Expedient: The Podcast

As IT landscapes evolve, the need for flexibility and a diverse set of infrastructure options becomes paramount. If you're an IT leader aiming to increase the adaptability and resilience of your IT infrastructure, this webinar will help you understand why Nutanix is a crucial component of the modern technology stack that allows for increased performance, scalability, and diversity. 

Join Anthony Jackman, SVP of Strategy & Innovation, and AJ Kuftic, Principal Product Strategist, for a discussion about how Nutanix solutions provide unmatched flexibility, allowing you to meet your unique infrastructure needs with confidence and ease. Learn how we ensure your workloads are secure, efficient, and readily adaptable to evolving business requirements.

Creators & Guests

Host
AJ Kuftic
AJ Kuftic is Principal Product Strategist for Expedient. AJ has over 15 years of experience as a customer and partner helping end users build solutions that are sustainable and easy to manage. Having knowledge across various silos of IT infrastructure gives AJ a unique perspective of the pain points and what customers are looking to improve. When AJ isn’t thinking about the next big thing, he spends his time with his wife and 2 children trying to bake the perfect loaf of bread.
Guest
Anthony Jackman
Senior Vice President of Strategy & Innovation

What is Expedient: The Podcast?

"Expedient: The Podcast" is your gateway to the inner workings of technology and innovation, presented with unparalleled clarity and expertise. Each episode is an invitation to join the luminaries of Expedient along with special guests from the forefront of the tech industry. We delve into the latest advancements in cloud computing, the evolution of data centers, cybersecurity trends, and groundbreaking developments in AI and machine learning. This podcast strips away the complexity of the technology landscape, offering listeners an exclusive look at the real stories of challenge and triumph, innovation and leadership, that are driving our digital future.

But we don't just stop at presenting groundbreaking ideas; "Expedient: The Podcast" is about building a community. It's for the IT professionals charting their course through the ever-changing cloud environment, and for the tech aficionados keen on decoding the future of digital infrastructure. Our episodes provide the essential insights and perspectives to keep you at the forefront of a world in constant transformation.

Tune in to "Expedient: The Podcast" for a deep dive into the technologies and ideas propelling us towards tomorrow. Experience the journey through the eyes and voices of those shaping our technological landscape, all presented with the authenticity, insight, and forward-thinking Expedient is celebrated for. This is not just a podcast; it's your insider's look into the technologies transforming our lives.

00:00:00:02 - 00:00:09:08
AJ Kuftic
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's conversation on Nutanix as a service from experience. With me today is our senior vice president of product and innovation, Anthony Jackman.

00:00:09:10 - 00:00:09:22
Anthony Jackman
Great to be.

00:00:09:22 - 00:00:28:02
AJ Kuftic
Here. Thank you. I'm AJ principal product strategist here to Expedia. And we wanted to talk through, our Nutanix as a service offering and where we've been able to expand that into a number of different really interesting use cases. And I really want to start at the beginning. How did we get started with Nutanix?

00:00:28:04 - 00:00:52:17
Anthony Jackman
So we've been a VMware provider for a long time, a very top tier provider with VMware. But a number of years ago, as we started to grow our shared cloud platform, we realized that there were some benefits of hyper converged storage that we wanted to take advantage of. And we just really liked the Nutanix story. We had a number of engineers that had worked with it in the past, and they were very confident that it would deliver not only great performance, but great availability.

00:00:52:19 - 00:01:00:03
Anthony Jackman
So our Nutanix path started with Nutanix on top of VMware, largely invisible.

00:01:00:05 - 00:01:02:22
AJ Kuftic
Nutanix on top of VMware or VMware on top of Nutanix.

00:01:02:23 - 00:01:09:14
Anthony Jackman
Nutanix on top of VMware ESX plus a OS on top of it providing a storage layer for VMware.

00:01:09:17 - 00:01:20:17
AJ Kuftic
Got it. So as part of, you know, this long term, you know, use of Nutanix, how how long have we kind of been in that partnership. And where do you see us in that space?

00:01:20:19 - 00:01:38:05
Anthony Jackman
We've been partnered with Nutanix for probably 5 or 6 years now, and we really had a whole lot of growth. Our shared cloud has grown a lot, and that means we really grew that Nutanix storage footprint significantly, you know, running up on a thousand nodes of Nutanix. And what that really means is that this isn't a new offering for us.

00:01:38:05 - 00:01:59:08
Anthony Jackman
This is an expanded offering for us. This is us recognizing that clients are demanding more private clouds, that clients are demanding, choice for hypervisor for for good reason. Some clients want to go from ESX to, in this case, HP. So we really expanded the offering, not only in terms of our service, but also the hardware that we're using to enable this.

00:01:59:08 - 00:02:22:01
Anthony Jackman
We built purpose designed hardware, to, to solve these use cases. Obviously edge right. Small footprint has to go to tens or hundreds of locations. We had already solved for that. We made sure that it was also compatible with Nutanix. But even within the data center, we've optimized our hardware delivery platform to make sure that clients are getting the most value out of the hardware.

00:02:22:03 - 00:02:44:14
Anthony Jackman
The core, as you probably know, has become the most expensive component in the data center not because of the hardware, but because of the software that runs on top of it. And we've designed our hardware to ensure that clients can get the most value out of that core license, and that we're also providing them with the toolset and the service to recognize if they're running inefficiently to drive more value out of that core.

00:02:44:16 - 00:02:59:13
AJ Kuftic
And that I think those are the efficiencies that turn into where we sit status wise inside of that partnership as well. Obviously, we've been talking a lot recently about our pinnacle partner status, kind of where do we fit into the Nutanix kind of sort of partner tiers as well there.

00:02:59:15 - 00:03:19:11
Anthony Jackman
So like pinnacle partner with VMware is the top tier invite only program. Nutanix has a similar one for service providers, and the top tier is what they call a champion service provider. We are a champion service provider with Nutanix as well. We are the first partner that was, both a pinnacle with VMware and a champion with Nutanix.

00:03:19:11 - 00:03:39:11
Anthony Jackman
And that really just speaks to, you know, our desire to be experts in all platforms that we operate and to make sure that we are helping clients to make the right decision, regardless of what that is. We try to be very, opinionated and just data driven and guiding our clients. But we want to be able to operate both platforms to the highest tier of service.

00:03:39:13 - 00:03:51:13
AJ Kuftic
As we kind of saw that grow, did we see other use cases kind of come up from clients who were on prem as Nutanix customers starting to ask for things?

00:03:51:15 - 00:03:58:03
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, absolutely. You know, number one being Dr. who wants to own two data centers, it's enough of a headache to own one data center.

00:03:58:04 - 00:03:59:12
AJ Kuftic
We own 15. We know.

00:03:59:14 - 00:04:25:22
Anthony Jackman
Right. And you know, one of the benefits of the Nutanix platform is the, rich integrated disaster recovery. So we've had a number of clients that run Nutanix private cloud on prem us. It's theirs. They own it, they operate it. And they were looking for a disaster recovery target or the perfect target. So we would spend them up a Nutanix based cloud, whether based on HP or VMware, allow them to replicate in, and that was just a big piece of their story that they didn't need to think about anymore.

00:04:25:22 - 00:04:27:19
Anthony Jackman
They just look to us for a great service level.

00:04:28:00 - 00:04:40:17
AJ Kuftic
And then Nutanix a few years ago, had they announced a Docker as a service that they were running themselves elite? Kind of what was separating us there and kind of where does this leave land today for clients?

00:04:40:19 - 00:05:09:14
Anthony Jackman
So leap was Nutanix. My understanding from them figuring out what was really required to deliver a great service versus just great software? But ultimately they decided that that's not a path they wanted to be down anymore. So they looked to, a couple of partners, us being one of them, that they were looking to us to handle net new sales of what would have been Dileep that's now been discontinued for sale, as well as to absorb a number of those clients that are landing in leap today.

00:05:09:14 - 00:05:16:10
Anthony Jackman
As that service ages out. Nutanix is looking to partners like us, to be that disaster recovery target.

00:05:16:10 - 00:05:34:05
AJ Kuftic
And it's kind of interesting because with all the changes with VMware and the pinnacle partners being the larger providers, you also have Nutanix turning to the provider space, because I think both of those, even if you take VMware back to the V cloud er days, when they were trying to run a cloud service, they sold that off as well.

00:05:34:05 - 00:06:04:06
AJ Kuftic
It turns into a like being a software provider and a service provider is really hard. You can't be good at both. So it's I think it's really great to see that Nutanix is also helping the service provider space do what they do best and focusing on making a really good product. So when we talk about, you know, landing that inside of our landing Nutanix, inside of our environment is that base storage layer and even our private cloud layer kind of how big did we get to with Nutanix?

00:06:04:06 - 00:06:05:09
AJ Kuftic
Where are we at today?

00:06:05:11 - 00:06:27:11
Anthony Jackman
Quite large. I want to say we're running up. We're just under a thousand nodes of Nutanix, and they're actually fairly dense nodes, as a large portion of that is our shared cloud platform, our VMware shared cloud platform. We do also have, many private clouds, for clients that we run today. We think moving forward that we're going to see some rapid growth, primarily in the private cloud space.

00:06:27:13 - 00:06:36:01
AJ Kuftic
As is that clients who are moving into Nutanix. Net new or is that Dr.. How do you see those two playing out there?

00:06:36:04 - 00:06:54:16
Anthony Jackman
I think it's both. Docker is typically a tip of the spear for us. Again no one wants to own a second data center. Z leap is going away. There's thousands of customers in there. So we think we're going to see a lot of growth, as the Docker target, but also from a primary standpoint, you know, there's a lot of changes in the industry.

00:06:54:16 - 00:07:12:06
Anthony Jackman
VMware is going through a lot of changes. Expedience opinion is that there are great reasons to be in VMware. There are great reasons to be in Nutanix. We want to help our clients to make the best decision. And for, you know, some portion of clients, the right decision is going to be to to make that jump to Nutanix.

00:07:12:08 - 00:07:16:21
Anthony Jackman
So we've really developed a lot of our capabilities there to, to help them adopt that quickly.

00:07:17:01 - 00:07:26:09
AJ Kuftic
And when you're talking about that, that lands in a private cloud kind of what does that experience look like for a client? They get set of hosts. They log into that. Like how does that work for them?

00:07:26:11 - 00:07:47:11
Anthony Jackman
Or or our opinion is that co-management is the best. And what I mean by that is, you know, expedient obviously handles the building, the power, the cooling, the base network. The base hypervisor patching, when it goes the next layer up, we like to give our clients as much access as they may need. So more advanced clients don't have to call us if they don't want to.

00:07:47:13 - 00:08:03:19
Anthony Jackman
However, there are many clients that aren't there yet, especially with a new platform like Nutanix, and we're really there to be that full service partner that they can call us to really do any operation that they may need. You hit it right on the head. It's a private cloud stack dedicated to that client. So that means dedicated hosts.

00:08:03:21 - 00:08:12:04
Anthony Jackman
They're also going to get a dedicated prism central instance, which means that they have a lot of flexibility for how they do disaster recovery, multi-cloud services, things like that.

00:08:12:04 - 00:08:34:21
AJ Kuftic
And then from that standpoint, it's just as if they were running it on prem, but there's somebody behind it really helping keep everything moving, keep everything running nicely and smoothly. How does that play into edge? Because we've done a ton of work as part of you and your team, bringing out edge into the field, quite literally. How does Nutanix play out into the field?

00:08:35:00 - 00:08:47:00
AJ Kuftic
Because there's that is a big shift for a lot of organizations now where they're running these workloads at that site and trying to, you know, optimize their hardware and cost there.

00:08:47:01 - 00:09:05:22
Anthony Jackman
I think the first point to make is anything that we do in our data center, we could do on a client premise, including a very large cluster, when that makes sense. But what you're getting at is very often these, these sites have or these client local sites have a relatively small workload, but a very good reason that it has to stay local.

00:09:05:22 - 00:09:30:15
Anthony Jackman
Right. And for that we developed expedient edge, you know, which is a, you know, a really small package, full cloud operating model delivered, at scale. Fortunately, we thought through this ahead of time and we chose a platform that would work for both VMware as well as Nutanix, so we can deliver Nutanix as a service in an extremely small footprint at scale to tens or hundreds of locations for a client.

00:09:30:17 - 00:09:42:09
Anthony Jackman
We manage that, we manage the hardware again, the hypervisor layer. And importantly, we give the client a single, management plane for all of those locations, single pane of glass.

00:09:42:14 - 00:10:04:09
AJ Kuftic
And so effectively, you could take the exact same edge story, and it's Nutanix or it's VMware. And then that hypervisor choice comes down to application requirements and not, hey, this is where I, I want to save money here. I want to change this platform because I have to change this platform. It comes down to what do you need as an organization to maintain your business operations.

00:10:04:11 - 00:10:05:14
AJ Kuftic
Is that kind of where you're laying?

00:10:05:18 - 00:10:24:15
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, absolutely. You know, our, opinion is that we need to be a trusted advisor to our clients and make sure that they land on the appropriate platform for them. There's a lot of decisions that go into that. We can't obviously can't cover them all on a webinar. But that's part of our pre-sales processes to discover what our clients really need and then to ensure that they land on the correct platform.

00:10:24:16 - 00:10:41:08
AJ Kuftic
So kind of getting a little bit, you know, kind of broadening out here to like an industry landscape. Obviously we have VMware, we have now we have Nutanix. There's a number of other alternatives. So why did we choose Nutanix over any of the other alternatives that are kind of out there?

00:10:41:10 - 00:11:06:08
Anthony Jackman
I mean, the easy one that really jumps out is we have a long standing relationship with them. We know they are a great partner. They have a history of delivering really great software that has been absolutely stable across the board. Right. Availability is one of our number one concerns, obviously. So that's the easy one. We also think Nutanix is really just a step above a lot of those other smaller hypervisor providers.

00:11:06:09 - 00:11:28:18
Anthony Jackman
In terms of the quality of their software as well as a feature set that comes with it. Another one is the ecosystem VMware has dominated for a long time because of the ecosystem that they built. But a lot of the industry, especially the modern software companies, have recognized that Nutanix is really a player and most of the industry integrates with Nutanix very, very well.

00:11:28:19 - 00:11:50:04
AJ Kuftic
And then that I think that ecosystem play kind of ties into clients who are looking to potentially make an alternative hypervisor move there on VMware. Now they want to move away, kind of talk through that ecosystem and where, you know, as a moving to another hypervisor kind of fits in, in that ecosystem where that ecosystem really helps.

00:11:50:06 - 00:12:15:01
Anthony Jackman
The number one thing is backup. That's the number one, clients expect very rich backups with file level restore, instant restore capability, the ability to clone across sites. And that really requires hypervisor level integration, things like instant snaps, instant restores. So from our standpoint, our backup platform of choice for, for a number of years has been Cohesity.

00:12:15:03 - 00:12:34:19
Anthony Jackman
Cohesity integrates with Nutanix just like it integrates with VMware. That's one of the most important ones there. Nutanix also plays well with a lot of the security vendors. There's a lot of joint whitepapers, a lot of software integration between, for example, Flo and Palo Alto Networks, who is another provider that we use. So that ecosystem is really playing in their favor now.

00:12:34:21 - 00:12:58:21
AJ Kuftic
And then that helps to ease that transition as well. And I think one of the things that we've also done is as we've been rolling out Nutanix support, also ensuring that all of our services are backups, Dr. OS management, a monitoring and security play across both of those stacks so that it's a consistent service. And you're not just saying, okay, well, if I'm on Nutanix, I backup this thing, and if I'm on VMware, I backup with this thing.

00:12:58:23 - 00:13:10:22
AJ Kuftic
It's a cohesive experience. There is there. You know, when we start to see that dedicated Prism Central, how does that work with a client who's potentially on prem doing Da to us? Can we connect those two things together? How does that operate?

00:13:11:01 - 00:13:31:14
Anthony Jackman
We can. And that's really one of the benefits of the Nutanix platform is, not only from a management and a disaster recovery standpoint, but also from a networking standpoint. We can stretch networking from a client site, from a, Nutanix platform that they own and operate to one that we own and operate on their behalf. We can connect those together to really create a seamless Dr. experience.

00:13:31:14 - 00:13:41:21
AJ Kuftic
And when you're talking about stretching, networking for some, for, you know, sometimes it's every every come up because someone's first when you're talking about stretching that networking, what does that do in a Docker scenario.

00:13:41:22 - 00:14:12:06
Anthony Jackman
So it really enables flexibility. And this comes down to clients that have things like hardcoded IP addresses that cannot be changed. We also find clients that just don't think it's feasible to failover their entire workload at once as part of a migration and disaster recovery scenario. That's different. Obviously, everything's got to go. But from a migration standpoint, sometimes it's advantageous to only move bits and pieces at a time, and we can really help our clients to develop the proper strategy to do that, to ensure a seamless cloud migration, and.

00:14:12:06 - 00:14:15:14
AJ Kuftic
That basically having that same IP address space.

00:14:15:16 - 00:14:16:05
Anthony Jackman
On.

00:14:16:05 - 00:14:33:16
AJ Kuftic
Prem versus in our data center. And so they don't have to re IP, they don't have to make any of those changes in it. I that sort of thing is something that a lot of organizations struggle with. That's why people do their, you know, bubble test or they have to re IP as part of their Docker strategy. And being able to see all that over smoothly is something that we pride ourselves on.

00:14:33:16 - 00:14:55:17
AJ Kuftic
We did it with the VMware stack. We can also do with that Nutanix stack when we, you know, work through a client who comes to us and says, hey, I have some VMware things and they have application certification requirements, right? This is my app that I run. I get it from a vendor, but it is only certified. I only get support if I run it on VMware, but the rest of my environment doesn't.

00:14:55:22 - 00:15:01:10
AJ Kuftic
And I want to flip that over to HD for a client. Can they use both with us or how does that work for them?

00:15:01:14 - 00:15:19:09
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, they absolutely can, can use both. Right. We offer both platforms for a reason. We certainly don't tell a client you must be an A or B. Generally you want to be in one if possible, just to limit the number of things that your team needs to know how to operate, or I need to know how to interact with even though we're there to help you.

00:15:19:12 - 00:15:36:12
Anthony Jackman
It also helps when your team learns as they go. But there are reasons to have both, and we certainly can enable that. So much so even to a network standpoint, again, we can stretch networks within our data center across the two platforms. We don't recommend you go do this just for the fun of it, but there are very good reasons to do that.

00:15:36:12 - 00:15:48:13
Anthony Jackman
And our background as a network provider means that we are really strong in networking, which is one of the most difficult considerations as as you move towards more of a cloud operating model. And I think.

00:15:48:15 - 00:16:08:11
AJ Kuftic
That's the part where our our folks, your team, our operations, our delivery staff have taken the time to figure out where all these sort of nooks and crannies are going to be in a migration in a, in, in the operations of hey, client's going to want I have VMware, I have Nutanix. How do I make those two things talk to each other?

00:16:08:13 - 00:16:25:19
AJ Kuftic
It's really helpful to know that when they come over to us, they have that capability. They don't have to worry about having to figure it out themselves. We're there every step of the way. You know what? When we're starting to talk through those migrations, how does a client actually go do that? Or how does our delivery team help with that migration?

00:16:25:21 - 00:16:47:12
Anthony Jackman
It's really a consultative approach. That's the best way to say that is that we are providing, you know, an upfront consultative service to help our clients figure out how many workloads you have, what are those workloads look like, and what is the appropriate migration plan to get them over to us? Again, networking is the number one thing. Before we even think about moving a workload, we fully build the client's network on our end.

00:16:47:14 - 00:17:09:01
Anthony Jackman
We also encourage them to do bubble test failover to ensure things work in a vacuum. And then we also we take that last step as well that we want our clients to do a real disaster recovery failover up front. You know that it works because from our perspective, you just have a tick box. If you don't do that, you need and you need to know that your business is going to be back up and running when you click the big red button.

00:17:09:01 - 00:17:27:05
AJ Kuftic
And I think that there's two sides to that one. We know that it works and they know that it works. So we all agree that when that big red button is you just mentioned, when that gets pressed, it's going to work. And I think for a lot of organizations they don't do that. They just want to tick the box and then find out.

00:17:27:05 - 00:17:50:05
AJ Kuftic
And then everybody's upset at the end because they don't have that, you know, true agreement. When we have clients coming to us, we have private cloud, we have drives, we have edge. Bringing that all together, I think is really, really powerful for us. All the same services in our data center, land on edge, all the same capabilities. We can do that in Docker.

00:17:50:05 - 00:17:59:01
AJ Kuftic
We can do that with private cloud kind of. How does this fit into that overall story of expedient? It's now it's an additional platform, an additional capability that we have.

00:17:59:03 - 00:18:17:04
Anthony Jackman
Yeah. It's you know, we really want to be, you know, the one stop shop solution provider to our clients. We want to be a trusted advisor that not only helps them to make the best decision, but once they make that decision, we want to be able to help them to operate their entire IT landscape. And we know that it's just the way the industry is gone.

00:18:17:04 - 00:18:37:16
Anthony Jackman
Workloads are not all going out of a client's four walls. There are very good reasons. Some things need to stay local. That's edge. We know our clients don't necessarily want secondary data centers. That's derives from their site to us. We know that when a client moves to cloud, they don't just want to stick a workload there, they need to know that it has rich backups, rich disaster recovery, rich security services.

00:18:37:16 - 00:18:48:17
Anthony Jackman
So we provide that in a unified way across all of those platforms. Again, because we need to make, our clients life a little bit easier in terms of managing their IT footprint.

00:18:48:18 - 00:19:12:00
AJ Kuftic
And with that, I'm going to turn it over to our live Q&A. And Anthony will be with me to answer all of your questions. Stay tuned. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Live Q&A. Hello, Anthony, how are you doing today? Fantastic. So, we got a ton of questions, and I want to thank everybody who put in, questions as part of the registration form.

00:19:12:04 - 00:19:29:14
AJ Kuftic
Deeply. Thank you. Also, we are taking live questions. So if you have them, please go ahead and put them into the chat if you can see that. The first question we got, we got a number of them, was does Nutanix replace VMware as a whole. At Experian we got a ton of questions about that. You know, kind of across the board.

00:19:29:14 - 00:19:36:02
AJ Kuftic
So I don't think we really see that as a distinct replacement. But where do you see this kind of going?

00:19:36:04 - 00:19:58:07
Anthony Jackman
It's absolutely not a complete replacement VMware as a longtime partner of ours. And we'll continue to be that. We really see Nutanix as a parallel path where we are offering our clients choice. So we will be maintaining both platforms, you know, for the foreseeable future. We'll definitely have both of them. And we will support both of them to the same level.

00:19:58:09 - 00:20:24:08
AJ Kuftic
And I think that plays into our overall curator of technologies. That's what we do. I think that's a big differentiator for us is that you're not tied to one vendor or another and and can actually get those options from the, from a service provider instead of just whatever. The one thing that we have, the, another one that we got was a lot of can you compare and contrast Nutanix and VMware from an admin and operations perspective?

00:20:24:08 - 00:20:32:02
AJ Kuftic
We got a ton of questions about that. A lot of people are interested in kind of I know VMware. What does Nutanix look like?

00:20:32:04 - 00:20:48:19
Anthony Jackman
There's a lot of similarities. You know, the hypervisor is really just the base of what both of them are at this point, which they are, you know, almost cloud operating platforms is the best way to describe it. There are many other services or software suites that come along with the hypervisor, that really aren't even optional at this point.

00:20:48:19 - 00:21:11:04
Anthony Jackman
They're basically included. I will say that we generally find Nutanix to be a little bit simpler, a little bit cleaner overall, a little bit easier to adopt if you haven't used it before. A lot of those features or just, you know, maybe a little bit easier to pick up, but largely both platforms are providing a very similar feature set.

00:21:11:06 - 00:21:27:17
Anthony Jackman
Nutanix differentiates a little bit, in that they've integrated disaster recovery directly into their platform. So it's been very baked into Nutanix from the start. And they've been rich that over the years, you know to run down towards, you know, 15 second RPO if that's what you need.

00:21:27:19 - 00:21:50:10
AJ Kuftic
And then I think there's still even things like as simple as the yes you can do things like live migration or vmotion. There are. Ha. So if a host fails the VMs reboot onto another host. It's all of those basic features that are in vSphere that people expect are also in the HP platform. So I think from an admin and operational standpoint, there's not a real loss of feature set there.

00:21:50:12 - 00:22:12:02
AJ Kuftic
The other piece there is that and as you know, Anthony, you mentioned in, in the the interview was that it's the same integration points, right? We're still do being able to do the same backups. We're still able to do the same, you know, operations management and the same security tooling and all of those things. I think that's the other piece there is that there's a lot of similarities in being able to consume those.

00:22:12:04 - 00:22:35:15
Anthony Jackman
Yeah, absolutely. You know, again, it comes back to that ecosystem. All the major players have recognized, that Nutanix is growing and is a very legitimate competitor to VMware. And they've decided to integrate their services. That was really important for us as a provider. We want to limit the the number of services or the number of products that back our services so that we can really deliver, you know, the highest tier of service to our clients.

00:22:35:17 - 00:23:00:06
AJ Kuftic
And then kind of in that same vein, we got a lot of questions about the amount of time and effort that it takes to move on from a VMware platform over to Nutanix. I think the difference becomes expedient versus coming from an on prem platform or doing it yourself. I think there is a distinct difference in that, but kind of where do you see that migration and how that takes?

00:23:00:08 - 00:23:19:18
Anthony Jackman
If we look at, what I call a net new prospect, right. Someone that's coming to experience for the first time looking for help, they're going to go through a cloud migration regardless of if it's VMware or Nutanix on our side. And in terms of their.

00:23:19:20 - 00:23:36:23
AJ Kuftic
I don't know if we lost Anthony there. But I think in just to kind of, keep things, kind of keep things going there for us being able to migrate from, you know, a VMware platform over to an HP platform, it's fairly simple. Anthony's back.

00:23:37:01 - 00:23:38:13
Anthony Jackman
Hey, internet problems.

00:23:38:13 - 00:23:46:06
AJ Kuftic
So tremendous. So we were you were in the middle of discussing how to how that migration actually works.

00:23:46:08 - 00:24:06:14
Anthony Jackman
Yeah. It's, I'm not sure where I got cut off, but, it's largely the same if you're coming to expedient, from a client perspective, they're not really going to know too much of a difference. We do use slightly different tooling, but that's really on our engineers, to work with that, for a client that tries to do that migration themselves, there can be a considerable amount of work because there's a lot of upfront design.

00:24:06:14 - 00:24:31:10
Anthony Jackman
They need to learn a new platform. They may need to get new tooling. They need to go get, a CapEx budget. Right. Nutanix has to run on specific hardware. So you can't necessarily just flip Nutanix on to your existing VMware hosts. There's a lot of considerations. I'd call it, you know, typical 1 to 2 month type of migration to expedient, based on your size, if you try to do it yourself, maybe that 6 to 12 month range.

00:24:31:12 - 00:24:51:21
AJ Kuftic
And especially I think the CapEx point is huge there because you have this, okay, I want to make this switch. But in order to do that, I potentially have to go acquire new hardware. Who knows when you last bought hardware where you are in the depreciation cycle. So that can also be a challenge. But coming over to expedient I think makes that a whole lot simpler and a whole lot easier.

00:24:51:23 - 00:25:13:23
AJ Kuftic
We did get some kind of future looking stuff, which I always appreciate. What sort of practical strategies do you recommend for it? Leaders looking to futureproof their infrastructure in the face of rapidly evolving business and technological landscapes? Basically, how do I keep going? It's there's a lot of change happening right now. So as an IT leader, what do I do about that?

00:25:14:01 - 00:25:31:15
Anthony Jackman
The first thing I always recommend people do is to consider whether their it is their business or if it's a critical enabler of their business, if it's an enabler of your business, that means that there's a lot of decisions that maybe you don't best live with your team, and you should look to a service partner like expedient to help.

00:25:31:17 - 00:25:57:00
Anthony Jackman
Because the industry is changing so much. There is there are so many options. We can really help them to navigate that. And obviously we're offering VMware and Nutanix. That means we are providing inherent flexibility, and protection from those changes in the industry, so that, you know, that really lends itself towards saying that, clients should just try to lean on the partner community, where possible, to help them navigate this.

00:25:57:02 - 00:26:20:05
AJ Kuftic
I think there's also a desire to jump on to bleeding edge to bleeding edge technologies or want to be first to things. And they're bleeding edge, but call bleeding edge for a reason. You might get stabbed, right. There's you might get cut when you do this. And I think sometimes letting the market sort out and to your point is it what your business does or is it an enabler of the business?

00:26:20:05 - 00:26:40:05
AJ Kuftic
If it's an enabler of the business, you don't have to run and jump to the very first time that something gets mentioned or starts to get popular, or let the market kind of settle out so that when you actually go to make that jump, it's a much more solid landing zone than, you know, hey, I'm landing on this new thing and I have to constantly keep up with change as it evolves.

00:26:40:07 - 00:26:58:23
AJ Kuftic
And kind of one of the last points here before we wrap up, can you provide any real world examples of how experience Nutanix solutions have helped organizations? You know, we've started rolling out the HP platform, in a number of locations. We've seen a number of different things, but kind of where what are your favorites that you've seen?

00:26:59:01 - 00:27:19:06
Anthony Jackman
My favorites of the multi-site clients that need edge. They need data center, they need Docker, and they want one consistent way to manage it. Nutanix provides a very clean solution. If you've done the upfront legwork to make sure that you've architected it appropriately, which obviously we've done, we've developed all of those solutions, and we built them, with the entire ecosystem in mind.

00:27:19:10 - 00:27:31:03
Anthony Jackman
So our clients that are taking advantage of that, really the four ecosystem are really fun to work with. We have a lot of, great examples and use cases there. And I think our clients are really thrilled with the platform.

00:27:31:05 - 00:27:49:21
AJ Kuftic
And I think that's, you know, kind of what we do that's I think our biggest, you know, thing that we work with our clients, it's not just, hey, here's a list of services. Click a button and get something. It's we want to help you sort out the entire solution, the entire strategy, and actually get you to the outcome that you're actually looking for.

00:27:49:23 - 00:28:07:23
AJ Kuftic
And with that, unless there's any other live questions, I will wrap it up here. I want to thank Anthony Jackman for taking the time, and working through, one quick little internet blip there to, help us, walk through this. We do have some more Nutanix content coming next month. We will also be at the next event.

00:28:07:23 - 00:28:25:22
AJ Kuftic
If you're in the Dallas area, come on down and see us. We will be there. And you can also schedule, a meeting with us right there using the QR code on the screen. We want to help you through your strategy. It is not just a, you know, kind of one time thing that we do. We want to help you overall, this is a partnership and not a transaction.

00:28:25:22 - 00:28:29:13
AJ Kuftic
So with that I want to thank you all and we will see you next time.