Get ready to navigate the cloud computing revolution with Evan Kirstel and special guest Lee Caswell from Nutanix in a dynamic discussion that will reshape your understanding of cloud, network and storage evolution. As we peel back the layers of technology, we reveal how the industry is pivoting from hardware-heavy landscapes to software-driven environments that are redefining how we interact with data. Discover the marriage between exciting hardware advancements and AI, the strategies to secure data efficiently, and why generalists are becoming the MVPs in managing modern infrastructures. This episode promises a front-row seat to the challenges and triumphs of cloud environments, from hybrid to multi-cloud and on-premises solutions.
Experience the transformative power of AI as it drives customer loyalty and innovation across sectors, with insights on how airlines are elevating their game with smart tracking and rebooking systems. We'll unpack the magic behind deploying AI applications like "GPT in a box" seamlessly, and uncover how partnerships with tech giants like NVIDIA are making waves in the industry. Find out why you don't need to overhaul your infrastructure to jump on the AI bandwagon and how sectors like healthcare, financial services, and the public sector are harnessing AI's potential. Lee Caswell's expertise illuminates the path for companies to tackle AI adoption, technical debt, and talent acquisition, offering a treasure trove of opportunities for anyone keen on staying ahead in the tech arena.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Get ready to navigate the cloud computing revolution with Evan Kirstel and special guest Lee Caswell from Nutanix in a dynamic discussion that will reshape your understanding of cloud, network and storage evolution. As we peel back the layers of technology, we reveal how the industry is pivoting from hardware-heavy landscapes to software-driven environments that are redefining how we interact with data. Discover the marriage between exciting hardware advancements and AI, the strategies to secure data efficiently, and why generalists are becoming the MVPs in managing modern infrastructures. This episode promises a front-row seat to the challenges and triumphs of cloud environments, from hybrid to multi-cloud and on-premises solutions.
Experience the transformative power of AI as it drives customer loyalty and innovation across sectors, with insights on how airlines are elevating their game with smart tracking and rebooking systems. We'll unpack the magic behind deploying AI applications like "GPT in a box" seamlessly, and uncover how partnerships with tech giants like NVIDIA are making waves in the industry. Find out why you don't need to overhaul your infrastructure to jump on the AI bandwagon and how sectors like healthcare, financial services, and the public sector are harnessing AI's potential. Lee Caswell's expertise illuminates the path for companies to tackle AI adoption, technical debt, and talent acquisition, offering a treasure trove of opportunities for anyone keen on staying ahead in the tech arena.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, Evan Kirstel here. It's rare you get a legend to join the podcast, but we have one today in the form of Lee Caswell. Lee, how?
Speaker 2:are you? I'm good, Evan, Nice to see you and thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here. Kind of you're the ultimate industry insider. I think everyone in compute cloud networking knows you and who you are and your work these days at Nutanix. But maybe introduce yourself and I won't do you justice here.
Speaker 2:I think what you're saying is I'm old, I'm not sure. I am thrilled to be the senior vice president of product solutions technical marketing here at Nutanix and, as you suggested, have worked through storage actually started my career in a lot of hardware businesses. It's been super interesting, I think, to look at how new software architectures taking advantage of the latest in server capabilities was really transforming the industry. So a lot's going on. Couldn't be more exciting time in the market, I think.
Speaker 1:Well, excitement around hardware is back, as we see at GTC, nvidia's big powwow this week, and we're going to dive into that. But maybe give the audience your snapshot of Nutanix's main mission and goals these days. I've been following you for many years, but tell us about what's exciting, top of mind.
Speaker 2:Well, what's interesting, I think, is that we're following this path of consolidating and expanding. You know the industry does this over time, and so there's a lot of consolidation around cloud, for example, and then people, as they started realizing particularly data, people, data people realize that data is going to be more distributed over time, and you mentioned GTC. So these AI workflows, I think, are inherently at least hybrid cloud and potentially multi cloud in nature. Right, You've got development happening in the public cloud. You've got systems running in private data centers right, and then you're going to have inferencing some of the new things being announced around inferencing right happening closer to the edge, and so, as data gets more distributed, you start looking for how do you think about having a commonality across those so you don't get overrun with the management of these, and that's one of the things I'm excited about what Nutanix is doing.
Speaker 2:So, once you move to a server-based system you know every modern cloud is based on servers and then you can run software right that runs across these servers and now you can start consolidating things. So I remember, you know, when we used to have separate blocks and file systems and object stores were separate right. Well, now you can get those, together with software that supports them. You can have common data services for VMs and containers. I mean, these are the sort of things, and now you can run it across the public cloud and on-prem and at the edge. These are things that really get people excited.
Speaker 1:Excited indeed. So your clients are excited and you know what are the top one, two, three issues that you're helping them tackle, given the landscape of challenges, obstacles, roadblocks out there, what?
Speaker 2:are you hearing today? I mean, certainly number one on every CIO's list is security. So you know the issue and you started thinking well, how does modernizing my like even on-prem infrastructure help with that? Because you know traditional, what we call three tier here, right, which is basically separate servers. You got a hypervisor, you've got a storage system right, and you've got, usually, fiber channel infrastructure. You know the issue.
Speaker 2:There is that patching all these systems for let's call security risks, like log 4j or remember right, or it's a big issue. If you have to patch individual components, it actually takes a long time and it takes experts across different teams. And so the ability to get to a single stack right, where you can upgrade all of the elements down from the, you know, even down to the IO controller, the firmware controllers, right within a server system. That's a very interesting solve for customers trying to get to, like, a remediated security position more quickly. And so security is a big one.
Speaker 2:It ties into the second one that's top of mind, which is the race for talent, like, how do I get talented people right? You know, with my daughter's a data scientist, for example, you know she wasn't interested in going to become, I don't know, like a. You know, patching the sand system wasn't part of what she's in the least been interested in. Here's what happens, right as you can start using generalists to do that type of work. Now, all of a sudden you can help get very sophisticated enterprise level infrastructure that's supportable by, you know, by generalists, and that's, I think, a way, it's a big, interesting solve for these days and times.
Speaker 1:Indeed. Yeah, that's a huge opportunity and requirement. So cloud is no longer a trend. It's sort of the destination. We're all getting there to various degrees, but it's a complex landscape. It's no longer okay just public cloud. We have multi-cloud increasingly, we have hybrid cloud, which will remain for some time. What's the balance that you're seeing out there today? How do you see this settling?
Speaker 2:Well, I think it's changing in the sense that five years ago I think there was a sense, if I was going to the cloud first or moving things to the cloud, that there was an opportunity to cap investment perhaps on prem and just let that go over time A little bit like Unix systems. But what we found instead is, as the data is being distributed, as people started thinking a little more let's call it judiciously about where to place applications and data For performance, for cost reasons or for security reasons and then also two important developments happen. I think you'll appreciate this, evan. So for data, amazon made S3 effectively the standard for portability of data across the hybrid cloud. Similarly, google open-source Kubernetes as a way to go and have a portability standard for applications. You can almost start to think about how to free ride on these two standards.
Speaker 2:Now, for data and application portability, once you move to a server-based system with software you can start thinking about. Now I've opened up the floodgates almost. I think hybrid cloud is first to one cloud, but as people start thinking about multi-cloud and certainly some of the cloud moves recently to minimize egress costs are going to have people thinking about how might I move data across cloud providers in order to access different PAS level services. We think we have a good play there. In fact, nutanix could even be like. Think of it as the edge for every cloud.
Speaker 1:Interesting proposition. Speaking of edge, I'm at Enterprise Connect next week, where the big topic is what's next in collaboration and contact center and IoT and all of these things within the enterprise. Enterprise leaders are struggling on how to practically implement AI. What are they telling you in terms of their, again, the Enterprise CIO, the big changes they're facing and how to get started on this journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's certainly been a lot of certainly a lot of interest, right, and you think, well, why, why didn't chat, gpt like, capture people's minds and interest so fast? Because AI has been around for almost 30 years, really. But what happened was it became obvious and accessible to people to get the benefits of AI. You didn't have to be a data scientist in order to go and see and you got a sense of the speed, and speed is really today's competitive currency. If you think about applications as being the way that you build customer loyalty. If you're anywhere from an airline, right. If you travel, now you can track your bags. You're getting rebooked on flights. If they're delayed, right. There's really the apps that are providing the kind of integrated experience, if you will.
Speaker 2:So the ability to go do things at speed means that new applications and now we're starting to see what they're bubbling up with. So it could be like a support co-pilot Using information out there. How do we get it more quickly? Ai can be a sell for that, or a chat bot, right, so I can go and basically get information more quickly. Or maybe a fraud detection system for video.
Speaker 2:So I think customers are looking at these and saying, well, how do I get there faster, like, how do I get started? And so we've announced this thing called GPT in a box which basically says yeah, let's take like GPU enabled systems, we'll certify those right so you can make sure you're sizing and configuring it correctly. And then we'll take, and basically take the application elements from companies like Hugging Face, for example, and now I can basically start building that together, and Nutanix is helping with the stitching the workflow together with Kubeflow, for example, and so this becomes a way to get started without breaking the bank and use all of the same server management capabilities you have today. For us, ai is just the next application.
Speaker 1:That's phenomenal. It looks like you might be at GTC with the green background there. Is this something you've announced or are launching within video, or part of their partner program, or what's your go-to-market look like? Yeah, great question.
Speaker 2:Well, we are a partner for the NVAIE, where the E is for enterprise right Applications or libraries, so we've got those supported today, and we're a partner with NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:Excuse me, the beauty of live streaming is yes, you can't escape the hiccups, Am I gonna?
Speaker 2:sneeze or am I not gonna sneeze?
Speaker 1:We do it all here.
Speaker 2:yes, no worries you got to see a piece of it and then you start thinking well, now in terms of the application base, can we go and help get customers more quickly involved? It's interesting that NVIDIA today has announced something called NIMS right, which is their ability to do that, their ability to have new containerized versions of their AIE libraries. We think that's a really great thing because that's gonna mesh really nicely, completely complimentary to the GPT, in a box support. We have to go and take those libraries, build them into the infrastructure and then, importantly, make them enterprise ready, day two, supportable right, all the things that infrastructure folks really, at the end of the day, get paid for.
Speaker 1:Indeed. So you mentioned some of the challenges around implementing Gen AI, ai solutions Talked about workforce and talent issues. What else are you seeing in terms of the roadblocks? I imagine things like technical debt and legacy technology, sort of a boat anchor out there. What?
Speaker 2:else. Well, one thing is that I think a lot of customers initially thought that containers, which are probably initially, when I was at VMware, were thought of as potentially a risk to virtualization, are actually complementary technology, because containers help speed the development and the testing of applications and remove OS dependencies. One of the things that's interesting is infrastructure users are thinking, hey, how do I take this new container technology and support it and basically make it? Can I do it with my existing tool set? We did some surveys here at Nutanix showing that most customers thought they were going to have to change their underlying infrastructure to support AI. We're out to say no, you can do it actually with your existing systems.
Speaker 2:You need GPUs although there's some interesting CPU technologies with the rag being an vector processing being proposed but today, using GPUs, I can go and assimilate those and, if I can go, treat those new containers exactly the same. I can do snapshots, I can do replication, I can do DR same data services. Now, all of a sudden, containers are just another form of enterprise ready workloads. I think that's one of the things that I've seen is customers who thought containers or maybe hoped containers were going to be limited to the public cloud are finding that, hey, this is coming into the private data center, even to the edge, and AI is going to be a big driver of that.
Speaker 1:Fantastic opportunity. You sell and market into every vertical out there. I'm curious to take on the different verticals where you're seeing the most traction with your leading edge technology. I was just at Hymns, where healthcare is in the midst of a rapid, massive change in disruption for good, hopefully. But tell us about where you sell your solutions and how they're being adopted.
Speaker 2:Hymns also, and I was excited to see that AI was a topic of every conversation. One of the reasons why is that there's an amazing amount of, I hate to say, drudgery, but if you think about claims coding or claims processing, the payers have a huge amount of effort. If you ever tried to negotiate or navigate that yourself as a user, it can be a morass. The ability to speed that up really helps drive, as I mentioned, competitive advantage. That's one way to think about it. There's also for the providers, the ability to go, start thinking about intelligent diagnoses or looks through video things, where it doesn't eliminate judgment Like I would never say that but it does change the way in which you're able to process much more information more quickly and then present to trained experts decisions that need to be made at that point. So I think the healthcare market is really primed for this. Lots of interest there. Also financial services. So financial services thinking about making recommendations or starting to think about how you would go and have more easy access to more information Is actually one of the areas that I think is basically makes complicated financial decisions more accessible to more people. So I'm excited about that.
Speaker 2:Last one, by the way, is public sector. You're seeing a lot of interest in public sector. I've been traveling, actually, around the world about public sector institutions, looking at how to make sense of whether video data or other things. So lots of interesting applications. The commonality, by the way, is can I do it within my existing tooling set? Can I bridge to the cloud? Is there a way to go do that? One important element is that can I run where the data is in an untethered, disconnected manner? This is very important. So think about it turns out like HCI, which is what we invented this hybrid, sorry, hyperconverge infrastructure, now transforming to what we call hybrid multi-cloud, actually can scale down and run. If you're running in a wind farm, let's say, or an oil rig, or a manufacturing facility or a hospital, you don't rely, you're not dependent on an active cloud connection, so you can run these independently. That's really important to make sure that running AI doesn't mean that you have any enterprise risk of continuous operations oh great great point.
Speaker 1:Let's shift gears a little bit. You have an amazing career arc and for younger folks I say kids in their 20s and 30s it's a tough time to be a professional in tech. Lots of change and disruption sadly layoffs Any advice to stay ahead of the curve as a tech professional, it professional. What should she or he do to kind of adapt to this kind of crazy environment we found ourselves in?
Speaker 2:I think one of the hallmarks of being successful in this space right is just a continued curiosity and interest in new things. And so the fact that things were announced today and we're already talking about it and like how would it it doesn't mean you have all the answers, by the way, so I would never assume that but that level of curiosity where you can assimilate new things. It turns out that learning new things is hard. It forces you to, in many cases, give up things that you already knew, that you've built your career on before, and then starting to think, well, all right, how do I go and help with a new way that the industry would learn? So I think there's this continued model of almost discarding things you learned early in order to go and learn new things. I mean, I knew a lot about semiconductor manufacturing.
Speaker 1:And that's and did I. That was a double E. So yes, really it was helpful now doing social media.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's good times, and yet it's also interesting one of the things I loved hearing Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford where he was really interesting talking about his early stage of learning fonts right and how learning fonts became one of the hallmarks of how Apple became successful was making fonts easily accessible for creative people, and so it was interesting. I think, no matter what you learn, retain it in the sense that it may become useful later down the line.
Speaker 1:I love that and I mean the other, I guess. Last question here I see you like to work hard and play hard. You're out and about, you're playing tennis, you're doing all kinds of fun things. Any that seemed like a great personal habit or practice to put into your personal life? Any other growth hacks or tips? Tricks on just day-to-day work life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know being active is actually fun and you know anything that takes your mind off of. For me, you know, just doing the same thing over and over again becomes a little bit I don't know. You get a little run down actually trying to do that right, and travel can be either exciting or it can be wearing, and it's a little bit about your frame of mind. How do you feel about it? Right? And so you know I try and go into things thinking well, this will be exciting, but then also make sure I got enough time off to go and you know whether it's skiing or mountain biking or pickleball now is the latest thing I know for folks that's kind of a fun area to try out. So find time right to go and re, re, re, regroup.
Speaker 1:I love that. Very good advice, and sorry to get all touch and feel. We'll get back to business. Next question what are you looking forward to the next couple of months? Any travel trips, events, yours or partner events? You're especially looking forward to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you bet. You know I was just at Cisco Live, which was in Amsterdam. It was really interesting. You know we've done a joint relation. We have a joint relationship with Cisco. Now they're reselling our products. We're doing joint integration work, joint development around ACI, intersite a bunch of just exciting stuff around you know, two big companies coming together. So that's exciting. Our own user conference, dot, next happens in May in Barcelona. So Barcelona is a wonderful town.
Speaker 1:I was just there for Mobile World Congress, so I want to enjoy it.
Speaker 2:It's a fantastic city and so you know we're excited about getting our top customers and prospects together, our partners. It's a great opportunity there to go. You know experience, the latest in, you know computing, what we're doing with containers, ai, new application environments, and to learn from others right who are in the space. So that's one I'm particularly excited about, and I think you know customer visits. We are meeting with some of the largest customers who have, you know, been kind of set on a trajectory for years and now, because of some industry dynamics, right are really looking at alternatives and Nutanix, fortunately right, is one of the ones that they're you know is top of the list.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for sharing. Just a quick update and everyone reach out. Follow Lee on social media LinkedIn, twitter. And good luck with the pickleball and tennis. You're having a blast, obviously, and I'll catch you out there in the market.
Speaker 2:Evan, thanks so much. Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. Everyone Take care Thanks.