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Welcome to MISAC Connect Audio, the official podcast of the Municipal Information Systems Association of California (MISAC). This podcast is your go-to resource for in-depth discussions, expert insights, and community stories that go beyond our MISAC Connect forum.
0:00
Hey everyone. Allen Hammond here with misat connect audio before we get into today's episode with Sean and Matt from Kis, I wanted to give you a quick heads up. We had some pretty tough audio issues during this recording around minute 42 you'll notice Sean suddenly sounds like he's been taken over by a robot for about 10 minutes, but the conversation itself is just too good and too timely to hold back. This is an important topic for our music community, especially as we head into our annual conference, and we really wanted to get this first episode with one of our strategic partners out to you now rather than delay for our re recording. So with that said, thanks for your understanding, and I think you'll get a ton of value out of this discussion. Let's dive in.
0:52
Did I make it? Hey, Sean, hey, yep.
0:57
Hello. Me, sack community, welcome family we have on our very first episode, one with a strategic partner. I promised when we started doing these that we would have episodes related to those things that we're dealing with, some things that maybe escalate or have elevated to something that is more important than others, some common interests, sharing some of our war stories, but we also wanted to give a chance for our strategic partners to be a part of what we're doing in the mesec community. With our me set connect audio podcast, and today we have one of my favorite vendors, Kis, and we'll let Kis have an opportunity to share a little bit about what they do at the end, just to make sure they stick with the through through the whole podcast. But we have, and I butcher names all the time, but I think I'm going to nail these and I'm going to say them anyways, just so people know that I butcher names. But please correct me if I'm wrong. We have Sean cannevaro. Cannavaro, can of arrow,
2:13
I actually answer to either one. So can of arrows, probably the easiest.
2:18
I appreciate that. I always appreciate folks who care less how you pronounce their names, so thank you for that. Sean is the CEO of Kis, and more importantly, we're kind of kindred spirits. In my previous meetings with Sean, I've learned that we're a couple of dinosaurs in the tech industry, cutting our teeth on Novell networks, and maybe even CPM, um, and Sean is one of those guys that lead a company that rolls his sleeves up and in still nerding out to this very day, and that's why we have them on on today's episode.
2:54
Yeah, don't, don't get me too old. Allen, I definitely Novell, but not CPM. I can go back to dos, but I but I cannot get to CPM.
3:03
Okay, well, I've aged myself because I had a North Star computer and so and we have Matt or eekman, but I've answered the both. Okay, I knew that I appreciate that Matt has been a partner of ours for many years in the city of Pleasanton, and helping us with matters that Kis, as a whole, has helped out with. So I consider Matt and Sean, or Kis, we had talked earlier, and one of my asks for them to be on this one is I've always felt and have put Kis in a place where, you know, many vendors will come to you and they'll say they're vendor agnostic, but I find sometimes agnostic is maybe a lowercase a, and Kis, to their credit, I will say they come with us as agnostics and all caps. And so the topic that we're talking about today is one that is one that you'll you'll see very soon why it's nice to talk to somebody and have something in this episode of Talk about this topic, because it is one where we're having to make choices, and it may not be the vendor that we're talking about. I also recognize that kiss is in kind of a delicate spot, where they're coming in here and they're talking about solutions and vendors that compete with each other, so we don't want to make anybody angry. But what they're bringing to us today was, is some real, honest dialog and hopefully some clarity in the space. Because this is a topic that has been very popular in the Mesac connect forums, and that's why we're talking about it today, and it's one that I feel like. Yeah, it's one that is affecting us here in Pleasanton, and so it's close to my heart, and I'm struggling with many of the same issues that I'm seeing in the forum post. But I also wonder if maybe there's a little bit of that is fed by competitors and misinformation, and maybe we'd be better served to getting it right from somebody who is veteran vendor agnostic and is a subject matter expert in this space, and I haven't talked about it yet, but it's about VMware. VMware, Broadcom, mon, it's, you know, VMware was a solution that we, many of us adopted many years ago and found it to be the gold standard if you were going to virtualize your server infrastructure and get those multiple racks of standalone servers down to a couple in a virtualized environment, and VMware was the way to go and and part of that reason was because of its affordability. Now, there's been a lot of things that have happened over that time, including what's going on now, and so that's why we've got chaos on the day. And I'll start out with this question, and that is, I've certainly queued it up. But to start off, can you share your perspective on what's happening in the VMware landscape right now, particularly with broadcoms acquisition and all the licensing changes, right?
6:35
Yeah. So this is, this is definitely the question of the of the last two years since the acquisition kind of took hold, and there, there is a lot of confusion. I think VMware Broadcom, I'll use them interchangeably today, because my my memories for the last 20 years go all the way back to VMware GSX. Broadcom, to me, is still extremely new. My brain isn't as elastic as it used to be. So VMware, Broadcom owns most of the confusion that's out there right now. I don't know why they did it, and it's not my place to try to opine about about, the decisions that they made. They certainly made those decisions, and they are. They had a right to make them. I think it caused an enormous amount of confusion. The biggest change that they made, really was moving from a perpetual model to a subscription model. That is the way of the industry right now. It's, it's kind of amazing to me, from a from a fury standpoint, how much Fury was directed at VMware for the move to subscription when they were, without question, the last major manufacturer to move to subscriptions, Microsoft with Office 365 did it almost 10 years ago. Cisco is on subscriptions now. Palo Alto Networks is on subscriptions now. AWS, of course, started off with with a subscription model, GCP, Azure, Nutanix, VMware really was the last major enterprise based manufacturer that moved to subscription. But boy, they got the they got an absolute brunt of the anger and frustration associated with it. So that part, I didn't think was fair, although I thought VMware did a really, really bad job of explaining why they were doing it and what they were getting done now. They also moved their socket based licensing to core based licensing, which I think is the is the real genesis behind the the idea that somehow VMware was going to be, three, 510, times. I've seen reports where people are saying that VMware licensing is up to 10 times more expensive in the subscription model than it was in the perpetual we haven't seen anywhere near those kinds of numbers. And honestly, the most, the highest increase have been for those clients that were running multiple sockets but low numbers of cores. So I know I'm getting too technical there, but a client that's running a single 16 core CPU didn't see very much of a price increase at all, moving from perpetual to subscription. However, clients that were running quad sockets with four cores, which essentially is exactly the same server, it's a 16 core server, those people could see a doubling of their. Or of their licensing. I think our clients kind of got lucky because we fell in love with the single 16 CPU system for a lot of different reasons. And so when our clients kind of rolled through it, they didn't see anywhere near the kind of upset from a pricing standpoint as some other people did. And so we've been working really hard with clients to get them out of their quad four cores, which are, you know, probably 789, years old, or their dual eights, which are at least five years old, and moving them into single 16 CPU hosts and essentially cutting, you know, even if they were at one point paying 7080, maybe double the price initially, once they swap out those hosts, those those VMware, prices are going right back down. So I think those two, those two pieces, really have caused the most consternation. There's a bunch of other swirling dirt devils that are that are happening, whirlwinds, not the least of which is that VMware, in their in their wisdom, in August, decided to go from having 20,000 partners resellers like us that were committed to helping the VMware brand. They've gone now from 20,000 resellers to 2000 resellers, and it's been a little bit of a surprise, I think, to the VMware and Broadcom folks that I have spoken with directly that what they really did was created 18,000 VMware haters, those resellers have now because they can no longer sell VMware are now actively out there, spreading rumors and fear, uncertainty and doubt, because they can no longer sell VMware, not because VMware isn't still the best solution for that particular client, but because it's no longer a way for that particular company to make money. And I think it really did come as a surprise to a lot of people at VMware and and and Broadcom about how vociferous those 18,000 deauthorized resellers we're going to be. I'm not sure how they missed it, but, but they did. And the last piece that I think, from their standpoint, they didn't understand what was happening, didn't read it, didn't read the room very well. They came out and said, Hey, we're moving from a price list of 5000 line items, which was preposterously huge, impossible to navigate in any kind of way. Their original piece was to go from 5000 line items to five, and they thought everyone will love us because we've eliminated 99.9% of all of the confusion in our price list. And while that number has already gone it's already gone up, there are probably 20 items on the price list. I think we can, we can give credit where it's due. It was very hard to do that. They did a good job. The bounce back, though, is that they bundled some things. For instance, VCF now has not just vSphere and vCenter, but also has VSAN, also has NSX. And so that bundle is potentially incredibly valuable to a client, but only becomes valuable if that client is using VSAN, and certainly if a client is using VSAN and NSX, those clients are actually seeing potentially a price, a small price reduction if you're using vSphere, vCenter, NSX and VSAN, buying it as a bundle on the subscription is now percentage points cheaper for some clients than what they were having to do, which was to go buy vSphere and vCenter licenses and Then go buy VSAN licenses, and then go buy NSX licenses. So for a certain segment of the of the population, this move to VCF has has been great. Now I will admit that again, most of our clients, we have been talking to them about the potential benefits of VSAN for four or five years, we have a lot of clients that are that are using VSAN. They're very happy with VSAN. I know Allen, your your team, started off with VX rail, which is a VSAN system under the covers, and that we have now built you a couple of clients. Investors that have decent in it. And so your pricing, I think, is going to see a little bit different. It's not going to be five or 10 times more expensive because you're using two of those three bundles. And the NSX piece, again, has enormous value for anybody that's running large Palo Alto or large Cisco implementations, NSX can really save, potentially save a tremendous amount of money on the Palo Alto budget or the Cisco budget, but it's really, it's a matter of really sitting down and figuring out if each one of those clients actually has a need to run those particular systems, but the ones that do are getting the most value out of out of VMware and broad phone.
15:52
That's great. So Sean, you were certainly shot out of a cannon on this topic, because you covered like my next 10 questions. No, that's that's awesome. And if I get a little redundant here, shame on me for not hearing everything you had to say. That's what's great about podcasts, is I can hit that quick rewind. You know, you did share what you're hearing from your public sector clients, you know, specific to some of the things on the renewals. And I really appreciate you sharing what you did, because there were a couple of nuggets in there I had no idea about, and that was one of them, is the reseller space, and which kind of does sort of feed into the narrative that I kind of getting a feel of, not that, you know, I'm I've put my flag into the ground of Broadcom. I certainly have, you know, some areas with Broadcom that I continue on an ongoing basis of having heartburn with. But sometimes you know the truth is somewhere in the middle. And so I really appreciate you providing some of that, that context that might be feeding into some of the pitchforks and torches that I've been seeing in the forum, right? But are there any what are the things you might be hearing from your public sector clients outside of that the specific related to perpetual, to subscription, and the cost increases related to socket and core, anything else that you could add just to that part of it, what you're hearing from your folks.
17:35
So, so the the frustration with subscription and the way VMware did, it was incredibly real for every single one of my clients. In fact, I initially when the when the original purchase got done in November of 2023 I think the leader of Broadcom, Hawk tan came out, and boy, I was I was connected to him in every possible way. I wanted to hear every single word that he spoke because of previous issues. When, when Broadcom took over Symantec, there really were some, some really dark days there for us as a big Symantec house and Hawk came out and and was just completely winning me over with, you know, I've made mistakes in the past. I'm going to do it the right way this time. I've learned from the Symantec deal on what to do and what not to do, and we're going to take care of everybody and and unfortunately, what he really meant was that he was going to take care of his shareholders. And I should have known that. I really should have I should have realized that his his duty is to make sure that his shareholders are happy. And it didn't really matter if I was happy or if my customers were happy. And so I wore that for almost a year. I told everybody, don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. And then at the towards the very end, I was able to get a couple of our largest clients to sign largest you. Education, you know, sled state, local education clients to sign three and five year enterprise agreements, which I was worried that maybe it was going to be a little rockier than I thought they were able to sign it the larger ones were, which is carrying them through all of this chaos by the time they land, I think Broadcom will have everything figured out. And you know, things will go on business as usual for them, but the move to subscription was absolutely brutal for the vast majority of our of our clients. I. Even the ones that were already using vSphere, vCenter, V San, it was just a it was a big change from having essentially a monster pop in year one, and then, you know, 10% payments for years 234, and five, essentially the money was the same, but it was being broken out much more evenly. And so instead of having, hey, I got to come up with 300 grand this year, but then next year I only have to come up with 60 to do the service and support. It was 60, 6060, over a five year period. So the total spent was 550 grand. And instead of having that that 300,000 instead of having that $60,000 support, which is what they were expecting, they got a bill for $120,000 and over the next five years, they will spend exactly the same amount of money as they as they would have, because that 60,000 was eventually going to turn into, you know, 200,000 or 250,000 when they did another forklift, another forklift upgrade, so not explaining to the clients, not giving them a way to utilize their existing perpetual licenses, and giving them credit for that, I thought was a was a huge mistake. They came back to clients and said, Hey, if you you know, if you still have a year left, but you need to buy this new license, you have to buy all of the subscription licenses up front, and essentially throw away a year's worth of licensing, which was just wrong, in my opinion, it just wasn't the right way to do it, and we managed to help our clients get what they needed without having to be ever we don't, I don't think we had a single client that was in a situation where they had to throw away perpetual license advantage, and moved a subscription throughout that first year or two, which is most of those issues are dead now, because the vast majority of perpetual licenses are now, have now expired, and so everyone's gotten the usage Out of them, the socket to the core piece. Now again, I think it was, I think it was the wrong choice to tell a client that a quad, a quad socket, four core server, which has 16 cores total, had to be licensed at 16 cores minimum per socket. And so that quad four was was requiring 64 core licenses instead of 16. And that is where the vast majority of the the rumors of, hey, things are going to be four or 567, times as expensive. They were comparing service and support money the 60,000 without making any attempt to add in the 300,000 that it cost to get to the 60,000 service and support. They were taking the 60,000 and then adding in the 64 sockets of that of that host, instead of the 16, I think VMware could have been a little gracious. And, you know, given everybody two years and said, Hey, now in two years, the minimum socket, the minimum socket count, is going to be 16 for right now, we will normalize everybody so that people that listen to a path that said quad sockets are better than a single socket, and they didn't have a price penalty to pay. So they chose. Some people chose the single socket, some people chose dual. Some people chose, chose quad, and they were being penalized for a decision, a decision that they made two years ago or five years ago. I think VMware could easily have said, Look, you guys have, you know, another two years, right? You've got a seven year old quad server. You've got two years to get it replaced, get it replaced, put a single 16 in there, and, you know, essentially, get enormous value for your money. And until then, we'll just charge you by the total number of cores, you know, four sockets, four cores, that's 16, and that's what you'll get charged for. I think they could have created a huge amount of goodwill, huge amount of goodwill, and they just didn't that just was not their was not their decision. They they, they wanted everything, and they wanted it
24:46
on the first day. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna take a little sidebar here, and that is, you kind of got me, you know, you're picking at a scab of mine, and that is subscription. So. For so, obviously, this is not new to us. We've been seeing it over many years. Now moving to subscription based software from perpetual and our budgets are seeing it. You know, having things go from what used to sit in a CapEx where you had a nice replacement plan and those dollars showed up every five years to now. You know, these have moved into our operational expense at an annual cost of, oh, by the way, it increases every year. So from your perspective, I just, you know, those who hear me pontificate, and all the areas that I do that, including here, they've heard me jokingly, half jokingly, say, call out, you know the software vendors as that being the real ransom. The real ransomware that all of us are dealing with is these software subscriptions, to be quite truthful,
25:50
that is a great that is a great turn of the phrase that's inside our industry, because I do consider it, I mean, it is a ransom. And even though a bunch of resellers have come back to me over the last five or six years at different conferences and things, and they say, oh, subscriptions is the greatest thing in the world. It's guaranteed annual recurring revenue, and we don't have to work for it. And it just comes in and I'm going, subscriptions are the absolute worst possible thing for our clients ever in the history of things for our client, and they look at me like, why are you so concerned? You know, everybody's got money. They'll figure out a way to pay it. And I'm thinking, this is a terrible, terrible idea. And I really thought there was going to be some, some huge backlash in the end user community, and I was just going to, you know, stoke the fires from within. And, you know, here we are, 10 years later, and there isn't a single thing that comes out that isn't subscription based. It's to me, I think, I still think it's a bad idea. So they don't want to listen to us, you and me, Allen, talk about how evil we think subscription contracts are. It'll be a broken record
27:00
the well, I'm hoping things like this and me SEC in general, that, you know, we can at least cause some disruption and, you know, some responsible cost increases, or more friendly opt outs and migrations and, I mean, there's, there's Many things that paint you in a corner that you know, quite frankly, that's why I call it ransom. And so I think you already answered my question, because I was going to give you an opportunity to maybe speak on behalf of those vendors of what you know. Are there any vantage points to it? I really struggle to see any and um, but you know, if there was something other than, you know, if you're an organization that did not have a replacement plan, or, you know, where you scheduled these future replacements out, and you had to go and look for CIP dollars. Every time you did a major upgrade, I could see where you built that in into your operating budget, you know, and it is there, and the spend is there. So I guess in that respect, there's some value. But is there? Is there anything else where you can see where us as customers should be, like jumping up and down happily over subscription based software versus perpetual
28:25
so the idea that that they are they the manufacturers who are moving to subscriptions, their statement is that they are smoothing out the budget process, that it isn't going to Be 360 6060, 6300. 6060. 6060, it's going to be 110 110 110 110 now obviously the the 60s were going up. And so you know that, that that number was never real, and the 110 will go up, I promise you, the the piece though, that I still think just cannot be discounted, is if, in your situation, city of Pleasanton has a you know, has a completely unknown thing occur to them that could not have been planned for, and you're going to be in a severe budget crunch for the next two years with a perpetual license scheme, you have the chance to kick the can at your discretion and move it down. And hey, I know we had this. We had the $300,000 build up. We have the chance to go do it all brand new. And then this thing happens, and the money is better spent someplace else, and they promise you that you're, they're gonna, they're gonna refill your coffers in two years, you'll have that 300 there. You don't, you don't get that choice anymore. That's the That's the danger that I see, is that a lack of client choice and a lack of client control
29:59
and. Am, I think are
30:03
cannot be understated. So I just tried to, I tried to find something good about subscriptions Allen and and I just came back to another, another bad pin. The the smoothing of the budget is what they continuously, yeah, with Matt, I don't know if you have, do you have a kernel of truth here on why? Well, great to have a subscription contract. I
30:24
have been seeing a couple of vendors, Broadcom, being one of them, like being Barracuda with subscriptions just off top my head, where they are willing to, you know, annualize the payments. And to your point, Sean, it is positioned as saying, hey, you know you in the public sector, know what your spend is going to be on XYZ software for the next three years, right? So predictable spend from that standpoint. But there's only one that I can think of, and that's Broadcom that does provide an out clause when I have been sending my quotes to people. I've been including that link now i in all full transparency, I have not it's there's not been enough time for someone to experience how effective that out clause is, and I've not experienced that yet with any of the folks that I've been working with. On the surface it's supposed to be, Hey, I've notified you, like, city of pleasant, for example, we've notified you, Broadcom, that you know we are no longer using, you know, your product, so we don't want to pay year two and three, right? And then the annualized payment Broadcom somehow, then is my understanding, will validate that you've evacuated all their software from your environment. And you know you don't make those, those next payments, and you're out how smooth or not smooth that is. I can't speak to it at this point in time, but you know, so understanding to your point, Sean, the potential disaster that rises, right, that you're not planning for, right? Hurricane comes through and you have to divert money to new streets and sewers or something, and that gets pulled from its budget, right? I you know, who knows? Right? Can that possible? I don't think the subscription folks are gonna go, man, I'm sorry that happened to you. Where's payment so, or you can defer it for six months. So, so yeah, that is potentially uncomfortable for you, the consumer, and I don't know what the future is after that.
32:39
And Allen, I can say that honestly, once the once all the numbers are normalized. So, you know, we get away from the from those four people that use quad, quad socket, four cores, and the punishment that they're that they're getting once we move past the subscription to perpetual when you look at a five year, just as an example, when you look at a five year overall cost, the total cost of ownership over a five year period for VMware, the five years of perpetual versus five years of subscription, the numbers are exceedingly close. We're, I mean, we're not anywhere near even a 6070, 80% increase over those timeframes, we're looking at 10, 15% and again, the more a choice to use VSAN and a choice to potentially use NSX can create a situation where over a five year period, The budget for the IT department is actually lower. There's actually more money inside the budget because of potential savings that you can get by. You know, the VSAN being cheaper than pure as a as an example. And I'm not saying that VSAN is automatically cheaper than pure, or that, you know, NSX can help save, you know, a huge Palo Alto network refresh and potentially cut it in half. So there are ways there, there are advantages that are still there for the clients that are using VMware, using BCF, and using it to to its best capability. So over a five year period, all of those fears really do wash away. It's just that first jolt of going from a service and support number, that 60 to that 100 number, which really that that 100 number is giving you all the service and support and essentially allowing you to upgrade to a new version and do all that stuff. So it's part of the 300 that you you guys used to put that number away and spend it every five years. Now you're spending 20% of it every year.
34:58
Yeah, you know, I. Um, I wanted to pivot away to some options and strategies. But before I do, you know, you did a great job explaining the what, how's, ifs and whys and everything. But if you were to crystallize down to, you know, a couple sentences, what, what? What can you provide IT leaders in terms of communicating it to their internal teams, you know, like finance, upper management, maybe even elected officials, when they have to go take this in front of a council, but something that might help them share and fully grasp the impact. Right?
35:39
So, in order for us to and we've always maintained the idea that providing the right education, giving the right information to the clients, will always help the client make the right decision. And so we aren't just a VMware house, we're not just a Broadcom house. We're also a Nutanix house. We also have Hyper V installations. We have recently, within the last couple of years, become Proxmox authorized and expert, so that we can sit down with a client and not just say, Oh, don't worry, it's not as much as it was. You're paying more for your VMware, Yes, tomorrow than you are today. We can also sit down with them and actually work out how much it would be to migrate to Hyper V or Nutanix or AWS, or Azure, or GCP or Proxmox. We can, we can help them figure out what the paths actually look like, so that when they present to the board when they, you know, go into the into the budget meeting, they have the number that they need to potentially keep the status quo, but they also have the numbers that they would need to move, because that is kind of where the rubber meets the road, right? If, if you're looking at, you know, going from 60,000 to 100,000 and you are just up in arms because that extra 40,000 is in your minds, not getting you anything. And you know that for the next five years, you're gonna spend 100,000 a year. So you've got a half a million dollars over the next five years. When we sit down and go through Nutanix, if Nutanix comes out at 800,000 then you're actually starting to cheer for VMware. Yay. VMware was only 500 Nutanix is 800 or Proxmox is 200 and not 500 so that's amazing, but you've now lost all of your ecosystem partners, so no more Veeam and no more exaggerate, and no more this, and no more that. All of these things are going to die because you're open source, and you're going to have to choose Open Source as your as your path forward, which has been problematic over the last 10 years. And so we want to be able to help clients understand what their path looks like. And we spent an enormous amount of time and effort and money becoming expert in multiple different pads so that we can help our clients see down each one of those pads before they start spending money. So that's what I would tell clients, is that you owe it to yourself really, and we owe it we the I believe the reseller community, we owe it to our clients to be beholden to them, to help them understand the full path of what it's going to be, right? Moving to Nutanix isn't just, you know, we swap the licenses out and replace the hardware, and we're good, right? There's a potentially an enormous amount of training that needs to happen. Yes, they're great at VMware. Yes, they're great at vCenter. No, that doesn't mean that it just in 100% of the cases just migrates. All of that knowledge just migrates easily to a different virtual platform. Yes, AWS can be the cheapest entry, but at in how many months, in how many years, will the will that cost start to outweigh buying hardware and being on prem we can actually help figure out all of those pieces, so that when somebody comes up in a board meeting and says, Well, I don't understand why we just don't go to AWS, because everyone's on AWS, and AWS is great, and it's taking over the world. And for them to be able to pull out the proposal and say, This is the proposal for AWS, Kis has gone through the numbers, and we believe this. And yes, for the first two years, it will be cheaper, and over a five year period, it will be two and a half times as expensive, and there it is, right? Those are those the numbers. So that's what, that's what we want to do for clients. We want to help them make the right decision not choose VMware, to just to choose VMware because it's not right for everybody anymore. But to understand, you know, these are the pros and cons. Tons of these two or three or four paths, and for you to really be able to understand it, have your eyes open when you make your decision. Know what you're giving up. Know what you're getting for the budget numbers that you're you know that you're working with. So that's what we'd like to do, and we do all that for free. It's just part of the for us, it's part of the process. Yeah,
40:23
I appreciate that you hit, you know, another matter. And you know, I'm obviously not cloud adverse or having things hosted in the cloud, but there are dirty, little secrets and hidden costs that you don't realize when you do go to Azure or AWS as well, we've seen it just, you know, like with our cloud backups, you know, the aggregate cost and, oh, we got to pull that data down. And now, now your, your your cost savings are all going out the window.
40:56
Yeah, all of a sudden, ingress and egress become your, biggest cost structures, and you didn't even know they existed, yeah? When, when AWS or Azure was talking to you about sending your backups up the shoe shining?
41:10
Exactly? Yeah?
41:14
Yeah, I know. So you know, you talked on some topics or some solutions there of going in, and that's a whole nother episode in itself on those alternative solutions. But just just the high level overview, you know, you name three that are the clubhouse leaders, if Pleasanton was to pivot, actually, the top of it was Proxmox, my guy, My guy is really interested in it, but just just an overall feeling on what agencies are the best fit for what solution, and let's just take those New tonics, Proxmox, hyper, V Sure.
41:57
So Nutanix, the Nutanix, we've been a huge fan of Nutanix. They were the original inventors of HCI. They came from Google File System. Now we were, we were their biggest fan when they came out nine or 10 years ago, VMware ended up taking over that market, they ended up creating a VSAN structure that we felt was safer, more reliable, it was cheaper in the in the long run. But never gave up on Nutanix, and we certainly won't give up on Nutanix their their system, for anybody who was extremely angry at VMware for moving to subscription now they would, they said, rightly be angry at Nutanix, because all of Nutanix is subscription based. So that's not going to work. The hardware typically needs to be swapped out, so we're looking at a forklift upgrade. So if you bought your hardware two years ago, Nutanix is a tougher implementation. There was a school that we worked with just recently that was extremely angry at the machinations from VMware, and they offered to go price out different vendors, and we quoted out the Nutanix. We cornered out VMware as it's done, business as usual. We cornered out box box, and neither one of the other two, Nutanix ended up being then three or 4% of what the VMware component was, Proxmox ended up being, overall, about 10% under the issue with Proxmox, I've already alluded to, it is that the ecosystem that's out there that supports Proxmox is small, and it isn't likely to get enormous. You're going to have one or two vendors from a backup standpoint, instead of 50, you're going to have one or two disaster recovery choices. Instead of, instead of, you're going to have far fewer choices. And the fact that
44:19
that the
44:20
learning curve of being inside of an open source system is going to add cost, the ability to do retraining, and those types of things typically are can be fairly expensive, and just having the nerd part of it Out of the way, and knowing what wanting to push really hurts from a from a long term strategic plan of where is Fox Mark is going to be five years from now? For that matter, where is Hyper V going to be five years from now? Microsoft has actively spoken of hyper B's death. Uh, multiple times,
45:04
really the the last, the last time that Hyper V got brought back to life is because of
45:13
a unbelievable decisions that Broadcom made to make everybody so angry with them that Microsoft said, Hey, we can. We can go back. We go bring back Hyper V, have a bunch of people migrate off a VM. We're on to Hyper V, and then as soon as we have them on Hyper V, we'll kill Hyper V and make everybody go to the Azure HCI stack. And voila, we've got them back in the cloud, and we're rolling along. Sounds like my audio might be bad. Allen, Can you still hear me?
45:40
I can it sounds like you're talking on the very phone that Alexander Graham Bell created. I'm hoping that your local recording is a better quality, so we'll see what happens.
45:56
So I mean, each one of them, we can sit down. Each one of them have pros and cons. Hyper V is great some situations, Nutanix is great for some situations. You know, obviously, if you're if you're tied to something like pure or one of the other, one of the other major third party sands, Hyper V is going to be an easier choice for you that Nutanix, because Nutanix works to have the hardware, the storage, built into the into the system. I think between those three, they all have gaping holes in their strategies, and they all have great solutions that they can bring to the organization. So it's really just a matter of sitting down with the organization, figuring out what they need, where they need it, other pieces that they may need. Maybe they need disaster recovery. Maybe they need site resilience. Maybe they are on a cloud
46:52
trajectory.
46:54
I keep trying to move to different places to see if the audio getting better again. But yeah, but we do want to sit down with each organization and figure out what it is that
47:10
they need and how
47:12
they need it delivered, and give them a range of options to be able to get there right price options, a range of features and benefits, those kinds of things.
47:26
Okay, great, yeah. You know, in light of your the audio issues, which I'm hoping you know, could be sweetened up a little bit as we edit the podcast, I think we'll, we'll wind up with just one last question, I think you, you kind of answered it and you hit it, and that is the long term future of virtualization, you know, you, you kind of prefaced a little bit or shared that there's a lot of uncertainty with all these solutions, I mean, and it is with tech in general. I mean, I get it, you know, it's very difficult to talk about something five years from now, let alone three. But you know, where do you see long term future virtualization? I have my opinions, but it's only based on what my shop is headed to. And quite frankly, I just don't see us really hosting much hardware, probably that much down the road. There's a part of it makes me very It freaks me out to even say that, but given to all the things that we even talked about on this episode, I don't see how it just doesn't go to that to that direction. How about you? What do you see in your crystal ball, in the areas of virtualization?
48:38
So I think on prem is going to survive as long as cloud continues to extract the amount of profit that they are extracting, I think that they that cloud could have killed on prem solutions two years ago by simply cutting all their costs in half and turning a what has been so far about a two or three year cycle before the cloud becomes too expensive, and turning it into a five year situation before the cloud becomes too expensive. If they could get to five years, I think that the vast majority of on prem will run its course, and people will be in the cloud.
49:27
Now that is
49:29
really the same belief that VMware has, that hawk has with ACF, because the entire purpose of coming up with VCF, which is vSphere, vCenter, NSX and VSAN, the entire purpose of selling that cluster is that that exact same environment exists today in Azure. It exists today in AWS, it exists in GCP. It exists in the Oracle. Cloud. It exists in the IBM Cloud, and it exists in the Alibaba cloud. So you're talking about those six clouds essentially controlling 95% of all cloud based systems. And for a client that is on prem today, with vSphere, vCenter, NSX and V San, if you have, if you're running all of them, you will be able to move your stuff into Azure tomorrow with literally the click of a button. Right now, nobody's doing it because it costs too much money to move into the cloud, the cloud, the ingress and the egress and the and all the little you know, fees and locals and taxes and these things are simply driving people crazy. These unknown costs are driving people crazy. I think when that happens for a client that's on VCF today, and all of the experience that that that client is going to gain. So let's just say you Allen, you decide you're going to run, you're going to run vSphere and vCenter. You're going to run VSAN and NSX, all of the experience that your team is going to gain, all of the expertise that they're going to have. If, in five years, the cost for the cloud comes down, you will be able to say, Hey, I'd like to have all of my stuff be in Azure and go to Azure and buy the exact same VCF in Azure, and have two different sites. Have the site on prem and Azure. Two years later, you could decide that you want your sites to be Azure and AWS, and you buy the BCF in AWS and the VCF in Azure, and you are now out of the hardware business entirely. And the biggest advantage that comes with that just intuitively, is choice. Because not ever has anybody said that they are moving to Azure natively, right? And then two years later say we're moving to AWS. Nobody has ever said that. Nobody will ever say that, because it's impossible. The amount of expertise and learning and knowledge gained that is required in order to understand Azure native services and and features is simply incompatible with the amount of time and effort that it would cost to become IBM Cloud expert, or Alibaba cloud expert. So when you choose Azure native, or AWS native or GCP native, that client, as far as I'm concerned, is locked into that vendor forever. And yet, if you have VCF and you're on prem and you know VSAN and you know NSX, when you move up into Azure, you are still using VSAN, you are still using NSX, you are still using vSphere. And if you wanted to move tomorrow, if Azure comes up and says, we're doubling our price as of next week, you could move to Azure or move to AWS next week and avoid that, whereas everybody else that is Azure native will be stuck. They will pay double because they can't move. So this is the secret weapon. This is the thing I think hawk has been slowly building. He's becoming the arms dealer, supporting the true combatants, which are the AWS is and the azures and the GCPs and the IBMs and the Oracles and the alibabas of the world, they will control the cloud. And all, all VMware is looking at is, is essentially being able to provide the clients with the choice to choose their cloud and then choose a different cloud. And you will not be able to do that. You will be able to do that if you aren't VC app, you will not be able to do that if
53:46
you try to go native. Yeah, yeah. Now winding down here, I wanted to give you guys an opportunity to share a little bit about what Kis is, who in you know, and how you can help others who may want to reach out to you
54:02
Sure. So Matt, you want to take that
54:04
so first of all, chaos been around since 1988 so we're not a new organization by any stretch of imagination. And a lot of the folks that were a competition, you know, 37 years ago. Now, congratulations Sean on starting the company 37 years ago. And 15 years ago and 10 years ago, our ease have been maybe absorbed or gone. So the iteration of who we are today, I like to describe like a CPA law firm with practice areas. Practice Areas have consultants. The consultants have engineers that work for them. This allows each of those consultants to be subject matter experts in the technology verticals that they cover. So Sean and the data center, Dave Powell, cloud, Craig Miller, network security, auditing, pen testing, those types of things. Allen Hurst was in project management and. And Todd schmitzer sales organization, as well as physical security, right? So things like, you know, for cotta structure, cabling, hanging, APS, those types of things we've always wrapped that in around being able to provide a range of products, right, both in the hardware and software arena, the list of those products you know, changes over the years as technologies you know, come and go. We do have a cloud where we could host backup as a service, even Infrastructure as a Service, right, potential, tertiary, just target for data, things of that nature. We have various compliance standards that some of our public sector folks would need to adhere to, that we've been able to achieve. And then, of course, the sales organization to talk about all those things. We're heavy on the engineering side. Unlike a lot of manufacturers, where they'll have, you know, five, six sales reps will share one, you know, kind of pre sales engineer. We're the exact opposite. You know, probably half to 3/3 of the company, two thirds of the company are engineers. So it allows us to be able to get into those discussions that Sean talked about, and helping decide path, A, C, B, C, D, and bringing in the appropriate subject matter expert to go navigate that path with you. One thing I like to say too is that the company on an average 17 year lifespan from an employee so you get really a consistent voice year over year, which allows for continuity as we go through budget planning, introducing processes, knowing history of where we've been together, both as a client and customer, from that standpoint and your reseller of choice. And we understand you have a choice, and we do our best job we can to be able to continue to be your preferred choice. So that's the that's the Kis
57:10
and thanks. Thanks, Matt. Really appreciate that. Obviously, strategic partner of me, sack, we are going to be at the conference. Yes, sir, I think if I thought mistaken Sean, I think Matt said 25% off if you mentioned you heard him on the podcast.
57:28
So no, you know I, this is my, this is my first podcast ever. I'm open to doing something like that.
57:36
Well, I'm actually joking and and I can't see Matt right now, but his eyes probably got really big. Well, wind down. We've gone over where we like to be, but it was all great information, and this will be of great value to many of the members of me. Sec, so the community, I'm sure, is very grateful for the stuff that you provided. Maybe it provided some area where some people could, you know, walk back from the ledge a little bit. Maybe others will just go over and say, No, I'm moving on. And then you could be there to help them with other solutions. The, you know, I've been doing this thing just because, I'm a geek, and I like to hear what people are doing with this, but we'll end on this, and that's your favorite app when, when you reach in your pocket and grab your phone out, what is that? What is the app that you are are using the most, or your favorite one? Matt, probably the
58:39
one I click on most often is my outlet client just doesn't ever seem to be able,
58:47
oh, that's a Yeah.
58:49
From a common standpoint, the I like the ESPN app just because I enjoy sports and getting the sports news. So I will, from a personal standpoint, I guess probably, probably that app
59:08
that's good. I was teasing you about the outlook thing. I thought you were going to say that you had me as a VIP
59:17
contact. I do have you in my contacts, but you don't often pick up the phone. So that's the
59:26
it's very, very difficult to pick up a phone these days. Sean, how about you? What's your favorite go to app? So
59:34
before, before, I embarrass myself eternally, since I know these things can never be deleted. Allen, you tell me what your favorite app is,
59:42
uh, you know what? Right now, I could tell you, because it's on the home screen, I Well, it's one of two. One is TV time, which is not an app, it's a website, okay, but I've made it, you know, yeah, you can save a website, you know, to your home screen as an app. But my wife and I, as we sit down in the evening and we think, Hey, what are we streaming tonight? We always forget what we're watching, what episodes haven't dropped? What are, you know, what's in queue. And so, you know, we have a Apple TV at home, and it's not very super friendly on keeping up with all the things you're watching on Netflix, Hulu, Disney TV time does that. So I don't own stock in it, but it is a nice tool to just put your shows in there, and it'll tell you what episodes you've watched, what are coming up, what hasn't been released, and blah, blah, blah. And then, of course, number two is our Zendesk app. You know, keep keeping in touch what's going on.
1:00:43
I love that app, and I'm going to download it or get a hold of that website immediately, because my wife and I are constantly staring at the TV, going, what was that show? And even if you can remember it, it still takes another 10 minutes to figure out what what channel or station or whatever it's on. Although it does seem like Apple TV has all of our as like, five or six shows, we just go to Apple TV and figure out which which episode has dropped on which one
1:01:13
of these. Yeah, it does a decent job with that. It doesn't do Netflix for whatever reason, I'm guessing, competition reasons, but it does do a good, pretty good job of what's next. But I'm also in competition with kids on that. So yeah,
1:01:28
my kids do not. My kids watch TV when we force them to watch TV, otherwise, they are just glued to their phones, doing whatever it is that that their phones have. Yeah, yeah.
1:01:43
You have not embarrassed yourself yet with your app?
1:01:45
Oh, still remembered that I was really hoping so I've been trying to figure out an app that I can say that's just nice and safe, like the ESPN app, because that's
1:01:57
all right. Sean, blink twice if it's Grindr.
1:02:02
Oh, so Okay, so there is, there are way worse things than it could be. Okay, so I have really had a great time on various versions of Tiktok. So that is my that is my guilty pleasure. I watch it and like it, and it's,
1:02:26
it can be addicting. It's scroll, really, scroll, scroll, scroll. So yeah, hey you guys, thanks again so much. You are not only the first strategic partner that we're able to talk to today, but you're the first episode that we pay for an hour. So 224,
1:02:45
Mesac, if anyone wants to come by,
1:02:50
there you go. All right, the great Willie Mays, there we go. Thanks again, and we'll see at The Conference. Thanks. You. Quiet you
1:03:00
you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai