>> Live from Orlando, Florida.
It's theCUBE.
Covering Microsoft Ignite.
Brought to you by Cohesity
and theCUBE's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage
of Microsoft Ignite here in Orlando.
I am your host Rebecca Night, hosting,
co-hosting along side Stu Miniman.
We are joined today by Steven Rosenthal.
He is the senior product specialist at QTS Data Centers.
Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> You're welcome, thank you.
>> So let's start by finding out a little bit more about QTS,
based in Kansas City.
What do you do?
What are you all about?
>> Yeah, so QTS is based in Overland Park, Kansas.
We have our operations based in,
actually right outside of Atlanta in Suwanee, Georgia
where actually I'm from.
And we have 16 data centers across the United States,
about six million square feet of data center floor.
We cater to everybody from hyperscalers,
the hyperscalers of the world that everybody,
I think, knows about,
to enterprises, to federal customers.
We have product lines that cover, again,
hyperscale, co-location, private cloud;
which I think we'll talk about today
and mannered services around that private cloud offering.
>> I know Stu is dying to talk private cloud with you but--
(Stu Laughs)
Can you just tell us a little bit
about how you fit in precisely with the Microsoft Ecosystem?
>> Yeah, so, we fit in
because we will offer Azure Management,
so for customers that will have work loads up on Azure,
we can help manage that
and we also have dedicated connections
through our connectivity products
that will get you to Azure from our data centers.
So, that's how we kind of fit into this ecosystem.
>> Alright, so, just to geek out on that one little bit,
when I talk to a lot of service providers,
things like AWS direct connect,
and Azure Express Route are one of the things
we're seeing just massive adoption on being able
to take my own stuff and plug it in
or use services from the public clouds.
Do you offer all of those?
>> So we have AWS Direct Connect in our Chicago data center
that we can cross connect to you,
to that via our other data centers.
We're also utilizing the software to find networks
as back-up fabric and megaport
to get you to those direct routes into Azure and AWS.
>> Okay, great.
So you do have the way to,
'cause the discussion has been,
for a few years it went from hosting
to service providers and, oh wait,
public cloud is the enemy.
And now I think we've matured a lot.
It's like, yes, of course there's competition there,
but as SoftDel and Microsoft said,
look we're going to compete against people,
we're going to partner with a lot of people.
And, of course, your customer's are using everything.
>> Yeah, I don't think it's just a line.
We definitely partner with the public cloud offerings.
It's not if you can't beat them join them,
there is a workload for public cloud,
there's workloads for private clouds
and we can get into that into detail,
but there is absolutely a partnership
that we can have there and not a competitive partnership.
>> Yeah and I actually, let's bridge that discussion
over to the private cloud discussion.
You know, I will give you the one there is no answer for it,
but how are customer's sorting this thing out?
How are you dealing with it?
What do they put where?
How do you help them with that discussion?
>> You know, what we're finding is customers
are anywhere from all into public cloud,
to I'm kind of just dabbling in it
and maybe putting my toe into it.
And we can go in and help them
along their cloud journey.
So, because of the integrative products
that we have within QTS,
we can help you from just being a co-location customer
to kind of dipping your toe in a little bit
with some public clouds.
Getting you that direct access via AWS Direct Connect
or via software to find networking,
helping you manage that,
but there is workloads out there
that customers just want to know where their data is.
Where is my data?
When you go to a public cloud,
I'm not saying it's not safe, it's not secure,
but we all know there's issues that sometimes they go down
and there's customers, for compliancy reasons,
for whatever reason they have,
they want to know my data is in Suwanee, Georgia
and due to the private cloud,
and we know it's always there,
we can provide that to the customer.
>> Do you think that customer anxiety of where is my data
will always exist for certain clients
or do you think we will actually get to a point
in the cloud computing evolution
where people feel really secure?
>> You know, I think if you look over the last few years,
people are a lot more secure today
than they were three years ago,
two years ago or even one year ago.
So, if I had a crystal ball,
I think people will get a little bit more comfortable,
but I think customer's in finance--
>> Healthcare. >> Healthcare.
They're all going to really be nervous
about where that data is,
so there's always going to be that need for that.
Certain workloads, I want here.
The rest of it, yeah, we can put up in public cloud,
but I want to know that this data
resides in this data center.
>> Yeah.
I mean, governance and compliance
is obviously going to play into that.
So, let's talk about the private cloud.
In our research, we started a few years ago,
we said, what customer's need is true private cloud.
And we said that because cloud should really be
an operating model and the public cloud
really set the bar as to,
how I consume, how I manage,
how I don't have to get into some of the pieces,
so, to do that,
you really need to kind of modernize the platform.
Maybe bring us through your journey
as to how you've seen it versus just kind of,
I had a bunch of servers in Iraq,
versus how do you define what is private cloud
for your environment today?
>> Yeah, so at QTS, we define the entire stack
is dedicated to a customer.
That's everything from the Nutanix hardware that we use
and we decide to use as our infrastructure base for this.
All the way up to the Cisco 9K's that we support.
Everything is dedicated to that customer.
So, there's no multi-tendency at all within that.
So, there's no noisy neighbors,
there's nobody next to you that you may not know
what they're doing.
Our journey started about a year ago,
maybe a little bit more.
Where we saw that, as everyone probably did,
the evolution of the customer
going to that true hybrid model.
That not everything is going to public.
They, again, not to repeat myself,
but there are some workloads that stay within
the private cloud and they needed somewhere to put that.
Customers also were looking for more
of an optics model than a capics model.
We can host that for them within our data centers,
provide all the data center services that we provide
to our COLO customer's around duplicate power
and the security that we provide and allow them
to host that within our data centers.
So that's what we're seeing in our customers
and that's what is really driving that.
>> Alright.
When Nutanix positions the enterprise,
it really is about that simplicity that they can offer.
Service providers often have different metrics
as to how you determine.
What lead you to the Nutanix solution?
How does that fit in your over all operations?
>> Yeah.
Honestly, we did, for lack of better terms, a bake off.
We looked at competitors out there but Nutanix, by far,
they have a right to be in that Gartner Magic Quadrant
because, one, their support is just excellent,
that we have found from them
everything that we needed from them.
They were right there and helping us.
Up until now and we don't think
they're going anywhere either, right?
Nutanix has been one of our best technology partners
that we've brought on board.
And we see the benefits
of the hyper-converged environment, allowing us,
you talked about people want that cloud experience
>> Right.
>> The loud experience is, I want to be able to swipe
my credit card and have a server running in five minutes.
That's not what dedicated private clouds are,
but they might want it less than 30 days, less than 60 days.
Having hyper-converged there,
we can provide that to the customer,
get them up and running in a matter of weeks,
not a matter of months.
You know with their traditional architecture.
>> One of the things we're hearing a lot at this conference
is the importance of having the right kinds of partners
and making sure that there is
a lot of trust embedded in the relationship.
>> Right.
>> You just described, choosing Nutanix,
having this bake off,
how else do you walk through the,
can you walk our viewers through the process
of how you choose the right people
that you want to do business with,
from sort of a business mindset stand point,
but also, complimentary functionality?
>> I think a couple things.
One, we obviously look at the technology.
Technology for us is, if not number one,
it's up there as pretty close to number one.
Does the technology meet the needs of our customers?
Can we provide the service
with the service level agreements that we have in place?
Around our hosted private cloud,
we have 100% SLA around that,
so we want to make sure
that we can meet that for the customer.
So, the technology has to be there.
Then, outside the technology, the support.
This is technology,
technology's going to have issues.
If we can make sure we have the support to back that up,
so if a customer
or we have an issue with the infrastructure,
we can bring that back online as quick as possible.
Then we look at, how closely they can do,
you know, co-market with us, especially Nutanix.
We do a lot of things co-marketing with Nutanix.
We put on panels within our data centers.
We've been doing this for the past, almost a year now,
with Nutanix, ourselves,
maybe we'll have AWS sit on it,
we'll have Cohesity sit on it,
and bring in customers or prospects into our data centers
and have different topics around there,
so all of that kind of mixed together,
provides a really good partnership for us.
>> Great.
>> Steve, we talked a little bit about how Azure
on the public cloud fits in.
How does Microsoft fit in on the private cloud discussion?
>> So, most of our customers are running Windows.
I mean that's really where it fits in.
>> Of course.
>> Currently, our hosted private cloud
runs VMRS as a hypervisor--
>> Right. >> But most of the customers
are running Windows as their operating system.
>> Absolutely.
Still, I mean, from the early days until today,
the applications sits on top.
Microsoft has all the business apps up there.
Been a lot of announcements at the show.
Windows Server 2019, talking a lot about the shift to SaaS.
How are you seeing,
is that still a big driver for your customers,
the generational shifts of Windows
and what about the changing workloads?
I'm curious about how those impact you.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
The changing workloads definitely drives our business
and as you pointed out,
a lot of those are going
to either Office 365, going up to Azure.
We're getting a lot more customers
asking us for Azure these days.
I don't want to put AWS against Azure,
but we are at the Microsoft show, obviously.
We're getting a lot of customers
who are driving their business up to Azure
and to be able to support that within our community
is really important to be able to support that customer,
so we are definitely seeing that drive
towards those types of workloads.
>> You're an industry veteran.
You've been in IT for 25 years.
I wonder if you could talk about this point
in time that we're at now.
It feels like an inflection point,
but maybe I'm wrong.
Can you sort of paint this point in time,
in the greater context of the cloud computing revolution.
>> I think hybrid is the word.
Right?
I know it's a marketing word.
I know a lot of people use it,
but I think it really has hit today.
Where you have companies that say,
hey, we are all in on public cloud
and I think that's a great marketing term,
but if you really look at all of their workloads,
they don't have everything up there,
but even if they have 90%,
10% of their workloads are Legacy applications
that they would have to re-write
to be able to really work in the public cloud
and these applications are running just fine where they are,
they don't want to touch them.
So, I think that hybrid model is where we are today
and it's only going to grow.
>> Steven, I'm curious, we watched for a while,
public cloud polled on the data center apps,
but now we have the Edge out there.
You talk about IOT,
you talk about what machine
to machine type technology
is going to push things back out,
not going to be in some central location.
Is that having an impact yet on your business,
how would you play in some of these IOT environments?
>> Yeah, we are constantly looking
at the new technologies out there,
especially the autonomous cars
is something that we are looking at very heavily
and they require,
there's something like six terabytes of data
that gets passed back and forth between that car
and whatever service is running that car
and that's got to be somewhere on the Edge,
but I think if you look back at how people
were defining private cloud a couple years ago,
how are people are defining Edge is very different.
And over the next year or two, we will get more common,
how people are defining Edge Computing will
become a lot more common.
So, we're looking at how do we plan that market?
Do we have to have data centers closer to the Edge,
wherever that edge is,
in cities that you typically don't see data centers.
You're probably going to have a different type
of data center within that city too.
>> Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
The edge is very different
if you are a telecom provider versus an enterprise,
what you said.
That data center is going to be a pop,
is it going to be something in a wireless tower--
>> Is it going to be in a closet somewhere
that supports it?
>> It's all going to be something that just fits on a wrist
at some point in the future, right?
(all laughing) >> Yeah.
It's going to fit right there.
>> Yeah, check on my data.
So, getting back to the cities
that you don't necessarily think of.
I mean, you're a tech, a cutting edge tech company,
based in Kansas City, the Heartland.
>> Right.
>> How do you find,
is it difficult to recruit talent
because frankly even the companies
in Silicone Valley and Washington and Boston,
they're having trouble recruiting talent.
Where do you come down?
>> I think it's not only recruiting the talent,
it's keeping the talent;
which QTS is very good about keeping the talent.
I think if you look at our attrition rate,
it's probably some of the lowest in the industry
'cause we have a culture that people want to stay in,
but even though our headquarters
are in Overland Park, Kansas,
again, our, really our operations headquarters
are outside of Atlanta, Georgia in Suwanne
which is probably just about 30 miles north.
So, we have Georgia Tech that we can pull from,
you have Emory that you can pull from
and, you know, the entire Georgia University system.
I don't want to leave anybody out that we can pull from.
And we have data centers around the country,
even in Silicone Valley, we have Santa Clara,
which we can pull from the Silicone Valley individuals.
Dallas has a lot of tech companies,
so we're not just pulling from one market,
we're pulling from 16 different markets across the country,
which helps us a lot not just to dry up a single market.
>> You said that QTS has a culture that people want to stay
and Microsoft is touting its culture
as collaborative, inclusive.
Describe QTS's culture.
>> Our culture, a lot of people ask me that
and it's like, you got to live it.
It's very, very family-oriented.
I know a lot of people say that, but we live it.
We care about each other.
Nobody walks around going, it's not my job.
Everybody is there to support the customer.
We are very customer-focused,
you can see that in our NPS scores.
Our NPS scores are very high in the industry,
probably some of the highest out there.
So, and that goes back to just how
we take care of our customers.
And we look, goes back to your question about,
what do we look for in partners,
Nutanix probably has a very high NPS score
and we want to make sure that our partners
are treating our customers
as we want to treat our customers.
>> Great.
Well, Steven, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.
>> Thank you.
Appreciate it.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
we will have more from Microsoft Ignite,
coming up in just a little bit.