Cloud Success with Nutanix and Expedient

Nutanix solutions play a pivotal role in addressing modern enterprise challenges.

Join us for a live comprehensive discussion featuring two distinguished experts in IT transformation: Harsha Kotikela, Director of Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix, and AJ Kuftic, Field CTO at Expedient. This session will delve into the innovative approaches Nutanix and Expedient employ to solve customer challenges, including seamless migrations from VMware to Nutanix platforms.

Topics will include:

• Increasing operational efficiency
• Simplified disaster recovery
• Alignment with business goals
• Innovation and agility

Attendees will gain valuable insights through real-world success stories, highlighting the strategies and outcomes achieved through these migrations. Whether you are considering a migration or looking to optimize your current infrastructure, this webinar offers expert guidance to drive your IT initiatives forward.

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

Harsha Kotikela

Director, Product and Solutions Marketing at Nutanix

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.

00:00:00:08 - 00:00:14:14
AJ Kuftic
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. I am AJ, Field CTO of Expedient. and I'm joined by Harsha Kotakela, who is Director of Solutions and Marketing at Nutanix. Harsha, how are you today?

00:00:14:16 - 00:00:22:29
Harsha Kotikela
Hi AJ, pleasure to be here. Very nice to be here. So I'm doing great. And and here from Mahalo from San Jose California.

00:00:23:02 - 00:00:45:04
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. So we are doing a cross country. this is this is really the real team USA. The Olympics are going on and everything, but this is the real team USA happening right now. so I wanted to kind of start really down at the basics, with you teams, can you kind of provide a brief history of how Nutanix, you know, got started and how it's really grown into what it is today?

00:00:45:07 - 00:01:12:05
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah, definitely. So Nutanix was founded in 2009. Right. So since then and so what we first innovated was we were the pioneers in something we called the hyper converged infrastructure. Essentially it's bringing like storage compute a network layer together. Right. So that time, you know, there were some challenges with scale out architecture, right. and also some challenges with sun based architecture.

00:01:12:05 - 00:01:37:02
Harsha Kotikela
But like, you know, I was a developer before, so to provision things in a based architecture, it takes a little bit more time consuming. And, for planning also, it's a little bit time consuming. Right? So at that time Nutanix innovated this HCI architecture. So since then, at this point now we have more than 25,000 customers, many of them global two K customers.

00:01:37:05 - 00:02:05:12
Harsha Kotikela
And since then, from a product innovation perspective, we've innovated, you know, since the, the initial HCI architecture. From there, we invented something called we have h v r in-built hypervisor. Right. that's there. And then on top of it, we've also built the complete management layer. Right. providing you intelligent operations, cost management, any of those things for your data operations.

00:02:05:12 - 00:02:28:07
Harsha Kotikela
Right. And then going forward, also, you know, as we see look to the future, there's also containers, right? Like moving from virtual machines to containers. So we also have an orchestration layer, to help you manage large scale container environments. Right. So essentially that's kind of a brief history. I know we'll get into more details here as in that conversation.

00:02:28:07 - 00:02:30:22
Harsha Kotikela
But that's all of this. Yeah.

00:02:30:25 - 00:02:48:08
AJ Kuftic
And I think for us, at least for me, I remember seeing them back in 2011, and it was one of those things where it's like, oh, wait, you could do that. Oh, wait, that actually makes a ton of sense. Yeah, I want to go do those things. But I think the key innovation that that Nutanix made was really simplifying everything.

00:02:48:12 - 00:03:10:10
AJ Kuftic
The management layer itself makes it super simple to do basically all of your operations. You get a ton of really easy and clean to read data. I think the other big thing was Nutanix was one of the first to go fully HTML5 prior to everybody having their own individual little apps, and Nutanix having a fully HTML5 management play was an innovation and a real thing at the time.

00:03:10:13 - 00:03:32:13
AJ Kuftic
it's now fairly commonplace, but I think that was one of the key things that showed people like this is really the future, of where we're going. So when we see that growth, you know, kind of can you walk me through where, where a lot of that growth kind of came from? And how does that growth really address what the common challenges that enterprises and other organizations are facing today?

00:03:32:15 - 00:04:08:26
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. So it brings to mind, like recently, what I've seen in, in in one of the Gartner reports I was reading, right, the IPO environment in general has become super complex. Right. That's one thing. So as an I.T IT practitioner, I.T decision maker, their life has become complex because of various factors, right? One is you have now different environments, right, to, to look after and then not just different environments, but you have different technologies to right, like you have virtual machines, you have containers for different things to, to manage.

00:04:09:00 - 00:04:28:28
Harsha Kotikela
In addition to that, what's even more complex is the number of apps being developed. Right. So another article that you know, IDC Future Scope was saying that there's about 700 million, 750 million, apps, something that should be developed. Right? So, so that's a lot of that's lots of use.

00:04:29:05 - 00:04:30:19
AJ Kuftic
That's more than a little bit.

00:04:30:21 - 00:04:57:09
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. Yeah. So, so all of this is creating a lot of complexity for from an IT perspective. So Nutanix provides, as we're describing before she put ourselves in the shoes of the Nike personnel. Right. What do you need. You need to have a infrastructure that helps you, you know, manage this full scope of things. from say, a day to day zero operations and on top of it from day one and day to operations.

00:04:57:09 - 00:05:24:24
Harsha Kotikela
You want to manage this, you know, across. Right. And obviously these days we also have with the limitations of budget, with the limitations of, you know, staffing and those kind of things. Right. So, that's where Nutanix comes in, right? That's where Nutanix vision is. Right to vision is to provide the full scope of solutions with that single management plan to make it easy, for, for 90%.

00:05:24:24 - 00:05:25:18
Harsha Kotikela

00:05:25:20 - 00:05:47:17
AJ Kuftic
And I think a lot of that plays into kind of where we see things going. Right? I think a lot of organizations right now, you mentioned all of the complexity that's happening right now. And it's not just in the base deployment. It's not just in the base infrastructure itself. It's everything after that. Right? It's super fun to get to day one.

00:05:47:20 - 00:06:06:22
AJ Kuftic
And then everybody wakes up the next day on day two and goes, okay, now what do I do? How do I patch this? How do I maintain this? I trying to manage all of this together as somebody who spent the last year. Oh, oh I don't want to. Oh it's been it's been many years, 20 years at this point managing various I.T infrastructures.

00:06:06:25 - 00:06:22:25
AJ Kuftic
All of our ability can be really, really a challenge and makes the operations much more complex. So how does Nutanix really align IT strategies to overall business goals to actually make things better and help like get rid of a lot of that complexity?

00:06:22:27 - 00:06:50:13
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. So our goal is to simplify it. Personal life. Right. Essentially. And that's what we're trying to achieve. Some of the things I'll call out here. Right. For instance from a you mentioned about you know, yeah getting to day one, day zero is fun. And after that like we'll what's my life after that. Right. So few of the things that day to day life that 90% of does is cost governance, security is a big thing, right.

00:06:50:15 - 00:07:10:22
Harsha Kotikela
so these are the, and then intelligent operations, we call it intelligent operations, but just monitoring which VMs are working, which VMs are using a lot of resources, maybe some VMs, or provisions not being used. Right. So those kind of operations that you have to manage. So one example that I'll talk about is the security central, right.

00:07:10:27 - 00:07:32:28
Harsha Kotikela
Security central, in case, you know, with a lot of going on with security issues these days, you want to monitor what is the traffic East-West traffic going on in an event. So you have to create some policies based upon that. Right. So it gives you and it gives you clear visibility on what's the communication that's going on across your East-West traffic.

00:07:33:03 - 00:07:53:03
Harsha Kotikela
And if you want to create some policies where, you know, you want to get an alert, for instance, right. Like, so some things that, you know, not naturally happening, or if you want to keep them hands off a certain VM, maybe a web server to a database somewhere, you want to keep them hands off, then you can create policies that they don't.

00:07:53:07 - 00:08:13:16
Harsha Kotikela
You know, there's no data flowing in between each other. Right. So these are simple things that can help, achieve that. Something that we call, for instance, in our, some of our financial services customers. Right. Like zero trust architecture. Right. So these are the things that help support that zero trust architecture.

00:08:13:18 - 00:08:48:00
AJ Kuftic
And I think the other piece is that because you have this full scope of solutions, you can also accelerate adding capabilities. I look at things like Nutanix files of I need a new file server, I can just go hit a button and spin that up. same thing with NDB, with your with database as a service. It's a super interesting platform overall to try and eliminate the pain points of adding file servers, database servers, all the rest of the infrastructure beyond just the virtualization infrastructure that I think really takes that full scope all the way out.

00:08:48:02 - 00:09:09:19
AJ Kuftic
Now, I would be doing our audience really a disservice if I didn't ask about the big, gigantic elephant in the room that everybody wants to talk about right now, which is Broadcom and VMware. obviously Nutanix and VMware have gone head to head over the last 15 years. By the way, happy 15 years to Nutanix. founded in 2009.

00:09:09:19 - 00:09:29:18
AJ Kuftic
So this is 15 years, we've heard a lot about those changes. And it's always interesting to me to hear the, like, success stories or what people are actually seeing in the field of the success that you have seen from the Nutanix side. Right? We heard it from our own people. But going out in the field and hearing more stories there.

00:09:29:23 - 00:09:37:02
AJ Kuftic
So can you kind of like what are you hearing from your side around the changes that are happening and how people are going and trying to solve those?

00:09:37:05 - 00:10:09:29
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. So VMware created the whole virtualization, right? Like they innovated that and it's a very well loved company right. As a VMware. And there's many people grew, many enterprises grew to rely on it to build their careers on it. Right. But Broadcom acquired it and that's what caused the whole disruption, if I may say. Right. Like because Broadcom's view of managing the business and reimbursed view of, managing the business, very different views.

00:10:09:29 - 00:10:31:02
Harsha Kotikela
Right. so as soon as Broadcom acquired it, they made some few changes. Right. Like the same playbook that they applied, similar playbook. They applied to, the previous acquisitions like Symantec and Sia technologies. So some of the things that they've done is they've changed their business model with their licensing and packaging. Right? That's one big change.

00:10:31:05 - 00:10:54:21
Harsha Kotikela
The second thing they've also changed is the support, the model that they work with partners. and the third thing is which customers they focus on. Right. this was unlike how VMware was in the market. So this obviously didn't match, what some of the VMware customers were looking for, what they wanted for it, for their own needs.

00:10:54:23 - 00:11:17:11
Harsha Kotikela
so there's a lot of those customers who are looking for an alternative. And Nutanix, you know, has, as we described before, provides all the solutions that they're looking for. Right. So, so those those are to many of those customers are, migrating or maybe even like, you know, diversifying, right? So that, they have both VMware and Broadcom on the infrastructure.

00:11:17:18 - 00:11:40:09
Harsha Kotikela
So some recent success stories for instance, is right here in my neighborhood, we have a school district, the largest school district called VLA. Right. that moved from VMware completely to to Netflix. And then we had a very well known brand that you and I, we might be aware is micron, right. Micron is a semiconductor fab company.

00:11:40:12 - 00:11:54:14
Harsha Kotikela
they were going through their modernization exercise. Right, of moving to containers, applications, containers. and they chose Nutanix for their modernization exercise. So, so these are some great examples of success stories.

00:11:54:17 - 00:12:15:23
AJ Kuftic
Yeah. And I think the other side of that is you mentioned it is that sort of, you know, diversification, we like to call it optionality of you, have your workloads laying where you want them to run. Not every application has been fully certified to run on Nutanix, even though it'll totally run fine on it. There's definitely an application certification layer that comes into play there.

00:12:15:26 - 00:12:37:11
AJ Kuftic
And I think a lot of folks are looking to kind of keep things at bay, right? I have this vendor who's changing things. I have another vendor who I can potentially bring in to make sure that they don't change things too much, but in doing so, you're now adding you're now going back and adding more complexity on top of all the simplification that you were just trying to do.

00:12:37:14 - 00:13:01:20
AJ Kuftic
So I think for a lot of clients, when they want to look at options, this is where we it expedient really fit in because we can provide both services. We can do VMware private Cloud or our, enterprise cloud, or we can do Nutanix private cloud. So we have the ability to provide the various options, but not completely turn over all of the operations and make people have to learn 5 or 6 different things.

00:13:01:27 - 00:13:21:15
AJ Kuftic
You can leverage us to handle a lot of that. And I think one of those simplifications and or complexities kind of comes back around where if you're going to diversify your platforms, how do you handle disaster recovery? Right? This has been a big thing for a lot of people when they start saying, well, we're going to move on and we're not going to leave, we're going to leave VMware and go to something else.

00:13:21:18 - 00:13:33:24
AJ Kuftic
It's that your traditional disaster recovery plans kind of go out the window. So yeah, is there how does Nutanix actually simplify that for, you know, organizations who are looking to make that those.

00:13:33:27 - 00:14:01:08
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah that's a great use case right. Especially you know with the tenets of expedient partnership. networking is actually software makes really simple like very easy to deploy and also matches your, the RPO, RPO timelines that, you know, the one. And actually this is in built in our Nutanix architecture that we talked about. Right. The HP and AOS, I'm throwing some names out there.

00:14:01:08 - 00:14:26:03
Harsha Kotikela
But essentially this is a software that helps the, the HCI architecture that I've mentioned before. So this is inbuilt in it. so it's, it's easy to deploy. So it has inbuilt, you know, replication in build. snapshots, integrated snapshots. Right. All of this kind of helps in the, in disaster recovery features in it. Right.

00:14:26:08 - 00:14:33:11
Harsha Kotikela
So all of this really helps bring it being seamless experience and easy to deploy.

00:14:33:13 - 00:14:57:00
AJ Kuftic
And I think the I think the bigger piece there is from because it's all natively integrated, it understands the underlying storage storage architecture. Yeah. And from our side we build a private cluster and connect the prism essentials together. So you have one singular view across both of your environments. And then you can do your failover across those platforms as you need to.

00:14:57:02 - 00:15:14:03
AJ Kuftic
But also we can provide, management around the disaster recovery. So you can call us in the event of a disaster will help you do Docker testing will help you do failover. All of those pieces that, again, are stuff that a lot of businesses want to do, but never feel like they have the time or the staff to be able to do that.

00:15:14:03 - 00:15:33:03
AJ Kuftic
That's where you can leverage a provider like us to really help take care of that. so how are we collaborating? Right? I can talk through the experience side of this, but how are we collaborating to ensure that that seamless migration, you know, transitioning from VMware, kind of how do you walk through a normal migration? I can talk through the the expedient piece there.

00:15:33:06 - 00:15:57:23
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. So before we, you know, when this organization thinks about migration, right, we have to think about, I mean, as you know, we were talking about this before, you know, we have to go through a lot of planning process, right? you know, you have just planning, first of all, what do you want to migrate VM so infrastructure or from a VM perspective or application perspective, you have to decide what do you want to migrate.

00:15:57:26 - 00:16:19:09
Harsha Kotikela
And next once you decide then you have to come up with what are the dependencies of those right when you migrate. So you have to do a lot of planning. And then after that stakeholder management, maybe you have business users on bringing them up to speed on engaging them. These are the things that we're going to migrate. and then, you know, after migration, right through the process of migration and then testing.

00:16:19:09 - 00:16:40:03
Harsha Kotikela
Right. So we have to think about those kind of steps. and then as part of that, what Nutanix provides is, is a nice, toolset. Right. Nutanix move. essentially it's a it's a VM migration. re hosting tool. It's included in the platform. Right. That helps with this easy migration.

00:16:40:06 - 00:17:09:10
AJ Kuftic
I think that's the key thing is how much Nutanix actually puts into the platform itself that it's not okay, here's a third party thing or here's an additional tool or here's the thing that you need. It's just there. You just use it and it's and it's great. I think the bigger piece for clients who are looking to make that migration, I think one of the biggest hurdles, not to necessarily go into the negative side, but playing devil's advocate a little bit is that switching into Nutanix as an architecture can be very expensive CapEx wise.

00:17:09:10 - 00:17:40:17
AJ Kuftic
If you're not already in the HCI space because you are looking at, you know, I already have my storage, right? I already have my host layering on Nutanix is is something that's just a, you know, I just install some software and move on. making that jump can be something that can be really heavy for a business. This is where expedience comes in, because we can do that as a service where we can limit the amount of CapEx that you're having to outlay in order to move to a new platform and move away from VMware, if that's something that you want to do.

00:17:40:19 - 00:18:13:23
AJ Kuftic
And we also help do the migration itself. We're a service provider. We've been in business for 20 years. We do migrations all of the time. I want to give a huge shout out to all my folks on the delivery team, who literally sit down and go through with clients and make sure that everything moves smoothly, and the biggest thing that we find is configuring networking, going through a client's networks, understanding where they actually need to land, what networks need to be there, and making sure those all get configured so that when the migration happens, we don't run into a ton of trouble of oh, this VM powered on.

00:18:13:23 - 00:18:39:13
AJ Kuftic
But that network never got created, so I can't talk to anything. Right. This has dramatically lower the risk. We have a ton of experience doing it. And I think this is where Nutanix and expedience come together. Nutanix has an incredibly powerful, very simple platform and then pair that with a services team that can actually make sure that it all gets done correctly, smoothly and right the first time so that you can be be sure and be confident that it's going to work.

00:18:39:18 - 00:18:56:29
AJ Kuftic
Going forward. And earlier you mentioned I kind of want to jump the jump to a different thing that you said earlier with Security Central. can we kind of talk through some of those security features that Nutanix has and kind of how we're blending together to offer that and make sure that everything is secured all the way through.

00:18:57:03 - 00:18:59:06
AJ Kuftic
Coming on to the Nutanix platform.

00:18:59:09 - 00:19:24:28
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah, I mean, the basic things, right. Like for instance, you have I am you know, I don't tend to access management that is provided, as part of the Security Central. In addition to that. Right. Managing creating security policies right across environments. so you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you want to, you know, create the security policies if you want to migrate the security policies.

00:19:25:00 - 00:19:54:12
Harsha Kotikela
that is also in you can do that if because as we've talked about before, you have one unified environment. So it's easy to create it once and then replicate and then use the security policy across. and another thing we talked is, is the monitoring the traffic between your sites. Right. that is super helpful. Like, you know, if you have something visually just looking at the dashboard literally, and monitoring the traffic across, it's amazing.

00:19:54:12 - 00:19:57:24
Harsha Kotikela
Right? Like, it's it makes the IP person's life very easy.

00:19:57:24 - 00:20:18:24
AJ Kuftic
And so and I think that's the key thing is that trying to make everything simpler, data at rest. Encryption is just included. We don't charge anything extra for it. It's not an additional add on. It's not additional disk cost. It's just there because it's the right thing to do, right? You're putting your data into a what we are as a as a cloud provider.

00:20:18:27 - 00:20:45:12
AJ Kuftic
You wouldn't do a day that you would not put your data into unencrypted storage in AWS. Same here. We don't want to see your data. You don't want anybody else to see your data. So that's where the encryption comes into play. And then we also encrypt the connections between the sites. So as you're doing your Docker replication or you're doing your migrations or you have on prem, to us, we make sure that all that traffic is encrypted, so that when your traffic is moving across the wire between two sites, that nobody can snoop on it.

00:20:45:14 - 00:21:03:10
AJ Kuftic
And I think that's all of those pieces come into play along with us being SoC one, SoC, two certified, HIPAA, high trust, PCI, DSS, we can go through a number of different compliance certifications, and this is the sort of thing that helps you get to where you want to be without all of the effort that goes along with that.

00:21:03:12 - 00:21:23:24
AJ Kuftic
because we can do that at scale. And so when you're talking through that, you know, journey of clients who are migrating into Nutanix, what's the sort of feedback that you receive on that? Is it like, hey, this was this was pretty good, or you know, how are clients feeling when they're making that jump into the new platform?

00:21:23:26 - 00:21:43:24
Harsha Kotikela
I mean, they love it. Like the kind of surprised I've been in a lot of, proof of concept sessions for new customers at first, when, you know, when early on when we present that, oh, you have this unified platform, right? You can just see all your underlying environments with this platform. they're surprised. They're like, okay. Yeah.

00:21:43:27 - 00:22:09:04
Harsha Kotikela
It's just, you know, marketing, we're just talking about it. But when we come to the proof of concept stage, they really love it. When they see the tool. Right. and then after that you mentioned about support, and support. Nutanix support is very well known for for support. Right. and when we choose our partners to we have the partners provide that, outstanding support.

00:22:09:04 - 00:22:28:07
Harsha Kotikela
So customers that, you know, love the journey from preparing have, you know, preparing them during the whole migration process. And then they're also super surprised in a good way, once they see the environment, that how easy it makes their lives.

00:22:28:09 - 00:22:47:29
AJ Kuftic
I will say, as a former, not an experience as a former Nutanix customer, Nutanix support is incredible. you know, it makes it more incredible putting expedient support in front of it, because we also have our incredible support teams who are here 24 over seven. You can call us, get taken care of on our platforms, and be able to get the problem solved.

00:22:48:00 - 00:23:08:15
AJ Kuftic
That's really what we're after here. It's right. You're not calling us because it's like a nice day and you're wondering how we're doing. You're having a problem, right? So we want to get that problem solved as quickly and as easily as possible. And I know that we've talked a lot about the history of Nutanix, but kind of give me like a, like a really brief kind of what do you guys see over the next, you know, 2 to 3 years beyond where you see things now?

00:23:08:17 - 00:23:34:01
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah. Some of the things that everybody is planning these days, obviously I think we can't finish this webinar without talking about AI. Right? I think, we need to at least check the box AI. So but that is something that's going on. Right? So I've talked to many I.T leaders, and this year they were planning on identifying what are the different use cases that they could implement within their organization.

00:23:34:05 - 00:23:57:08
Harsha Kotikela
Right. and they're planning to implement those. I use cases within their organization. So as they implement it, the first question is how could I get started? But where can I get started? Right. So Netflix is, you know, is offering a, you know, solution called GPT in the box that is actually a turnkey, validated solution that makes it super simple, easy to start.

00:23:57:08 - 00:24:25:11
Harsha Kotikela
That's one thing. The second thing is, even if you don't have a second trend that's going on, is the whole modernization, right? Like moving from VM base to container based applications. Right? So for that, in Nutanix also is providing something we call it the Nutanix Kubernetes platform. Right. It's a it's basically orchestration and a management tool for large scale Kubernetes environment.

00:24:25:15 - 00:24:55:16
Harsha Kotikela
Right. So with the next cloud platform, you can actually manage both, you know, Kubernetes containers plus also your traditional VM. Right. So that's something that, as people are migrating over. Right. The many folks will have an existing legacy applications or a legacy VM. So they need to continue to manage that. So Nutanix Cloud platforms provides capability to manage this for both of those things.

00:24:55:18 - 00:25:12:25
AJ Kuftic
And I think that's that's really the you know, the next level of modernization is going to be, you know, hey, how do I take my traditional workloads and make them more scalable? But then on the AI side, obviously we've done a ton on our side from an AI standpoint, we still have more coming. I promise we'll talk about that in a little bit.

00:25:12:27 - 00:25:31:05
AJ Kuftic
But, not today. Later today. Come back. It'll be great. but I think this is where we all see everything going. we are aligned with what Nutanix is looking forward to of. Hey, we see how do we handle app modernization across environments? How do we handle AI in the world? How do we put those sort of solutions together.

00:25:31:05 - 00:25:50:02
AJ Kuftic
And we're definitely aligned with Nutanix on that. But before we go, because I want to make sure that we we have Harsha here. So I want to make sure that we're taking, you know, full advantage of of where of of his of his availability. Let's take some audience questions. if you have any questions, please go ahead and submit them into the, into the chat.

00:25:50:09 - 00:26:04:28
AJ Kuftic
I do want to thank everyone who submitted questions as part of registration. It actually helps us out a lot to make sure that we're on the right track and make sure we cover things. Some of the questions that were asked, we did cover in the in the actual content, but I wanted to make sure that we got some of the direct questions answered.

00:26:04:28 - 00:26:20:09
AJ Kuftic
So I'm going to go to the first question here. The first question is how do you decide when to go on prem on Nutanix versus in the cloud or what stays on a private cloud versus going public? So, yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna let you take this one first.

00:26:20:15 - 00:26:45:16
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah, that's a big decision, Ajay. Right. and then the decision could change also over time, right? Once you pick a place. So I think it's good to think about it from a framework perspective on how to you come up with a decision right from a framework perspective for each business you, you know, you need to consider? one is whatever you're building, right, your application that you're building.

00:26:45:16 - 00:27:04:27
Harsha Kotikela
What's the maturity of that application. Right. Is it, it does that application do you know what kind of resources this resource uses if it's a tab. Right. So that helps you for easy planning of resources if you don't know yet. Right. Then, you know, maybe it's cloud, maybe it's on prem. Right. So that's one thing of the maturity of the application.

00:27:05:00 - 00:27:27:21
Harsha Kotikela
The second thing that you have to consider is the the data aspect itself. Within the data aspect, are you how do you have any regulatory constraints on it? you know, and also the data aspect, where is the data originating from? Where do you want to keep the application and that data closer? Right. so that's the other aspect, the data itself.

00:27:27:23 - 00:27:48:06
Harsha Kotikela
the third thing is you might want to think about is, what's your plan for this from a financial perspective where like CapEx was opex, right. So these are the things that you think. So essentially, these are the factors that you need to consider that help you decide whether you want to go on private cloud, public cloud or what you where you want to put it.

00:27:48:11 - 00:27:59:05
Harsha Kotikela
And by the way, this decision could change, right? Because based upon these underlying factors, maybe this year you start on private, maybe next to you put on cloud or vice versa.

00:27:59:07 - 00:28:23:29
AJ Kuftic
And I think that's that's definitely where we see a lot of the things. The biggest piece is data origination points and the criticality of connectivity. I know that's a bunch of, you know, big, big words that start with the C, but the big thing there is when I have a workload, is it going to be okay if that workload lives somewhere outside the, you know, four walls of that location, right.

00:28:23:29 - 00:28:42:28
AJ Kuftic
And retail manufacturing, they can't rely on internet as a critical piece of infrastructure because they may have things that are in remote locations or that are not well served by various carriers. So they don't have the capability to say, oh, yeah, if we lose one circuit, it'll be fine. We can keep running. If the internet goes down and the plant goes down, big problems exist.

00:28:42:28 - 00:29:05:13
AJ Kuftic
So that's one big reason to stay in an on prem, in solution. But when we start talking about cloud, we see a cloud service provider like expedient being really beneficial for a lot of organizations because we are hands on. We want to work with you. We want to make sure that everything is going smoothly and being done correctly, and not just hands you a button to let you go.

00:29:05:13 - 00:29:27:28
AJ Kuftic
Spend money, right and go deploy stuff and then have to go figure it all out yourself. We want to help get you to where you want to be faster, and that really involves having a hands on approach. And that's really where we see it. So when we look at things like private cloud versus public or, cloud service provider or expedient versus hyperscale cloud like AWS or Azure, the big thing for us is do you want to get there faster?

00:29:28:00 - 00:29:46:14
AJ Kuftic
Do you need help along that way versus taking on more workloads in other locations, and have to learn all of that on top of everything else that you're doing? So that's generally what my decision point has been, and it usually helps customers understand like, oh, actually, yes, if they're going to manage the hardware. But after that it's still on me to do everything else.

00:29:46:19 - 00:30:02:03
AJ Kuftic
This is where we sort of help clients kind of walk through that. Yeah. well, we'll go to the next question here. I know that we are potentially going over time. So if you have to leave, it's, if you, the audience have to leave, that's great. This will all be recorded to be available on our YouTube channel.

00:30:02:05 - 00:30:33:01
AJ Kuftic
but we're going to keep going because there's some really great questions in here. so what are the typical savings versus a similar managed VMware private cloud environment? And I'll take this one. from our standpoint, we have partnered deeply with Nutanix on building out a really, really cost effective solution. And in a lot of our cases, when we start talking through TCO between a do it yourself environment versus a VMware environment versus our environment, and a lot of cases, we can deliver the Nutanix platform at a much, much lower cost.

00:30:33:03 - 00:30:52:01
AJ Kuftic
I don't have specific percentages because it depends on sizing and all that sort of stuff, but we can generally deliver the Nutanix solution at a lower cost and a equivalent VMware environment. And that's where we see a lot of clients kind of open their eyes and go, oh wait, I didn't know that was the thing. because a lot of times they look at both of those sides and they say, oh, they're about the same costs.

00:30:52:04 - 00:31:14:16
AJ Kuftic
It's something that we can do to help lower costs, and we're doing all of it as a managed service. So we're actually helping you get there and not have to relearn everything. that's really the bigger, the bigger slice of that pie to actually show where the savings come from, especially around people time. and then Dr. costs, you know, when we start talking about the cost, usually it's pretty straightforward.

00:31:14:16 - 00:31:32:08
AJ Kuftic
It's just whatever the old thing was times to. Right. But there's more to it than that. So how does this compare, you know, kind of price wise with VMware. And I think for Nutanix because your stuff is included, there is a big savings of just software savings, right, that you don't have to buy that third party tool.

00:31:32:11 - 00:31:51:20
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah, definitely. Right. Like, you know, because it's included in, in Nutanix, you know, replication and data and, disaster recovery, you know, it's it's included in our, like, in our, in our software package. so that really helps from a cost perspective as well. Yeah.

00:31:51:22 - 00:32:21:08
AJ Kuftic
And I think from our Dr. side, the bigger pieces for a lot of organizations having that second site, having all the second gear that they had to go by, and especially with newer VMware licensing, where it's that licensing is on all the time, we're able to help lower those cost dramatically in terms of our doctor licensing, both with VMware and Nutanix, but being able to offer it as a fully protected and managed solution of we're managing all the hardware on the back end, so you're saving all that sort.

00:32:21:08 - 00:32:42:17
AJ Kuftic
The soft costs of having to maintain all those things as well as the licensing costs on top. So definitely come talk to us if you want to learn more about, you know, Dr.. Pricing and kind of walk through what we can do there and how we scope all that out, we can definitely talk after this. I'm going to jump down to, this question about potential savings.

00:32:42:19 - 00:33:16:00
AJ Kuftic
so there was a question that came in that what are the potential savings after all the work to switch is done? and I think this is where the savings are really around time. Right. All of the simplification that the Nutanix platform does allows you to spend more time focusing on other things. So the savings is both from a financial standpoint of we're able to deliver that solution cheaper, but also we can help with all of the pieces that go around it backups, Docker monitoring, etc. that now you have all that time to focus going forward on.

00:33:16:00 - 00:33:33:09
AJ Kuftic
Net new projects, things that your organization wants to do that you've just not really had the time to do and get all those things back. And Harsha, I think this is where Nutanix really shines in terms of because you're able to simplify all those things, that it makes it a lot easier to show savings going forward.

00:33:33:11 - 00:33:54:22
Harsha Kotikela
Yeah, some quick things that I want to add here as well. Right. But need to look at the total cost of ownership as you've mentioned. Right. It's Nutanix because of how it simplifies the whole arc environment. It helps with that total total cost of ownership. Right. And also because it's a it's a scalable architecture, right. You can plan about based upon how your business is growing right.

00:33:54:23 - 00:34:16:23
Harsha Kotikela
And stuff a huge CapEx investment. And the third thing is the way you want to look at it is where, you know, as IP leaders, where where do you want your organization to be in like 3 to 5 years, right? In 3 to 5 years, if you're thinking about a complete portable environment, right, and you can put your apps and data right, that's one thing, right?

00:34:16:23 - 00:34:36:04
Harsha Kotikela
That's where you want to be. And you for thinking about modernizing your applications. Right. These are the biggest things that are happening that also enables you have portability that helps you get your innovation faster. The market, if you want to be in 3 to 5 years, right, that's where you plan to be in talent. It's cloud platform. It's built for that.

00:34:36:07 - 00:34:56:14
Harsha Kotikela
Right. So so that's a big thing that, you know, I.T. leaders are looking and choosing y, to go with new times. And that's exactly the previous one of the success story I mentioned about micron. Right. Micron. That's why they chose in three years they wanted to be an modernize platform. Right. So the chose Nutanix for that.

00:34:56:16 - 00:35:15:06
AJ Kuftic
And I think it's hard to not land on that one. I want to thank Harsha for all of his time. I want to thank all the folks at Nutanix that we've worked with, that have really helped bring this webinar to life, but also to help bring the overall platform to life. this has been really, really great.

00:35:15:09 - 00:35:29:06
AJ Kuftic
I want to, there's going to be a QR code that pops up after this. If you want to learn more, you want to dive deeper, you want to talk through, you know, the overall solution. with us, you can absolutely do that. Harsha, do you have any final thoughts before we go?

00:35:29:09 - 00:35:39:03
Harsha Kotikela
I think it's been great session. Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity. I think we got great topics and any other questions? Please reach out to us.

00:35:39:05 - 00:35:43:15
AJ Kuftic
Absolutely. I want to thank you all for joining us and we will see you next time. Thanks, everybody.