Live from London England,
it's the CUBE covering .NEXT Conference
Europe 2018
brought to you by Nutanix.
>> Welcome Back to the CUBE here from London.
Our reporting of Nutanix NEXT
2018 in Europe. With me here is Frans
Coppus. You are an ICT manager at
Driessen?
I'm very curious. Driessen is a customer
of Nutanix? I understand that you
develop HRM software among other things?
>> Tell me about Driessen. How does this work?
>> Yes, well Driessen is a family business.
We are a business service provider
for the public sector in the Netherlands
and the Driessen Group is actually
a group of companies that make employment possible.
We do that through the offering
of several different services.
You should think of
connecting people to work, so a
staffing function, but next to this
, we also develop software and services
to take over processes for other companies
or to make processes easier.
>> That sounds a bit
like on one
hand you are a Employment Placement company, helping
people get work, but on the other hand,
you also seem to do something with
software and the delivery of your services
as a software product. How
does that work?
>> Yes, that's right. We deliver
services to make other companies' processes
easier. You should think of
payroll and things like that,
but also all other kinds of processes
for which
we mainly use the digital
services
that we develop ourselves.
For example, think of
a package like AFAS profit
, where AFAS profit falls short on some functionality
that customers would want
to make use of.
We can
help those customers
to provide that extra functionality to improve processes.
>> Yeah, that sounds like you
are software development shop. You
develop
the software in-house?
>> Tell me more about that. Do you do this on-premise? Do you use the cloud? What tools do your developers use?
How does that work?
>> Well, have a team of about 25 in-house software
developers.
They are spread across a
number of our different companies
, and the software we
develop runs
partially on prem
and partially also in the cloud.
>> Yes, and I understand that you have been doing this
with Nutanix for a year, year and a half
to provide a foundation for your infrastructure.
Can you explain how this works?
What Nutanix products and services you use?
What are some of the benefits?
>> Well, we
started looking into modernization
of our data center at the beginning of last year.
That was how it started.
Then we looked further into things.
We already had some interest in Nutanix.
We did some more research and ultimately we
decided to choose Nutanix
and basically
slowly replace our entire data center
with Nutanix.
So we installed some hardware
but subsequently we also selected AHV
as the hypervisor layer.
We came from VMWare so we basically
migrated everything.
I must say that the implementation itself went very quickly.
The implementation of the Nutanix environment
was really a piece of cake and
then we started to
migrate our VMs to the platform
one-by-one.
And this year we completed this process.
Currently, our entire data center
is running on
Nutanix.
What were the problems you were hoping to solve?
Well, you should mainly think about scalability.
We liked the fact
that we could start small with Nutanix
but when needed we could scale easily.
Performance was an issue in the previous
environment, which we also completely resolved.
I think the biggest
challenge we
had was to make things easier.
We had
created a pretty complex landscape over the years.
That was actually the main
reason why we ultimately chose for Nutanix.
Simplification of the whole
landscape.
Easy to manage, especially also
since we are using a mixed solution.
Partially on- prem and partially in the cloud.
With Nutanix this is easy to manage.
>> Yeah, exactly.
Since you are an ICT manager.
I can imagine that your role also changes?
I assume that at first, the main
focus was on infrastructure,
as it was difficult and where attention was needed.
How has your role changed over the course of
time?
>> Yeah, that's exactly right.
That role is changing. Initially, you are very focused
on the operation to keep all the "balls in the air."
All sorts of things you actually don't want to have to deal with. And this is what we are now seeing.
We are able to manage the environment with fewer people.
That means you free up more time
and together with the management team,
you can use this this to look into how we can improve our services
How can we
improve our availability? And all of this at equal or lower cost and with less effort.
>> Yeah, and I assume, to use the word "
digital
transformation", is also a challenge for you?
You want to move closer to your customer.
How do you do that as an IT
department? How how move closer to the business
internally at Driessen, but also external customers? How does that work?
>>Well, the needs of the customer is often translated by the Business
to
the software developers. What is important for us
is the time-to-market.
The development life cycle is pretty rapid.
We work a lot on the basis of
orders and as such it often
goes paired with requirements
that we need to adhere to.
So, time to market is very important in such cases.
With Nutanix
we are actually able
to deploy software faster and offer new features to
our software engineers
who in turn can use this.
>> Yes, so you are saying that your software
developers can thus get closer to the business.
They require less time to
lay the groundwork, as it were.
We are here at .NEXT, we have watched the
keynotes, heard a lot
announcements.
Nutanix started as an
infrastructure.
A so-called modernization of what you had. Meanwhile,
there are 15 products.
It has become much more gigantic.
When you look at the growth of the amount of people walking around here,
3,500 people.
I am curious, how are you looking at this?
You will be walking around here for a few more days.
You've watched the keynotes. You see the
crowds. What is your impression of the event?
>> Well I must say, "very cool!"
Last year I went to Nice,
That was a very good conference.
That was also the reason that made me think "I coming back this year for sure".
During the first keynote, it was really cool to see,
how much bigger the entire
event has become
but also the success of Nutanix.
Last year, in Nice, I spoke with
some of my peers who were still
't doubt whether they would transition
to Nutanix.
Well, I told him about our
experiences and told them I would
recommend it for sure
including the use of AHV as hypervisor.
You are starting to feel
how everything has matured.
So much more has been added.
I was impressed with what products
I have seen over the last two days along with the simplicity and maturity of the products
Really super cool to see.
What really stuck with me.
What really impressed me was
Frame. Frame is really super cool.
It's also something we are for sure looking at to use.
In addition, Beam looks
very appealing.
I must honestly say, we now have
our entire data center on prem.
Also our DR environment is on prem,
because when we made the decision, there was no
Beam.
If I would have to make the decision again,
I would absolutely
choose Beam to help solve DR.
There too, the simplicity with which you
can manage it is really cool to
see.
Well, in the future we continue
to monitor such developments
and I am sure that we will work with
products such as Beam and Frame in the future.
>> The made the announcement
of the core
product. The core products
to essentials,
which is a bit of the uplift.
Those are the next small steps you
can take. And then you get enterprise.
Thats where you are especially finding the new product offerings such
SaaS products
, the Xi Cloud
, and what I am curious about is the following.
I also know from Nutanix
from the perspective of infrastructure? I
have seen them grow. And looking at
all the announcements they
have made. All those products they have developed
What was for you the lightbulb moment?
The moment where you thought "when I get home after the weekend,
I am going to use this?"
I want to learn more about this!"
What is that one product from which you say
I want to get started with that!"
>> I think
, if I had to choose it, then I would
say, "I will definitely get started with Frame"
to look at how we can provide our colleagues with a workplace
when they work remote or things like that.
>> Yes,
>> Is also one of the issues
that you are trying to solve using Nutanix?
Traditionally, Nutanix
did lots of VDI. Still does a lot of VDI.
Is that something that the Driessen Group is moving towards?
>> Yeah, well at least for a part of our
colleaguesI, I see ways to implement Frame as a substitute for a VDI environment.
>> Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Exactly. Yes. Exactly right.
>> Also, I was really...
and I did not realize that
they were working on this, but Nutanix
is building its own Cloud
I am very curious what this
will bring. Especially
if this will seamlessly integrate with your on
prem environment.
At the moment, I find that to be the strength of
Nutanix? The fact that you can
you can easily switch between
on your own prem Nutanix environment
or a cloud environment.
Well, if there is also another Nutanix
in the Cloud option, that would be cool. Exactly.
>> All right, last question.
You employ developers
Today, we also saw some announcements
during the keynote around cloud-native as it is called so nicely
So Karbon, databases in the Cloud
with Era with Buckets, S3, S3 storage.
Are these things from which you think,
"my developers will make use of this?"
Yes. Yes. My developers are all knocking on the door. They want to
get started with containers and other stuff.
So that's very good to hear that
Nutanix
is also diligently working on that and how it will integrate within
Nutanix. So my
software developers will be very happy with that.
>> Yeah, great! Well congratulations! That really sounds like
a top store!. A very nice
story about Driessen. how you
are using Nutanix.
Well, I wish you success with your next
steps that you will undoubtedly take. That was it for now.
Thanks for watching the Cube
together with Frans here in London
Til next time.