending tens of billions of dollars a year to build that out. So, you know, and often your real estates a big piece of your world's >> absolutely and well, we certainly like to think we're pretty damn good to build an operating data centers. But >> there actually are a lot of >> people to build, not break data centers and and, of course, the clouds Dubai from third parties. But they, uh, you know, they build some of their own, and they do buy from third parties as well. We think we occupy a pretty special place in the overall data center landscape because, candidly, people, you know can buy credible data center capacity from a number of players what they can't but they really want, though, is not so much a data center as they want to connect to somebody specifically, Um, and that's where Equinox is really different. You know, with 10,000 you know, customers inside of our digital ecosystems, you know, And we operate in 200 data centers across 52 markets around the world. And, you know, we represent something very special. And it's that interconnection piece there really differentiates at clinics. From the rest. >> You've had some, I guess expansion news in terms of partnerships with the, um, where that you announced talk about that a little bit if you would, but how you've grown that relationship. And what do you think that'll take you? >> Sure. And it bridges a little bit back to suit earlier question to which is, you know, kind of What what role do we play and how is it, you know, frame in the overall cloud landscape? What was announced today was a preferred partnership with between ourselves and and, uh, and now Veum wear and and also Del to deliver the VMC on Del um you know, offering which is really aimed at the sort of hybrid cloud requirements for enterprises, customers who have workload, a set of workloads, some of which may be very well suited to public cloud. And they may go either native on AWS or with of'em CNW s type solution. But a >> lot of >> times they, for a variety of reasons, are looking for a hybrid cloud solution on, and they want to implement that on private infrastructure. But they would like to get the benefits of clout they would get, like to get the simplicity, that flexibility as a service convenience. But they need the control, the compliance, the predictability and the performance that private infrastructure allows. And so where that's what that's what the solution is all about. And were there were the preferred global cola partner for that solution. >> And do companies have a pretty good idea when they come to you about what they want to do and where they want to do it? Or do you have to shepherd them through that a little bit? Because there are a number of factors that would think that go into that consideration? >> Absolutely. And >> I would say it's more typically the ladder. There are certainly >> some who come with a well developed, you know, sort of view on >> things, but it that often >> changes to some degree, and and we we like to think of ourselves. As you know, it's probably an overused term in I T. But it's as a trusted advisor in terms of helping a customer think through. It's >> really one of the great things that I think >> both of'em where and Equinox are positioned, as which is somebody who doesn't bring, say, here's the answer. Instead, they come and say, Look, the answer probably depends on a lot of factors, and so you may want a private cloud solution. You may want a public cloud solution. You probably want a hybrid cloud solution and a hybrid multi cloud solution. So let's talk through what you're trying to accomplish and how we can get you there. >> Yeah, Charles, you know, we know that things were going to change, and the advice we always give to practitioners is whatever you deploy, you need to be able to have the agility and have options. So that a decision you make today is not going to freeze you from doing something in there. Absolutely. A lot gets talked about in the multi cloud world. What is portable and what things were moving. And, you know, we know KUBERNETES is not magic. Right? Um, your your company must have actually really good view of things going from the public cloud to my own racks, too. Moving sideways because many times moving between clouds is just moving between Rose and your data centers, right? Or over some connection gives a little insight what you're seeing. Yeah. What's the trend along >> that line? You bring up a really great point and one, Frankly, I think our you know, our sales teams and are are, you know, solution. Architects are constantly talking to our customers about which is fruit future proofing your architecture because you don't know kind of what your needs are going to be tomorrow, Um, and so being able to deploy infrastructure in a way that has greater agility and flexibility is really critically important. And that's why putting private infrastructure immediately proximate to the cloud, being able to get to the performance benefits the economic benefits of that is really key. So that's that's definitely something we're seeing, you know, as a critical part of the conversation with our customers. >> How about EJ computing? That's something that touched on a little bit this morning. But, you know, I'm sure you've got some strong feelings about where we are >> today. You know, it's funny because I always I always telling everybody inside my company around. I said, Be careful about the word edge because one person's edge in another person's court, right, you know? And so, um, you know, we actually talk about eh? Quinyx as really the best manifestation of the digital edge today, and perhaps that sounds somewhat self serving. But I would say that when you look at people who want to place infrastructure geo geographically distributed way and they want to interconnected with clouds with networks with other members of their sort of supply chain. Equinox is really best solution for that in many, many cases. And so we really talk about EJ oriented solutions with our customers inside of our are, you know, sort of population of 200 data centers across 52 markets today. Now, when I when typically I think when you're hearing edge today people are talking about an even more geographically distributed footprint that is out, You know, closer I ot sensors or closer to, you know, customer endpoints and those kind of things, Um >> and I I think that will happen over time. And I >> think people talk about compute storage moving closer to that edge. But >> I think that's gonna, you know, >> take place over a long period of time. I think five g once it's fully dense, ified and deployed. I think we'll start to drive some of those applications. But we're seeing today is the current digital edge at a quinyx works very well for most of these edge related applications. >> So what would you call it then, if it's not edge? Because you said one >> man's, we do call it yet. Yeah, right. We call it a vigil. Some people might operate out there as a >> core business right into them. That's the core you raise. An interesting point Depends on your perspective and how you see it. So we called the digital and you think from the telco side of that slate mobile applications, mobile devices. You know, we all know about the usage trends. What you see in the last 10 15 years, that's good. Just explode. So how are you preparing for that on slot? Because, you know, five G's coming >> it is. Well, we're actively >> involved. In fact, we haven't We've had real success in a number of I would call him EJ sensitive Reg related ecosystems, digital payments, you know, connected car these things and people love to talk about autonomous driving. The reality is that most autonomous driving, Um, you know, interactions are done on boards. You you don't even have time to go out and making a request to the cloud. Right? You know, But other connected car value propositions that do interact, you know, with, you know, with of farther edge are things that we've actually been working really closely with equipment providers and service providers on, and they're having great success in implementing those things. Using at clinics is part of the architecture. All right, >> Charles, how about security? You know, when you live in this multi cloud world, you know I need security that can living across the environment. How does a clinic make sure that it's a trusted partner in that? That whole security store? >> There's a variety of sort of layers to it, you know, you are the biggest response to be we have specifically is physical security because people are trusting their infrastructure to reside in one of our facilities, and it needs to be physically secure. So there's five layers of security between the front door. I know you've toured one of our facilities and have gotten the full experience of all the biometrics and all the checks and balances that occur in terms of being able to someone to being able to gain access to the facility. So there's the >> physical side. Then there's >> really, you know, sort of virtual or, you know, ah, digital security. And you know what we're doing there is really cultivating the ecosystem of providers. We have a number of really sophisticated customers who are delivering cloud based security solutions. VM. Where is one example of that? But you know, there's a variety of other customers that have a sort of, you know, security oriented value proposition companies like C Scale and other people that are really doing that well for customers. So I think that, you know, we're really more about cultivating that full ecosystem so that customers have access to the full portfolio of security tools that they need. >> Charles, Thanks for the time. We appreciate that. And I do want to congratulate you on having probably the strongest team showing >> of the Cube so far. Take, they have Charles do today. Everybody All right, That's the equities culture, all right? Trust me, they're clapping. I expected a little more of around next time we'll work on it. A good deal. Thanks for being with us side your baby. Thank you very much for big connects. Back >> with more where we're alive. Here in San Francisco at Veum World 2019

>> 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