>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> And we're back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest Christian Pedersen, who's the CEO and founder of Zentura, a service provider based in Denmark. Christian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so tell us a little bit about what led you to create the company, a little bit about your background, and then we'll get into it. >> My background is from Citrix, I'm a Citrix consultant, back from the ages of the wind frame and all the old stuff, and in 2006 I founded Zentura with a focus on Citrix consulting services and all the stuff around Citrix, and quite fast, we saw the trend in the market to become a service provider so we started up with some of our on prem customers and moved them into a traditional hosting virtualization platform. >> So did you start as hosting? Were there certain Citrix services that you were offering to your customers? Walk us through that kind of progression. >> Our product is something we call Business Cloud. It's a brand of the Citrix platform, and it's a full service platform for our customers. So everything is around Citrix. The connectivity to our platform is Citrix based, yeah. >> Okay, and how big, do you have multiple data centers? How many customers do you have? Give us some of the speeds and feeds. >> We have two data centers and we have roughly 3,000 people connecting into our site on some customers. We're mainly focusing on legal and accounting customers, with special demands for 24/7, yeah. >> Okay, and all of your customers are in Denmark, correct? >> All of our customers are in Denmark. Some of them have branch offices in the U.K., and in Germany, and one in Russia. >> Okay, so why don't you bring us up to speed as to, when did you start looking at Nutanix, what lead you kind of down that path? I'd like to understand a little bit about kind of, the problem statement, the criteria, what lead to that? >> The beginning, as we were Citrix house, then of course we started with SAN server that made really good sense for us because it was a Citrix product. And quite fast, it became really complex. And, the development of our platform was quite fragmented over the years. So we really needed to, I've seen Nutanix at Synergy from the beginning, and I saw on the keynote where Mark Templeton roll in a block of Nutanix. So just doing VDI and I said okay this is VDI and what really was, a huge game-changer for me was when Nutanix introduced AHV because I really liked many of the concepts about putting the whole stack into the cloth so you don't have, you don't rely on external management. You don't rely on that many components. You don't have sequel as a back end. We were evaluating a lot of stuff, a lot of products, how we could simplify our current environment. Because, we had huge issues. >> Yeah so you're Citrix client, were you running Zen before, what was your environment before? >> Our existing environment was a mix. We had eight clusters, some of them on Zen, different versions, because the upgrade part was a pain. It required a lot of downtime, and we only security patched on critical patches. We didn't do major release upgrades because we had so many issues with it. And some years before we introduced Nutanix. We switched to, half of our stack to VMware, because that solved some of our issues. They have a good way of handling and migrating data inside their own platform. But quite fast, the cost became an issue for us because the cost, as a service provider, of course you just pay in bids and you pay per usage but still the cost was just going sky-high. >> Okay, so it was AHV, was that the catalyst to get you to Nutanix then? >> Christian: Exactly. >> It wasn't kind of a hyper-converged, or it definitely wasn't VDI. >> I'm quite old in this field, and I really like the idea of having a say on all things and I was not easy to convince that this was a good idea. It's like in the past when you know, when people are switching from regular computers to a SAN, everybody says, "Oh I want my data on my computer." >> Yeah, trust me, I worked on a lot of the early SAN stuff, rolled that out. >> Exactly. >> And Wikiban, we actually created the term Server SAN which was all of the functionality and things that you loved in a SAN, we're just going to do it on the server, is really what that is. >> Christian: Exactly. >> As opposed to, Nutanix started out, "Oh there's no SAN." And I'm like, No, no no, you're going to scare off all the people that used it. That was also my biggest concern, it really was. But, when Nutanix started with the VMware we did a business case on it and it wasn't feasible because we still have the VMware and licensing costs and also now we have the Nutanix licensing cost and it was not easy to create the business case because the customers, they don't care what we put underneath because they only look on cost. And, if I add something to my stack, then I only add some cost, and maybe I can do something a bit more efficient but that's it. >> Okay so have you swept the floor now, EHV everywhere? Or you know, what's up? >> Yeah, we did a full turn for replacing everything, all legacy. We did, inside our business we did a survey with all our employees, and said okay, instead of doing just a business case bit by bit, you know how you do normally, to compare licensing costs and all that. We said, okay we want everything in this business case, not only products. So all the consultants went out with the, the main issues were all the complexity because it was not easy, we had people on network, we had people on storage, so we always have to ask another one if you want to provision something and the sales guys need to go to the tech guys okay do we have enough storage for this? And what about the IOS, and yeah. There was a lot of issues with this and also working at night on all the change windows and doing all the storage, Tetris moving workloads, because customers were unsatisfied on this platform, we can move it to the new platform. We had so many issues with this. So we actually ended up just, we discussed internally and said, okay if we're going to do this then we are going to do it 100%. It's not just putting Nutanix inside and move something. So internally in the board we discussed and said, okay it's now or never, because this is going to be our window of opportunity to grow and expand. So we discussed and we agreed on a total replace. Everything, network, everything. So we switched all our existing infrastructure and migrated all the legacy workloads onto Nutanix in a four to six month time frame. And we didn't have extract of that time so it was quite manually. >> Yeah, so obviously you're here so it went okay. Take us through, what did you learn, you know, four to six months is not a short period of time, so, you know, looking back, what lessons learned, what would you recommend to your peers to make things even better if, what would you change if you had to go back? >> What I would change that I didn't do it before, because it would have made sense. Actually we had quite new equipment, we just bought a new SAN one year before that. It wasn't even old, that was an issue. But the cost of the existing, even though we had bought it, the cost was getting too high. We were using too many hours on maintaining this and-- >> The best time to do this would have been a year ago, but the second best time is to do it now. Don't push it off for another year. >> Exactly, exactly. And what, yeah, we should have done it before. But I don't think Nutanix was mature for this at the moment. But now, one year before this, I was actually convinced. >> So, AHV, there's, they think they're approaching, about a third of customers are using AHV now. >> Christian: Yeah. >> You said it's mature now, you're happy with it. What more do you want to see out of AHV, where would you like to see them continue to add features and maturity? >> Yeah, as a service provider, of course AHV has some limitations compared to all of the other stacks because the multi-tendency is a big requirement for a service provider. But we're taking it kind of from another approach to it. Because they have all the AVIs, so we can just do it ourselves. We have all the AVIs exposed, right now we're working on a billing model because in our business case it was not only IT, it was also the management and all the accounting and all the other things. If we can optimize those, the whole business case would look even better. So we're working on a model where the system automatically bills the customers and everything sends status reports to customers. So before they get an invoice they know if they want to to change something. Because our solution right now is fully managed. So it's fully managed from our side, because we have some issues with the multi-tendency stuff. >> And what management stack are you using today? Is it in-house or, you know, what are you using? >> What? >> Management stack are you using? >> In-house, yeah. >> Yeah, pretty typical for a service provider. >> It is, yeah. >> Have you looked at some of the management tools from Nutanix or? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm paying a lot of attention, I'm calm. >> Yeah. >> Because it really makes really, really, good sense for us. >> When will, what does it need for you to be able to consider it even further? >> I need to play with it, I need to try it out. I've only seen some sessions. I also saw it last year and I've been following it closely. But from a slide to getting in production, it takes some time and I really need to play with it. It looks really amazing. >> Most service providers spend the time kind of building their stacks though, going from, I've got it, to that is challenging. >> But now we're really moving and we can see how much time we use on a day-to-day basis. I think we cut the time to one-tenth of what we would do before. We had a lot of things-- >> Stu: You're saying for managing? >> Yeah for managing infrastructure and doing changes because if you have a really fragmented solution then you have a lot of people you need to involve because, he knows best about this cluster, and all the differences in this cluster. And that was also one of the biggest pains. And also the Nutanix strategy, this is, as I said to all the employees, this is the final migration we're going to do, ever. Because now, it's rip and replace. And now we can see in the past, we used the senior consultants for expanding clusters and adding new clusters and doing network, doing a lot of stuff. Right now we moved the, down in the chain, so it's the regular support guy. He can put in a note right now and he can do the expand of the cluster. We do it in a regular service window. Now it's not an extraordinary service window, nothing. >> Alright so, Christian, you're so happy with the Nutanix? You're not only a customer, you're also a channel partner? >> Exactly. >> What lead to that? What services were you already offering for there and what lead to you look to move down that path? >> We saw a lot of synergies because we could also, we could extend the enterprises, and use cases. We had Nutanix and if we could sell Nutanix to some of our customers, maybe we could do some replication and DR for our customers as a service. Now Nutanix, of course, is moving to what's the A type, but that's our idea and we already have some customers signed up for disaster recovery as a service, on our AHV platform, and that made really good sense. And also, we did a lot of work in certifying all our employees, and why don't we, we have spare time now, why don't we use our knowledge and sell this product? It makes really good sense. And what I really also like about Nutanix, is there's not a one-size-fit-all. Because everybody needs, somebody can go public and somebody go private, and we have a lot of enterprise Citrix customers, because we have a small part of our company also through Citrix consulting, because that's our background. So we have a lot of potential customers there. >> Yeah, so I've watched over the last five years, there was a real tug back and forth between VMware and their service providers. They tried to, it was, vCloud Air, you're going to be a great partner. Oh wait, we're going to do it ourselves. Wait, we're going to do partner program. Oh wait, now Amazon and a couple of big ones are there. How is Nutanix as a partner for service? You mentioned Xi, is that something they'll partner with you on or is that something they're competitive on? >> And how do you look at that? >> Definitely. >> The main difference between, if you see all the other cloud providers and you see VMware and the other providers, this is one stack, it's still the same. You're not going to have to create a lot of stuff to adopt this. It can be quite easy for us. I see it as a possibility for us to of course sell this. We can be a reseller, we can just have one account and we can provision the customers' VMs in the Cloud. It sets us in a much better position than we were before because if we team up with AHSA or some of the other public cloud providers we are not in control anymore. It's easy to deploy and it's easy to work with if you know how to do it. But it's not that easy. Yeah. >> Well Christian Pedersen, really appreciate you sharing with us everything that you're doing at Zentura and your customers. Love to hear the inside at Denmark and what's happening there. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2017 in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music) (engine roaring)