Transforming Education with Cloud Solutions: A Think Together and Enzu Case Study with Dustin Young | Ep. 35

Max:00:09

‍Hi. I'm Max Clark. This is an it broker dot com tech deep dive with Dustin Young and Enzu. Enzu is a bare metal provider and a private cloud provider. And unlike a lot of service providers in the market, they focus on bare metal and found and built a platform for private cloud on top of their bare metal.

‍Max:00:26

And it's not a VMware based solution. So we talk about the differences. We talk a case study specific to a, in this case, a nonprofit organization that came. What drove them to move into a bare metal and a private cloud environment? What they were evaluating, what they were looking for, how they ended up selecting Enzu, what Enzu did for them in the migration process, and how they help them migrate.

Max:00:45

We get into a tangent into VMware, VMware licensing, what's going on in the VMware world and what's happening for enterprises and really the difference between the SMB, the mid market and the enterprise and how bare metal and private cloud really applies at these different segments. I hope you enjoy the conversation. This is Dustin with Enzu. Dustin, you know, I'm looking I've been looking forward to this one. And.

Max:01:08

Yeah, me too. Let's just jump into this here. Before we talk about the tech, let's talk about in this case, it's not a company. It's a nonprofit. So can you give me a little bit of background?

Max:01:18

I've got the case study, but if you could start off and give us some history.

Dustin:01:21

Yeah. So we were introduced to, a not for profit. They are in Southern California, and they are growing rapidly. They do after school program work, especially in low income and needs based environments. And so they have been very successful in the way that they do their program.

Dustin:01:41

And so they started out pretty small, and they started to integrate a lot of other smaller companies into their organization. And this built a very disparate IT stack, as everybody can imagine. That's normally what happens when you start to integrate multiple companies. Last I knew, they were over 500,000 in not for profit revenue and closing in on or 500,000,000. One of the 2.

Dustin:02:01

Actually, I don't remember. We had a great conversation the other day. I was surprised at how much they've grown since we first met them. It was sort of the message to that. And we'll talk about how our environment sort of made that very easy for them to do, and we'll talk a little bit about, you know, down the road in that case study.

Dustin:02:15

But they're just this really cool company that's out there working really hard to provide a great service.

Max:02:19

What was the introduction? I mean, you were introduced to this company. This wasn't something from prospecting or marketing. Somebody brought you in and said I mean, so what was going on that triggered that introduction? And what was the introduction?

Dustin:02:30

We have a a channel partner that's fairly technical, down in Southern California. And he met with the IT staff, and they said, hey. We've got physical servers. We've got some virtualization. We've got VMware.

Dustin:02:40

We've got some stuff over in the data centers. A few things under my desk. We just have all this going on. What we need is somebody to come in and bring this into a singular environment. Now this is pre the VMware announcement, so we weren't even having the please don't put me on VMware conversation.

Dustin:02:55

It was just I need help with developing my IT stack.

Max:02:59

Okay. And at that point, how big were they? I mean, what was the size of the environment? How many servers? How many VMs?

Max:03:04

What do you remember from that?

Dustin:03:05

They're not very big. At the time, they were maybe 25 or 30 VMs. We've got them on 5 production nodes and an node, and then they've got a Doctor stack out in Dallas.

Max:03:13

Was this driving their program, or was this all back office internal infrastructure? I found when you get into the not for profit NGO world. Right? Like, there becomes this misnomer with IT about what is actually delivering program or what they actually focuses versus just, you know, this is still a business. You know, you have you know, it's a it's a business not generating revenue and profit for shareholders, but it still has operations.

Max:03:33

So how much of this was, you know, let's say, program facing for students and programs they're putting in schools and how much was their back office?

Dustin:03:40

Probably 60 back office, 40 front facing, could even be 70, 30. Lot of back office. Their back office was very disparate in what Radware. They really struggled around an outdated database solution that basically managed all of the names of the participants in the program. So their back end was very broken at the time.

Max:04:00

Was it something that they had built or something they had bought?

Dustin:04:03

It was a combination thereof. So they had built some stuff, and then all the companies they bought brought into their version of software. And so they were trying to manage across all those platforms. They had never integrated the the multiple organizations.

Max:04:15

You know, I don't wanna get in on an m and a tangent, but it's if you've ever done any sort of m and a work, it's amazing how long that takes, how glossed over it really is, and how long it takes to actually do those sorts of things.

Dustin:04:27

Yeah. You have some interesting decisions to make then.

Max:04:29

Yeah. That's that's an understatement. Well, let's if we have time, let's come back. We'll come. We'll we'll circle back and talk about that.

Max:04:36

That might be an interesting tangent to get on. Okay. So they're creating program and education for students and schools serving schools or, you know, program and stir up and students in schools. They have a Frankenstein IT estate with lots of different pieces, lots of acquisition integrations. Everything's running siloed.

Max:04:55

They've ended up probably in a pretty common environment where just everything is just running, and there was no rhyme or reason for it anymore real integration plan. Enzu gets introduced. And when you guys come in, you know, the the initial charge is is what? Like, help us make this make sense?

Dustin:05:11

Yeah. And the partner that brought us in actually had a technical enough background that said, you know, you need to you need to be on private cloud. You you shouldn't be out multitenancy. You have a lot of data that needs protection here. And let me go find you some private cloud providers to start talking about building out your solution and integrating all your different components.

Dustin:05:27

And so when we were brought in, we had that knowledge of that base product that we're gonna talk about first.

Max:05:32

And walk me through that initial call, the conversation. What was that like? I mean, what were they expecting? How did it go?

Dustin:05:38

Lot of talk about, of course, what do you have today? Where is it built? How is it built? And so we started to gather a lot of base data. We didn't really do a a technical dive as you would imagine in that initial call, but we spent a lot of time discussing how their infrastructure was laid out today, what was or wasn't virtualized, what needed virtualized, or or what needed to be modified to be able to be virtualized.

Dustin:05:58

So it's kinda like a cloud readiness assessment without the deep dive portion of it. And then it was to talk about budget and to talk about where they wanted their environment to live. Do they have latency? It's all the usual sort of conversations you get into with private cloud based environment, especially. And then we talked about, did they have components that wanted to live in a public cloud?

Dustin:06:17

Is is this gonna be a hybridized solution where they use multiple adjacent clouds attached to maybe a core infrastructure?

Max:06:23

So budget is an interesting one. Right? I mean, did they walk into this with an idea of what they're getting into, what this was gonna cost, how that aligned with their existing expense and overhead with their IT infrastructure? No. So So this was a little bit exploration?

Dustin:06:36

No. Fairly normal. Not actually. Yeah. So they had gone out and gotten some pricing on their own before they actually got somebody to come in and start consulting on a solution.

Dustin:06:45

And so they sort of were using that as their baseline for what we think this is about, what stuff's gonna cost because we asked around, which is not uncommon at all.

Max:06:55

It feels like a very normal purchasing cycle. Right? Like, we've got this. Let's go figure out what it's gonna cost to run. What's always disjointed for me in that is you start with like, okay, we have to go figure out how much is this going to cost and, like, you know, let's go price it out and then create a proposal.

Max:07:09

But it's always a little disconnected because without a core business driver, like, who cares? Right. Like, ultimately, you're getting into some sort of purchasing committee or somebody else that has to approve. Right. You know, and in smaller organization, it's much, you know, flatter process.

Max:07:21

Maybe just going to a CFO or the CEO or the owner. Right. To sign off on it. But I find a lot of people fall short on that with this is the problem that we're actually solving, and this is why we need to go solve this problem. I mean, Enzu wasn't doing the consolation consolidation.

Max:07:35

Wow. The consolidation. Maybe consolidation is the right word, actually. I'm so sorry you're in this situation with this crazy IT infrastructure, the consolidation. I mean, you were doing software development for them.

Max:07:45

I mean, you're an infrastructure provider. Right? So had they gone through that process already and had an idea of what they were going to be investing or or moving down? And

Dustin:07:53

No. At the end of the day, the big component for us is we actually did the migration for them. Because they were so disparate, they didn't have the resources to do it. And they are flat as you as you described. So it was really we got this developed to meet with, finance, and you get a, you know, meet with CFO, and and they sign off.

Dustin:08:09

That part of the sales process wasn't overly complex. I did there was no board. You didn't have to wait for decisions to come down. What was very complex about their world was those many environments were across multiple database stacks. And then during the migration, we actually found the big problem even for us.

Dustin:08:26

So when I said it's sort of interesting, some decisions they had to make, quickly, it was we meet a lot of people that essentially want to do a a brownfield migration. Right? And they're like, oh, let's we'll just migrate the MDK files and spin the world back up as it was, and everything will be fine or OVA or whatever file they're gonna spin up. Right? And I try to discourage that as much as possible when I'm in meetings simply because you're gonna bring all the problem children with you to the new world.

Dustin:08:50

And so it's it's really better to go through and do a cleanup. Well, with these guys, there was no way, after meeting with them, I was like, if we're gonna do it, but it's greenfield only. This must be all new because with your you're not cloud ready for the most part. And so we're gonna have a lot of work to make you cloud ready in the migration. And so that was where they had the biggest struggle was.

Dustin:09:09

Cost aside, it was how were they going to be able to actually get some of that that information moved. And then we found the server with the licensing problem. We did not find that until the migration. So the licensing problem was, oh, we haven't paid our licensing on this server that's just been sitting there running for some time. And so they reached out to that provider, and the provider is like, yeah.

Dustin:09:31

Because you're so far past due, it was 20 or $25,000. What was their licensing cost to get this server? And so, luckily, we involved our CTO, and he said, you know, all he wants is the data off of it. Yeah? He's like, if you'll give me access to the server, I'll try.

Dustin:09:48

I'll go see what I can do. And, sure enough, he booted that bad boy up into safe mode, migrated all the data out of it. Then you guys can shut it off now if you want. So those are the things that you do in migrations. Right?

Dustin:09:58

Those are the things that change the course of a migration because $25,000 could have stalled a migration. I mean, they're not a big company. I mean, it would have stalled them out. Yeah. So 500,000.

Dustin:10:08

Yeah. They're a $500,000 company.

Max:10:10

It's interesting to me that, you know, the CFO was driving this process. Right? So that usually means the CFO is trying to fix something specific related to budgeting, operating expenses, resource allocation. You know, what was the buttons for the CFO? The CFO was trying to push?

Dustin:10:26

The way they were built, he had no allocation for the most part of expenses. How do you allocate for the power being drawn by the servers under, you know, an IT guy's desk? Or you've got a colo, but what's in it? You've put 5 different companies in that colo eventually. You've just started racking and stacking their servers and plugging in.

Dustin:10:43

And now you've got multiple login security issues because of that. And then the finance team or the the executive leadership team really couldn't go forward and continue to acquire if they didn't fix what they had because they didn't know how to acquire them and integrate them anymore. It was just too disparate of an environment.

Max:11:00

That's a big business problem.

Dustin:11:01

Very.

Max:11:01

Yeah. Not knowing what you're spending, what you're spending on, how you budget around it, how you forecast against it, how you decide to grow it, what resources are you allocating, how do you go acquire and integrate. Right? Those are big business problems. And how many people how many how big was the team total?

Max:11:17

Like, the company. I say company, but the nonprofit.

Dustin:11:19

And you only have 2 they had 2 IT staff, by the way, responsible for this.

Max:11:23

Yeah. I mean, so 2 is normal for that size. You know? And really, at at 2 people, your job is keeping the lights on and desktops running and people being able to work, not necessarily doing strategic projects.

Dustin:11:34

Every other provider came in parroting the same language, and and I come from that world. So I understood exactly what the the speak was. I I was with VMware providers for well over a decade. And so I understood their message, but it was fascinating. It was just months after I came here.

Dustin:11:50

And so I'm sitting there going, wow. Did I sound like this? Like, every presentation was the same.

Max:11:56

Well, so now you're gonna have to tell me what it was. You can't lead in with that, not actually share.

Dustin:12:00

Yeah. So, well, basically, spin up, VMware based multi tenant cloud. All of them were starting to push multi tenancy because of the cost issues. They knew they couldn't take this client to a private cloud and afford it because of the VMware licensing costs. And then they were all pushing, you know, small network, big management costs.

Dustin:12:18

Right? So a lot of them have big engineering staff, so these huge management fees. They needed to use multi tenant cloud because they were gonna be so expensive on the management migration. And their management was, you know, you can touch vDirector, but you can't touch anything else. You can only run applications, essentially.

Dustin:12:34

If you wanna make changes too bad, open a trouble ticket. They just everything was above this line will help you, and you're basically locked out everywhere else. And the thing is the 2 people in IT were very capable. And I've been across I mean, there's some very large companies that I've supported, and I was like, how is this IT staff accepting? They're very capable individuals who are accepting being locked out of their world.

Dustin:12:56

And that's because somebody in finances made the choice. And so it was really fascinating. I mean, literally, it was probably 60 days of coming here, and the part is like, hey. I wanna bring you in. You know, I've known known them for a long time.

Dustin:13:07

And sitting through that messaging was really fascinating on the other side.

Max:13:11

For clarity, this was a Windows based environment? Where they was it all Windows? Was it Lin I mean

Dustin:13:15

Mostly Windows.

Max:13:16

Okay. Because nowadays, you have to ask a question.

Dustin:13:18

They did have some some Linux stuff again. They you know, and they I think there were 5 or 7 companies, and now they're probably 15 or 20 total that they've integrated.

Max:13:27

Now Enzu did something a little different. You didn't do a VMware solution. I mean, that becomes like and we'll circle around and talk about VMware in general later. But it wasn't VMware. It wasn't Microsoft Hyper V.

Max:13:36

So what was it, and what did it look like?

Dustin:13:39

It's more KVM based. We've got about 17 years of actually having a private cloud that's KVM based. And it's, you know, it's we're Proxmox. We developed a private cloud solution. Proxmox is a great technology for that.

Dustin:13:51

You know, a lot of times, like, till we were open standard. You You know, if you look at the hyperscalers, most of them are some open standard KVM based hypervisor solution. Right? And people love them. They work fantastic.

Dustin:14:02

The big component for us in our private cloud is we are also containers based. So your portal is your own. And by that, I mean, no holding of hostage. And this is where it got it gets interesting for every customer in the conversation. When you know, even in private cloud because vCenter is owned by the provider, if it's a VMware based solution.

Dustin:14:23

If you're on, say, VMware 67 and you're like, hey. We really need to get to 8. We've gotta make all these upgrades. It takes one large customer to keep you on 67 for 3 years. And you're all stuck on 67.

Dustin:14:31

And so I know this. I'm using this very specific example of something I lived through where a customer finally left the company to get, you know, and bought a bought hardware to get away from a service provider problem that is you don't get to do upgrades. Well, with us, you can customize your portal and you affect no other customers. So this customer is like, hey. Could we do this?

Dustin:14:50

Could we have this feature? And we dev wrote the feature and said, there you go. And so that's really where our magic is for customers like this.

Max:14:58

For people watching that are listening that don't know, KVM is a Linux based virtualization. So it's native to Linux kernel. And Proxmox is a platform written on top of Linux to manage KVM containers then do containers as well. And both of these being open source, you have a slightly different economic model for your costs. Right?

Dustin:15:18

Absolutely. Not not even a secret. Yeah. You know, when I first came here, I immediately was like, no VMware tax. Hashtag no VMware tax because we don't have the same cost model as a provider that's running VMware.

Dustin:15:30

There's there's no secret about that.

Max:15:31

If you have a VMware based environment in your office, in your own data center, and you go to a VMware based service provider, you can take and you can do a lift and shift. So you talk about, you know, doing brownfield deployments that's available to you. Doing a VMware to KVM based solution makes that migration a little different. I mean, you're there's a slightly different consideration that comes in. So how do you migrate and how do you go through the process of taking a Hyper V or a VMware based virtualized platform and and bringing it onto your platform?

Dustin:15:57

Actually, we are fairly agnostic to the architecture. So we spend a lot of time. That is a big part of the development. And you can ingest the MDK files natively in the wizard, converts them, and you're off and running. And, actually, all NZ customers actually have access to the wizard.

Dustin:16:12

So let's say you bought somebody or you you just wanted to bring in 1 or 2 file sets. You can actually just import them and launch them directly into your private cloud and across your resources.

Max:16:21

So you can take and you have an importer. You have an importer for VMDK, and that importer will take and do the migration and convert the VMDK file into a KVM compatible file to launch and run.

Dustin:16:31

Let's talk about something that's really fascinating that people don't think about with the other providers. They don't usually use native VMware tools to do migrations. They use Zerto. Literally, Zerto is the number one migration software that exists as far as I'm aware. People literally just they buy Zerto licensing just to migrate their clients.

Dustin:16:46

So they're really using a Doctor. They put an agent on the server, and they replicate the file set. And then all's they do is turn on the new environment as if Doctor became production. That is the most popular migration out there.

Max:16:59

Is that just a time and downtime calculation? You go through I mean, because, I mean, if you're copying up a lot of VMs, it's gonna take some time to do it. Using Zerto allows you to do, you know, stage it, get it already, pick a time, bring your checkpoints across, then cut over. Right?

Dustin:17:13

Yeah. And then do one last data grab for anything you missed. Yep.

Max:17:17

Yeah. So, I mean, if you have 100 of VMs, I mean, that adds expense to you, but it doesn't feel like that's necessarily a big negative in terms of the actual migration process of saying, hey, we're gonna take and turn this data center off and move it to this other place instead.

Dustin:17:27

No. But I think the reality is is they're just using it like a wizard, like a migration wizard. And, no, it works well. I don't see it as a negative. I just think a lot of people often don't realize how the migration's done, and they they think there's some kind of strange wizardry going on sometimes.

Dustin:17:41

But in reality, what what I've seen is the most migrations are unless there is something out there, and this is where one of our big advantages comes in. If you are running physical non virtualized environments with some older dataset, Xero isn't gonna be a big struggle, and then you're gonna have to figure out your physical migration process. That physical migration process, for us, it's just part of the migration process. So we bring in whether it's physical or virtual right through the wizard. Wizard.

Max:18:06

How do you decide or help people decide between greenfield and brownfield of trying to do a lift and shift to their existing environment versus starting from scratch and and not migrating the, you know, the VM itself, but just the data on top of the VM?

Dustin:18:18

Generally, if they will run, like, RV tools, especially if they're a virtualized environment, I can go through and show them how many machines are stalled, how many machines are off. We go through the process and say, do you really want to bring you know, you've created 900 VMs over the course of 15 years. You're only running 80 of them today. We can archive those VMDK files and just stick them in an archive. Do you really wanna archive those VMDK files and just stick them in an archive.

Dustin:18:38

Do you really wanna migrate those into your environment and still have them shut off? Do you really want to bring all that data that you're no longer using or all those VMs that you're no longer using into your actual production environment? And the other thing is, are you seeing performance degradation in your current environment? And if they are, you know, why bring whatever is wrong? Let's actually go through and find it and just build a new environment so you get the the highest possible performing outcome in the beginning.

Dustin:19:03

Somewhere, there's gonna be a gremlin. You know, the ghost in the machine, it is there. It is hiding somewhere in your environment. You've done something. You've deleted something.

Dustin:19:11

You've changed something. And when it moves, it just may come and haunt you.

Max:19:14

Going back to the story, the big one was, oops. You forgot to license something for for a long time. And now this could be a problem. Story worked out okay for them. They were able to get the data off of it and just move on.

Max:19:24

What was the rest of the migration like? You know, because it wasn't really it was this, like, hybrid environment. You were building them out a well, let's actually go really basic. Right? So not a multi tenant environment.

Max:19:33

So you're going through a sizing exercise first. Right? And what dictates us? I mean, walk me through the sizing exercise. Like, how do you actually you know, people that are already virtualized maybe have an idea of what sizing should be like based on what their existing resources.

Max:19:44

But if you haven't virtualized, like, how do you go through that and help figure out what the actual new environment should be?

Dustin:19:50

Well, so if it's physical, we go through and look at what's on the machine. What is the size of the database? What is the size of the storage? How much of that storage is gonna come across this production versus go into a backup environment? Because it's just older and archival.

Dustin:20:02

And all of that data, you know, takes time in the in the assessment process with the IT staff. We do a lot of screen share. Share your screen. Open up a server. Let's look at the statistics.

Dustin:20:12

What processor is it on? So, you know, a lot of times, I don't think people ask that question. And I think the message has been for years, well, they're going to the cloud, so they don't really care what the underlying architecture is. And I've not found that to be exactly true. I feel like that's marketing and sales speak for we don't really wanna tell you, you know, just exactly what you're running on because it's disparate systems.

Dustin:20:30

You know, you're not gonna get CPU parity. You're just gonna get whatever the heck we had at the time. And potentially a customer left it, and you're going on to a used environment. So we go through that entire process of understanding because even coming up one generation on a CPU can change just performance of the environment significantly. And then we we right size those resources accordingly to the different performance metrics going through that assessment process with them.

Dustin:20:53

And physical, right, what are we gonna virtualize? How many different VMs do you want this broken up on? How much of this falls? Sometimes what's sitting on a physical server, like, in their environment, it was also virtualized. So what we had to do is just tie the database to the VMs and then tie the current that particular application to the correct VM and just build the application server.

Dustin:21:12

So they actually eliminated some of their duplicates because of it.

Max:21:15

I haven't created a term for this. As I'm listening to you talk about, like, sizing, somebody said to me once upon a time, like, IT is a very interesting position. Right? Your fundamental job is customer service for the organization that you work for, which means you have to keep the things running that the organization needs in order to work. Right?

Max:21:30

So this could be hardware, desktop servers. It could be applications, Internet connection, whatever it is. But your job is to keep everything working. And when things aren't working, then you get a lot of pressure put on you. Right?

Max:21:40

So this becomes just like, keep it working. But maybe you didn't choose what you're running. You didn't have a seat at the table and selecting what's running, but now you have to keep it running. And when it's not working, you get yelled at. So the expression was basically the consideration is just not to get yelled at.

Max:21:53

Like, how do you do your day to day job without getting yelled at? And I've noticed this creates a phenomenon, especially going through, you know, hardware sizing of, well, the easiest way to not get yelled at is just to oversize everything. And there's a certain amount of I'm not saying it from, like, a it's a malicious thing. It just becomes like a response to stimulus. Right?

Max:22:11

And then, of course, if you're oversizing thing that generates budget blow, you know, which is also not good for the organization. Right? Which also installs migrations because they become too expensive. Right? And there's, like, all these, like, things that come down the line.

Max:22:20

I'm sure you see this a lot. Right? Maybe you express it a little differently, but you have a customer come to you and say, we've got this much hardware. We wanna virtualize it. It's not virtualized today.

Max:22:30

You look at and say, hey, you know, we're gonna be able to do, like, a 10 to 1 reduction here in your infrastructure. And they come back and they say, we don't wanna do a 10 to 1 infrastructure. We actually wanna size our infrastructure up to x as opposed to reducing that. How do you help people through that process of discovery and rightsizing of, like, no, you actually don't need this or maybe this isn't a good idea?

Dustin:22:48

Yeah. That's always I gotta say that's one of the less than fun conversations on our side of the house is when somebody wants to grow an environment that doesn't need the resources. 1, when they're building physical servers, a lot of times, organizations don't account for all the other costs of what it is to actually run data center or cloud based solutions. So when they want to have that, we get into the, well, you're gonna run into real costs associated with powers, especially nowadays as as power creep has has hit the data centers at an all time high. You're gonna get into other cost models depending on how you build your cloud solution out.

Dustin:23:22

You've got to license components. If if you're a VMware provider, you have a lot of licensing costs when somebody decides to do that. So you have to sit and have that conversation. Right? I mean, you license RAM.

Dustin:23:31

They wanna double the environment. They're doubling the cost of RAM licensing. I tend to have a lot of those tertiary style of conversations in the process. And I try to have the salespeople and the sales engineers have it because the operational people just say, you're gonna run into issues you didn't intend if you make this decision as well. And that's the other thing is overbuilding of environments can actually cause performance degradation.

Dustin:23:51

Because if they stick something, you know, on an empty machine, well, somewhere something has to go find that on that other machine. And you're building in backplane latency. You're you're just building in components you shouldn't be building in. You know, the other thing is the way we design our cloud, all data strip or replicated. Right?

Dustin:24:07

So if it's every node can support all the storage of 2 other nodes. And so plus, we deliver everything as n plus 1. So you already have that additional hardware, which means you send your private cloud with some scalability. And so having them go beyond that just becomes a cost detriment to the organization and can become a performance detriment to the organization. Mostly finance gets involved in the cost side of that and says, no.

Dustin:24:31

Like, the point of going going to cloud is to just in time your resources.

Max:24:36

Under a certain size, whether it's headcount or revenue, IT almost always reports up into finance administration. Right? Like, traditionally, IT is a finance organization. When you cross some line and maybe there's a

Dustin:24:46

Yeah. Some years ago, CFOs took full control.

Max:24:49

Yeah. And I mean, you cross some line and maybe there's a CIO or CTO involved, but CIO and CTO is still getting budget approval through a CFO. So even if it's not like a direct, you're under it. Like, they're still they're still in control. Okay.

Max:24:59

So, Enzo, you guys have a initial conversation objectives. What are you trying to do? What are you currently running? What's going on? You end up following that up with additional scoping calls.

Max:25:09

Like, how long was this process? Like, from initial conversation to okay. We've got an architecture. We have a bomb. We know what this is gonna look like.

Max:25:16

Here's what you need to sign. Like, what were the touch points? How many interactions? How long of a process is this? Like, we're talking months, weeks, days, hours.

Max:25:23

Like, what what's actually engaged here?

Dustin:25:25

You know, if somebody had the time, you could get it done easily in hours. You could get something like this done in a week. But we were probably 90 days just between the different meetings and making sure we're doing the assessment, then doing a review, finding the things, you know, in the review or so. I forgot about, you know, that item maybe was missed or forgot about. I go through that normal kind of IT aggregation process.

Dustin:25:45

Oh, we found out Bob actually has a server at one of the after school programs, right, sitting under his desk. So we gotta get that now migrated in. Things like that cropped up. And then after the 90 day process, they were another 90 days in the decision making process because they then when they realized they could move everything, had to go look at every disparate agreement they had, whether it's a colo provider. Like, all of a sudden, the last piece of the puzzle was, what are my other costs that I hadn't considered?

Dustin:26:13

There are already sunk costs, but if I just abandon them, then they become very painful. And so we went through the process of, you know, setting up the migration timeline to fit that model. And so there was another 90 days before they could actually make the decision because of those tertiary costs that often get left off the table in the conversation.

Max:26:30

They were talking to you, and they were talking to other service providers who are running VMware. So from a from a surface standpoint, you're saying, okay. Migrate VMware to VMware. It seems like, oh, that that sounds like a reasonable plan or expectation. You won the business.

Max:26:43

What put you over the top on this? Like, why

Dustin:26:45

I gave them a private cloud for the cost of multitenancy at every other provider that was in the room. I mean, as simple as it sounds. And our private cloud gives them root access to the entire environment. They can set up all their It's essentially like having a very powerful version of vSphere. You have all the control without buying all the software and living with all the costs of the overhead of most of the other providers.

Dustin:27:11

And so it very quickly most got kicked out in their they just didn't have a good migration policy, so we had several got kicked out. There were probably 6 of us to start. They they had more people than usual, actually. Normally, we don't see people do that, but it came down to 2 of us. The other one was a a VMware provider.

Dustin:27:27

And their methodology was, well, if we just give you a bunch of free network, we'll offset all of our other costs because we know eventually we'll get a bunch of revenue out of you because of all the the growth that comes with it. And you'll have to license all that VMware and all the things that come with that. So we'll get our revenue out of you that way. That company still uses that strategy to sell today, which is free circuits for VMware trade offs. But it was multi tenancy.

Dustin:27:48

I mean, therein lies. You've got HIPAA restrictions. They had SOC restrictions, ISO restrictions. Right? Things that they needed to pay attention to.

Dustin:27:57

And, yes, you can accomplish a lot of that with all the right wrappers, security wrappers on multi tenancy. But, yes, you have to put a lot of wrappers on multi tenancy and hope none of them fail. Whereas private, private cloud, especially not based in VMware, that gets a lot simpler fast. It is. Because the other component was we were we are dedicated all the way through diverse top rack switches.

Dustin:28:18

So dedicated firewall, dedicated top racks. It's everybody's environment is dedicated to them. So when they go to report, they're not, well, I'm converged at the switch there. I'm converged in firewalls. I'm converged in networking.

Dustin:28:30

We dedicate the stack all the way through. And then the other was their 2 IT staff, 1 pretty much manage all the firewalls for 27 plus after school programs. And they were like, so we're gonna have to reconfigure all these firewalls. And we said, no. You can bring all your own VLANs.

Dustin:28:47

You just tell us what your topology is, and we'll plug it into the firewall. And you don't actually have to go configure anything at the end. We'll do it for you on our side. And so I think the end result, we really simplify people's lives in IT. It is actually part of our mission and value statement.

Dustin:29:01

When the CEO and the CTO founded this company, their statement was we would like to make IT as simple as using a personal computer. That's the goal of this company is to stop with the complexity because it isn't necessary. It's just become a thing.

Max:29:15

It's definitely a thing. And also, right, ultimately, we start talking about it. We express it in terms of leverage. Right? Are you spending money on IT?

Max:29:23

Or are you investing in IT? Right? And if you're spending money on IT, you're just wasting money. And if you're investing in IT, you're generating leverage for your business. And that's also like seeing that shift happen for people.

Max:29:34

And what is IT actually supposed to be doing? IT is supposed to be generating leverage for the business for the business to do what it needs to do to generate revenue and grow. Right? Like, you know, and so, like, it's not sexy, but in some cases, IT is a revenue generator. But in most cases, IT is a support function for something else to generate revenue with.

Max:29:50

So the more you can leverage that, the better off you are. Right? All right. Let's talk migration, you know, evaluation process scoping architecture that turns into a you know, we've peeled back enough onion. We've opened a Pandora's box a little bit.

Max:30:02

A lot of other things come into scope. Okay. We have to look at and figure out all of our contracts. When can we make this change? What's actually involved?

Max:30:09

What's our timing? They select Enzu. You go through, you know, legal process contracts, sign an order form. You guys go out and start allocating hardware to build out this environment. What is an actual migration process from that point forward?

Max:30:21

What is your team responsible for? What was their team responsible for? What were your checkpoints between the 2? Just kinda talk me through that process of migrating this, you know, this platform. I mean, you you you gave me a little bit of a, like, oh, whoops.

Max:30:32

We had this licensing issue, but, like, what what are the actual details?

Dustin:30:35

The biggest thing is access. Right? So we call them all co migration, you know, co managed migrations because at no point can a customer do nothing. That's, when people say they do a a fully managed migration. I question the sanity of that statement because no customer gets free pass.

Dustin:30:48

Let's just hit that out of the way. So we go in and we separate AC. We set up roles and responsibilities, checkpoints, and timelines. Right? We we have the customer sign off.

Dustin:30:57

Knowing that that document starts and ends very differently, very rarely does it have all the same data and all the checkpoints were perfect in any migration, much like we found, you know, a missing license so we couldn't log in to a server to get to a migration. And so the migration itself even with all that was done in 35 days, and they were up and running on the new environment. When you do greenfield, if you're good at just getting building the environment and then getting the data, it doesn't take very long. Even to do, like, some of the very large environments we've done, 45 up to 60 days. 2 things that tend to take a long time when you're using software like Thorel.

Dustin:31:32

Getting that set up and getting IT and getting access, and that is time consuming. It's it's one of the more time consuming components of the migration. And then leaving it running is time consuming because it's essentially doing a lot of the work instead of human work instead of humans doing the work. With us, people do the work. So you actually have somebody in there looking at it and saying, hey.

Dustin:31:48

We have a problem. Let's get on the phone. The thing that speeds it up is to we always set the stage, and not every customer is perfect, nor are we. But we set the stage that if something comes up, IT needs to do as if it was a typical trouble ticket internal to your organization. If during a migration something comes up, if you get on then, we can generally solve it quickly and your migration will stay on track.

Dustin:32:10

If we cannot get you engaged, those are when migration delays occur. People that miss meetings and miss the, hey. We all have to get back on on this day and validate all the data was moved, and they they don't show up to that. Or that does occur. Maybe you didn't assign the right person.

Dustin:32:25

Like, you know, maybe the CIO didn't assign the right person for that particular step that day. But those are the things that usually cause the delays, but we openly discuss that as part of before contracts are usually signed. And that as part of it, that roles and responsibilities document. After you sign and you go through the onboarding with operations, operations validates that document and then has each person who's responsible signs off on their part. Says, yes.

Dustin:32:49

This is what we're gonna do. So it's been discussed, and it's not a theoretical timeline. And in my past life timelines around migrations, I would argue often we're very theoretical. I've seen migrations take so long. I had I mean, contracts are halfway done by the time the customer's in the environment.

Max:33:03

I've had this conversation enough that people think I'm crazy about it because I'm I've become a big fan of just, like, just rip the Band Aid off as quick as possible, you know, because every migration, I mean, a physical data center moves, any migration out there, there's always some sort of lingering thing that has to get resolved. And you can try to plan migrations out perfectly and do them really slowly and do piecemeal and piece of time and try to keep your exposure low. And I find that that, like, persistent paper cut problem that comes up if you're doing staged and, like, you know, these long duration kind of migration projects creates more issues. Right? You end up with, like, burnout and morale in your IT organization are the people that are actually doing the migrations.

Max:33:42

Loss of goodwill for the rest of the organization. Everybody else hates IT because everything's not working properly. And it's almost like if you just say, you know, like, the heck with it Thursday night, let's just do the whole thing, and it's probably not gonna work on Friday. And so Friday, everybody in the rest of the company is like, woo hoo. Friday off.

Max:33:57

You know? And then, like you know? And, yeah, you're gonna have issues come Monday morning, but, like, you kind of expect you're gonna have issues on Monday morning, and everybody's already ready for, like, okay. We're gonna have some issues on Monday morning. So you get, like, a little bit of grace.

Max:34:09

Like, okay. There's be some problems on Monday, but we're gonna work through them. And then by the time you're at, like, Tuesday Wednesday, it's like most stuff is done. And then by that next weekend, for the majority of the organization, they're like, oh, it's just done. It's over.

Max:34:19

We don't have to think about it anymore.

Dustin:34:21

That's what I don't like about software migrations, what you just discussed. There's a point in time where the IT people you're working with are sick of talking to you. They're sick of getting on the phone. They're tired of answering similar questions. And they're like, the other part is, what do you mean it stopped replicating half the week?

Dustin:34:37

So what really got done? I mean, I've sat through so many calls where people are upset at the migration process. And and quite frankly, I'm sure the data's out there that points to the fact that that causes so much credit, and credits impact everybody. I mean, everybody suffers when a company has to give a lot of credits, and the migrations cause all these credits, and they cause, you know, what? Can we give you free months?

Dustin:35:00

How can we get out of this position we're in? And then when you look at most of the other providers, there are some great providers out there. This is not a a moment of picking on them. But in their design, what they built was many other people's softwares to create their solution. And so it's the amalgamation of a multitude of things.

Dustin:35:18

And at the end of the day, those things don't always work together in concert when they're supposed to. And so you get into these, the people selling them the software either start the billing immediately, so the customer is now paying for something they're not using, and that's a very big problem. Or I will use an example of a replication software rep might not like to work with some providers, so they don't really support them the same because it takes them 9 months ever get their migrations done. And so that software replication rep doesn't get their paycheck on commission for 9 months. Whereas if they use potentially somebody who only does Doctor that's out in space, then that software rep gets paid within 15 or 30 days.

Dustin:35:57

There are all these things that happen with a lot of the providers that tend to get ignored or they try to sell around these issues. And those things impact the customer whether the customer is aware of the impact or not.

Max:36:10

You mentioned something earlier I wrote down redundancy of your private cloud platform. Right? So really what you're talking about is you have a fundamentally or bare metal provider, but then has a, you know, cloud orchestration layer you can put on top of bare metal for people that want it. And your private cloud platform on your bare metal already has redundancy built into it. And with this installation, you ended up doing a d ras solution as well.

Max:36:31

So you're replicating data to a different site. What drove was a d ras a compliancy or a sanity of planning and redundancy? Like, how do they end up with both?

Dustin:36:40

Man, do I have this conversation a lot? So one of the beauties of our environment is you have native high availability built in. And that high availability is actually on the n plus nodes. Right? And we'll build somebody a 2 n environment.

Dustin:36:52

If that you know, in most people are like, well, what happens if the data center goes away? That is generally what causes second site Doctor. In my opinion, in our environment, that's the only reason you'd make that decision. Now that's not necessarily true. I mean, multi tenancy is clearly not true.

Dustin:37:07

You could make an update and crash the world. There's all kinds of other things that can happen. But with ours, it's your environment. It's dedicated to you. You've got high availability.

Dustin:37:15

So the reality is you can corrupt you. You could be ranted. There's a lot of things that could happen, and you just spin up on the new node. And and it's all built. It's all of that is built in.

Dustin:37:23

And so your microseconds to milliseconds to that VM running because it's running in Right? And unless you have your own copy of vCenter, you can't do that in VMware. Right? VMware providers don't pass that out because it's the vCenter issue, not a vDirector capability. And so that second site becomes more of a I feel the need to have that site, and they only put very specific items in that.

Dustin:37:45

So for us, we generally see replicating your entire environment has literally no financial value. Let's talk through that. If you feel like there's mission critical applications, and you're just afraid, like, the earthquake's gonna hit, and the Los Angeles data center is gonna collapse. And so you've got it in Dallas. And, you know, hopefully, it's summer, not winter.

Dustin:38:05

And so I get that decision if it's compliance driven or it's, hey. We understand this is a cost structure, but it's mostly unnecessary in our design today. If you want your nodes in, like, a second rack because you're worried about a rack or some I don't know. Like, you're worried about cables? These are all things in the data center that so long ago have stopped being problems.

Dustin:38:26

I think people are just still purchasing based on the belief that that problem still exists. And there was a day when data centers lost power more often. There's a day when there were issues. I just can't remember them. I mean, I haven't seen a data center without power in more than a decade.

Dustin:38:39

And I'm sure it's happened, and I'm somebody's gonna be, oh, I just had one.

Max:38:41

Oh, I I can give you a handful of stories, but they're amazing. Amazing. Okay. So I'm an LA native. I started in, you know, 20 plus years ago in IT in LA.

Max:38:49

I've had the 10 point o earthquake conversation. I couldn't even count how many times. And I finally came to the realization of, you know, like, there's this looming if you're living in Los Angeles, you just have this looming at any moment. It's kind of ingrained in you. The 10 point o earthquake can happen and, like, half of SoCal is gonna separate from the mainland and become an island and all these other things are gonna take place.

Max:39:08

The point that I make to a lot of people is this, are your operations for your Doctor plan even able to support your Doctor plan? Like, do you have people that can actually execute your Doctor plan or are all of your people in Los Angeles? Raytheon Raytheon had a Doctor plan of our critical employees are gonna drive to El Segundo and get on helicopters and be airlifted to Phoenix. And I'm, like, going through this, and you're like, okay. Yeah.

Max:39:30

All these people, have you checked and confirmed that they don't have any family living in Los Angeles, and they're gonna go and figure out how to get to I mean, again, a 10 point o earthquake is hit. There's no power. There's no forking freeway system. They live 30 miles away, which is normal in LA. They're gonna somehow mad max their way down to your location, El Segundo, and abandon their family.

Max:39:51

Grandparents, whatever it is, I worry about fires in data centers more than anything else. Actually, I worry about water in data centers. But, you know, so stories of data center outages, one Wilshire had a bus stop riser, you know, blow up. Now it didn't affect, you know, they had redone a bus stop risers and there were some outage related to it. But I mean, it happened.

Max:40:08

Seattle Wesson had a fire that took the data center down. That happened. I was in a data center, early 2000. And there was a somebody had an issue and they pushed the EPO buttons because this one EPO buttons were still on the floor. They pushed the EPO buttons and turned the facility down.

Max:40:23

There was a famous one in I think it was a semi truck. There was a car crash with a semi truck. A tractor trailer went into power lines. You know, so power lines go down. Data center goes on generator fire department comes in to cut people out of lines.

Max:40:34

They want the data center de energize itself because it's back feeding current into the lines effectively. Right. So they had an outage 365,000,000 in San Francisco had rolling brownouts and they were using really fancy data centers and finally had an outage. Craigslist went down for a while. MySpace, I mean, again, early 2000 MySpace had an outage when a generator blew up.

Max:40:53

I mean, I wouldn't say that was a Tier 4 data set. I mean, like, it happens, but, I mean, now I've just given you 25 years of history, and I've got, like, 10 examples of, like, data centers going down. You know? Anyways, I'm a big fan of redundancy in Doctor.

Dustin:41:05

Yeah. I had an office in downtown San Francisco for a long time, and the amount of times the building shook was staggering. But it's all small sort of rumbles. I'm currently right by the airport in San Francisco right now at the hotel, and, you know, we haven't felt one. But the reality is your example is right.

Dustin:41:20

I remember for a long time, I I'd be sitting in a meeting and I salespeople be like, you know, you gotta get the Zerto. You gotta get it turned on, you know, when the big one happens in California, you're gonna have all these people and we manage it for you. So we're gonna get you back up and running. You'll be back up in 15 minutes. Even that statement is so false.

Dustin:41:38

Yes. Your environment might be ready in 15 minutes, but that does not mean your applications have the capability of booting up an order anywhere in that timeline. And so it's sort of this really fascinating conversation I have a lot today, which is you are significantly better off in and then setting up an archival backup somewhere. And then just if something truly disastrous happens, we can spin you up in any data center. We do keep hardware and availability, and you're probably gonna be back up in a similar timeline as if you've been paying for it the whole time.

Max:42:08

My two real stories that I've seen with real, like, significant outages in data centers, I had a customer that weren't purchasing enterprise switching switchgear from an OEM. It was, you know, more like their SMB line. And this particular run of switches had an infant mortality rate of, like, 10 to 15%. And they were pretty quick to fail, but they had an infant mortality rate of about 10. And you say, okay, well, that's not significant.

Max:42:28

But then you say if you have 500 switches deployed, you know, and you have 10% of those 50 switches fail, it takes down a lot of infrastructure. Right? So that was 1 PDUs. We had a manufacturer PDUs. And you know what?

Max:42:39

Look, it was a long run. You're talking like 6, 7 years before the PDUs failed, but like some fuse that was non serviceable inside the PDU would finally give out at like the 6, 7 year mark. And then the PDU would, you know, you know, popping dinner. Anyways, I'm going to go completely on a tangent here. Let's try to save that for the end.

Max:42:53

So migration completes. You know, you find some things along the way. Like, you work through them. They come over. How long ago was this?

Max:42:59

Like, this recent years ago?

Dustin:43:01

No. No. They've been running for about 2 years pretty happily and growing pretty consistently.

Max:43:05

So and growing is a pretty positive indicator. Right? So more infrastructure with Enzu, more acquisitions on their part, people are happy.

Dustin:43:13

Yep. And by delivering n plus 1 when they bought a company. So the other thing in our world is, they can set up tenancy and subtenancy on their own, or we can set it up. So we're incredibly granular in the roles based part of our TrueCloud platform. And so they can say, we bought a company.

Dustin:43:29

We're gonna ingest that company, but we're gonna ingest them in this logically separated world so we can understand it before it becomes part of our production world. But then we can get them off whatever they're on and and get rid of that disparate system and disparate IT stack. They bring that in. They set up the people that that come in, get their own logins to that world, and then the administrator can see everything that's happening. And and they don't work in the production environment at all.

Dustin:43:53

And so they continue to keep those systems up and running, but it's already in their TrueCloud platform with us. And so they then can easily just change the roles and responsibilities and attach that to the production tenant. I don't know how many they have running right now. But I know at any given time as they're buying organizations, they have several going. It allows them to assess the new staff, understand if new staff should be part of the environment.

Dustin:44:17

Are they gonna keep the new staff? Or how what are they gonna do as people come on through these, you know, purchases to these acquisitions. And so they're able to do a lot of assessment of their world that they weren't able to do before. And then the other is because we knew they were gonna grow, we built so that the storage that was needed. So they're hyperconverged, plus they have a storage array for backups and archival data and some different components.

Dustin:44:39

But we oversized that. But it's already an appliance that's out there. So it's just a matter of having, right, the disk space available within it. And we just turn it on as they need it. So they don't have the cost growth until they need it, but they're able to turn it on in hours, minutes, I mean, quite frankly.

Dustin:44:53

So they don't have to wait for appliances to be shipped. And so we do a lot of planning like that with customers because they already knew what their growth path was. So, you know, we delivered n plus 2 instead of n plus one knowing that they might scale on to the next one fairly quickly. And we keep them and once somebody scales on to the new hardware like they did, we then ship the next new component. The other thing is we do everything we can.

Dustin:45:14

All initial deployments are parity. So your CPU, your everything is the same. Your NIC cards are the same. There's no disparity. So you can't have performance issues across the hardware.

Dustin:45:24

There's no variation in chassis, no variation in cabling, nothing. And we document that and do everything we can to continue to deliver that unless something went into life on them.

Max:45:33

Intel versus AMD. You know, historically, Intel CPUs were faster than AMD CPUs. And then we saw AMD CPU starting to give more and more core counts, right, quicker than Intel. And then we started seeing you know, I think Heartbleed was the first one I can remember. It was Heartbleed SSL of these, like, CPU trickery, you know, for lack of a better word, actually being the performance speed ups, you know, from a provider standpoint and as a, like, advising companies through this process of, like, CPU evaluations, right, you could evaluate an endless amount of CPUs and combinations.

Max:46:01

I mean, there's a few to choose from at this point. There's different core counts. How do you make this from, like, a massively overwhelming process to a, like, we're gonna funnel you into a directions that way you can figure out what

Dustin:46:12

you need. Yeah. So most of the time, we keep people on Intel. Most applications are performed very well. Most standard Windows based applications are gonna perform very well.

Dustin:46:21

Windows databases are performed very well. And there's no reason to really migrate away from Intel. You know your overhead, you know your issues, and so you right size that accordingly. And most of the time, we tend to use if we're getting into a private cloud where they start talking about performance metrics and IOPS, then we take a step back and say, alright. How are your applications bound?

Dustin:46:42

What is happening with different applications to understand? Right? If the application is very CPU bound, a lot of times we go through the proof of concept phase and we just put them on 1 of each and understand what's gonna give them the highest performance for mission critical applications. Because you can do everything you'd like on paper, and that isn't necessarily the same outcome is actually getting in, testing it, understanding what the real world metrics are, looking at the outputs that the graphs are gonna give you, and then putting them on the correct processor or the correct family of processors is private, you know, a little better way to say that. And so we tend to just go through that process with clients when there's something critical and the CPU is unknown.

Dustin:47:19

And then same with RAM. So, right, again, we have 3 levels of RAM. But if their application is heavily bound to memory, and they might need a very specific adapter, or they might find out they asked for RAID 5, but they really need RAID 1+0. So we go through that process of POC usually with those customers because there really is no other way to get the right output.

Max:47:40

I think surprisingly for a lot of people going through this, RAM is a limiting factor. And actually, a lot of things get decided by RAM. 1st, I mean, you can oversubscribe CPUs. You can do different things with storage. You can have local storage, you have different RAID sets, different types of storage.

Max:47:54

You can go external storage. But RAM RAM is RAM. I mean, now I'm old enough where I I think about how much RAM is going in servers nowadays, and I have these, like, old guy moments of, like, oh, man. You know, I can remember getting my first one gig hard drive, let alone having a terabyte of RAM in a machine, you know, and it's just it's bonkers. But, you know, I don't want to belabor this forever.

Max:48:13

I mean, this becomes so specific, I think, to each environment. Right. To like, I don't know how we talk about this in generalities. What I do want to talk about and come back to I think your statement that you used earlier, looking at my notes here was the no VMware tax. BroadSoft buys ends up with VMware and feels like it's still trying to figure out what they're doing with it and how they're doing.

Max:48:31

But the initial indications, of course, are how do they extract as much value in terms of money as possible from this environment? What is this actually going to look like? Full disclosure. Many, many, many years ago, we went down the path of evaluating VMware's vCloud for ourselves to run and found a lot of things embedded in that pricing and contract that discouraged us from continuing past a certain point. What is happening and what are you seeing right now?

Max:48:58

I mean, part of it is like, what are you seeing right now? And but the other hard part of it is what you think is going to happen with VMware? And there's a lot of service providers that built large businesses on top of VMware. So obviously, VMware doesn't want to flush that down the drain, but they have to you know, they want to try to figure out how to maximize the value of their purchase. And, like, this creates an interesting pressure.

Max:49:19

Right? And there's pressure from Broadcom to VMware to service provider. And then, of course, down at the very bottom of this, like, giant boulder being shoved down is companies and customers that have to write the checks.

Dustin:49:28

I'll talk about this

Max:49:29

and what I think are the customers that

Dustin:49:31

have to write the checks. I'll talk about this and what I think are the stages that are we've seen and then what's coming and then what I I mean, I I I don't think it's a secret. Most people know at this point where I think it ends because I've sort of pontificated that from somewhere in January. I'll say December 24th, when the major announcement came out, is usually when I start my week off to just unwind, do a little skiing, and enjoy for the family. And that week, I did not take my usual week off because I knew that Broadcom's purchase of any software company has ramifications far and wide and usually have major change.

Dustin:50:01

And I knew I was gonna have to figure out from from our perspective what that meant. Right? We're a competitor, you know. Could you run VMware environment? Sure.

Dustin:50:06

You could nest virtualization. Would you want a nest virtualization? I really don't know why you would cause all that overhead ever in your business. So but you can do those things, right? This is not a technological advancement by any means.

Dustin:50:20

The first movers and every one of them are the enterprise right now and they are moving. They can afford to move. They can do what they need to do. Everybody talks like, you know, they have all these VMware certified architects. Yeah.

Dustin:50:31

They have all these VMware certified architects and Azure architects and AWS Arc. They have every certified person on the planet working in their 600 plus IT staff. They are not short of every of virtual virtualization engineers and Doctor engineers. They've got that stuff down. They buy bare metal or they buy the servers themselves and they run their worlds.

Dustin:50:49

And they immediately went out because they're buying minor components most of the time. They're buying what they want from somebody to build the solution that they want to build. Well, when you were hypervisor only, it wasn't 3 times or 6 times. We saw a 100 times cost increases because they had to go to these bundles. Companies like Accenture, like, within moments were calling everybody that had anything to do with virtualization and asking if you could support them.

Dustin:51:13

But what they wanted to buy was software. They wanted to buy a new virtualization engine. That's it. They did not want private cloud. They didn't really want all the other components.

Dustin:51:21

And I will tell you in that instance, they got the rude awakening that there really weren't very many, if any, competitors. And a pretty good friend of mine works in the space where you analyze things and then you give out data. Not Gartner, not Forrester, not paid for stuff, but actually says, hey, Wall Street. These are the stocks we think benefit from this. So their their analyst is actually out to the financial world.

Dustin:51:45

And so we were sitting at an event and I said, hey, you know, who have you picked? And they're like, yeah, we can't find a known competitor to just buy a hypervisor from.

Max:51:53

I mean, this is somebody who

Dustin:51:54

that's their job is to say, hey. And so from that perspective, the enterprise is in a unique space. They're either gonna go to containerization and get off of virtualization and, you know, containerization is around longer. It's just was very hard to manage for a long time and that's where virtualization really won the war. And VMware took already existing systems and they made a pretty cool product out of it.

Dustin:52:15

There's no point where I'll say, oh, VMware is not a great product. It was a great product. And there are companies that should stay on it. They are dev for it, and they probably are just gonna have to figure out how to manage the cost structure. And the enterprise can do that.

Dustin:52:25

They can figure out how to absorb their costs, manage their businesses. I think the enterprise will they'll walk away from this running whatever they run-in the future. The mid market has yet to really get hit with this. I think it's just beginning now. We're gonna see it more through the summer.

Dustin:52:39

The service providers, again, I've got a couple panels. I've set them on stage to some of them. 1 of them said they were one of 3 that we're gonna be chosen as the great bastions of hope from Broadcom, and it turns out there's many, not 3. You know, I've heard every random thing I I could imagine at this point, but the mid market 3 times is not where, you know, everybody, like, 3 times cost increases. It looks like it's a lot more 10 10 times plus.

Dustin:53:03

Most mid market companies can't absorb this. They're running on small IT staffs. They wouldn't be using a service provider if they had a large IT staff. I think people misunderstand that. Right?

Dustin:53:12

For the most part, they wouldn't go out and buy from somebody and have managed services because they have the staff to do the management. And their businesses aren't just rolling in free cash. I mean, the mid market tends to run a much tighter financial shift. And that's why we've seen a lot of the providers in a big defensive position because that's when the big shift comes for VMware and that transformation. I I don't think VMware cares.

Dustin:53:31

I mean, no Broadcom doesn't care. They're very good at making money for their shareholders. I will say

Max:53:32

if they crushed a service provider and shut

Dustin:53:33

down all that revenue, I don't know that they care if it made them money. It is what they do and they're good at it. I mean, if you wanna make money on their stock, it pays out its dividends and it grows. And obviously, it grew wildly recently, but it grows. And it'll come back down and it'll go through, you know, all of its transformations from this.

Dustin:53:54

And they've already made other decisions like the decision around AWS and VMware on AWS coming to a halt. They've already made some decisions around Azure. And ultimately, if they follow the road that it looks like they're gonna follow, they're going to look a lot like an Oracle position, which is they bought something to transform it into a publicly available cloud platform because that's what Wall Street rewards and that's where the money's at today. And, you know, people always say if you follow the money, you'll find the crook. Well, if you follow the money, you'll actually find the business transformation as well.

Dustin:54:23

It's not always a negative. And so I openly think they transition transformation as well. It's not always a negative. And so I openly think they transition into a hyperscale style public cloud provider. It's kinda like bringing back you brought up VMware Cloud.

Dustin:54:27

Yeah. It's almost like they're gonna figure out how to fix that, and and I think they do. And that'll be, you know, people go in and they'll rent their space from them, and they'll drop down and choose their products to go with it. And, you know, VMware didn't want to I don't know. I wasn't in the boardroom.

Dustin:54:46

I wasn't a part of that decision. But I'd be sure fascinated to find out why they felt the need to walk away from AWS if it wasn't to compete with them. Broadcom, that's something they do. And I don't want anybody to be confused. I mean, we we have Broadcom components in our metal.

Dustin:54:58

We have Broadcom. I mean, they make some great hardware. Great RAID cards. I mean, they've got some great components.

Max:55:03

There's a line of increases. Right? Where if you increase the cost x percent, what's the additional revenue and margin that you get off that increase versus the loss that you're gonna have? Right. And this this applies to anything.

Max:55:15

Right? Real estate. You know, you're renting off a space, you know, like, okay, there's gonna be a point where an increase is gonna become untenable for the tenant and they're gonna move out. What percentage do you lose versus the increased revenue that you actually have? And usually these increases are much smaller percentages, 10%, 20%, 30%.

Max:55:32

If we increase cost 30%. As long as we don't lose X percent, we make more money and it it plays out better for us. If you increase cost 200%, 300%, 500%, a 1000%. Right? Like that delta of, like, how many you can afford to lose.

Max:55:46

I mean, if you if you jack up your prices 300%, you can lose a lot of business and still come out on top because your operational efficiency is so much And what I've kind of been wondering at and looking at is was this initial announcement and price increase the beginning phases of, like, a new distributor model or super aggregator model with within the VMware ecosystem. Right? Where it became that you're gonna we're gonna end up with a dozen, you know, like the top echelons where, you know, effective you have to purchase from them in order to get any sort of volume discount that's going to make sense that's passed down to you. Now, of course, if you're in that position and you're one of the 10 anointed, you know, apostles of a VMware is do you pass on that cost savings because nobody else can get access to it? Or is that just become your margin because you're so big and you've been blessed

Dustin:56:31

with this business?

Max:56:32

That's an interesting thought process in a lot of ways. They're simplifying and rationalizing their SKUs, but they're also increasing a lot of cost components. Right. And you mentioned Oracle. I can remember going through this with Oracle a long time ago.

Max:56:44

And what's a CPU core and what's a CPU and what's a socket? How do you license and what is is it an internal use application? Is it a public application? You know, how does your license actually apply? You know, if you're on VMware and you don't wanna do a migration, right, what are your alternatives?

Max:57:00

Your alternatives are write the check. You know, like there is no alternative. And I haven't seen anything from a service provider yet within VMware. That's, hey, we're large. We got in the premium tier.

Max:57:11

You can migrate your on premise VMware over to us. And, you know, you're gonna have a gentle landing in terms of price increase. Like, instead of having a 300 increase, you're only going to have a 30% increase. I haven't seen any of that in the market, which I'm really interested with because you think if somebody had that offer, they'd be out yelling it from the rooftops right now. And you say you started with enterprise.

Max:57:31

I want to actually talk about this for a second. There's really squishy views of what's SMB, what's mid market, what's, you know, what's SMB, what's SME, and what's enterprise. Where do you put those lines?

Dustin:57:43

Yeah. If I look at it just from IT, SMB really doesn't so they're usually outsourcing IT support to some company that does that. So that company will have, you know, 2 or 300 clients or 50 clients or 2 clients, I guess. But somebody else makes all the decisions for them. They buy all their licensing through them, they buy everything.

Dustin:57:59

Those are the VARs and the MSPs, the smaller ones out there in the world that are supporting that SMB business. I mean, the mid market will struggle to afford it, and SMB will just flat out have to come up with a whole new way to do what they're doing. The mid market tends to have, in my opinion, anywhere from 2 to maybe 20 people on IT staff. Even that's starting to get fairly large because if you can afford 20 IT, your revenue is probably doing pretty well. After that, you start to move through the different sizes of the enterprise.

Dustin:58:25

Right? Whether they're the Fortune 1,000 or 500 or 100 or 1, whatever it is. You move through the components of enterprise where they weigh purchasing of things versus the renting of things more heavily. And they're able to look at their cost structures more accurately. So they say, we have this many IT.

Dustin:58:43

The ROI of renting versus ownership is this. And they can assess most all of their costs much better than everybody else. They have a large finance team that I mean, they all have internal finance. That's only job is to audit internal processes and understand what the cost of a paperclip is to the business. Right?

Dustin:59:00

And so they sit and go through those processes very well. And the mid market does not go through those processes very well. Again, you're gonna have a generally, a small finance team. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, and a CFO kind of a, you know, a look. Right?

Dustin:59:13

And so they aren't looking at those costs the same way. They generalize things into buckets and go, okay. You know, these are my costs. And so I think those are my idea of those delineations.

Max:59:23

I like the IT staff count. That's an interesting way of looking at it. I I was reading a definition the other day, and it was defined SMB up to a 1000 employees and then put enterprise. It's starting at, like, a 1,000,000,000 a year in revenue. And you're like, okay.

Max:59:34

Now, like, how do you classify this and put this into place? Because I don't know if anybody would call a 1,000 person company in SMB anymore. I mean, they're like a little large SMB. It's this is a little side tangent for me because I'm always kind of curious about this. I've been using Microsoft and Google Workspace licensing is kind of my line lately.

Max:59:51

Oh, you're under 300 people. You're SMB. You know, you cross into you actually need e3 or you you're buying Google enterprise at, like, 200, 250 employees. Now your enterprise, it's kinda like, okay. Now you're a small enterprise.

Max:01:00:01

You've you've crossed over. The public cloud hypervisor competition is interesting. What's interesting about it to me is this, okay, you're gonna come out with a competitive hypervisor because, you know, Microsoft, right, based Hyper V or whatever you assume, like, core foundational technology for Azure. AWS has theirs. Right?

Max:01:00:18

Oracle. Right? Whatever. So if VMware is going that direction, they've got to also not alienate all of their potential customers that would use their public cloud, their hyperscale cloud at the same time of you know, because, like, I don't know. I mean, if you listen to marketing right now

Dustin:01:00:33

If you believe in the hybrid cloud world, are they? Or are they just monetizing their world the best they can realize there's no reason to actually I mean, some people are gonna have some stuff in AWS and some people are gonna have some stuff in Oracle. Are they simply just following that model along?

Max:01:00:49

But this is the same point. Right? Does does multi cloud exist in the mid market and lower? Or is it only an enterprise phenomenon? At what size are you really multi cloud?

Max:01:00:57

And then when you layer that onto it and this isn't an argument about whether you should be multi cloud, it's just a purchasing argument of you get to a certain size and and you have, you know, an EDP or its equivalency on these different platforms to try to encourage you not to be multi cloud, you know, and sub I don't know.

Dustin:01:01:13

Well, I mean, quite frankly, that's why they didn't fire the what I would consider the mid market service providers. So they're gonna build a public cloud platform for those large enough to participate in a public cloud platform, and they're gonna continue to every service provider. I mean, go watch LinkedIn at all the announcements. I'm now Azure certified as a salesperson. I mean, all these service providers are showing up with all over the map with hyper scale certifications because they're like, well, VMware just stuck the knife in the rib cage, and we have to go do what we have to do.

Dustin:01:01:43

You know, there's early movers around hyperscale, very large $1,000,000,000 service provider out there. Very early to start doing a lot of hyperscale or, you know, tried to build their own version and that didn't go. So they pushed into hyperscale scale when they couldn't build their own hypervisor version. Right? That's that was their big shift.

Dustin:01:01:58

And then you see other providers out there, all of them, tier point, 1111, there's a bunch out there, Thryv. These are good companies and they do good work, but they're having to figure out where they're gonna move a lot of their technology. And, you know, Nutanix is on the warpath. Wall Street picked them to win, but that's, like, that's Wall Street also protecting Wall Street because they're a publicly traded company, and Wall Street makes money on them. So they don't pick people who aren't publicly traded to win.

Dustin:01:02:21

And so, you know, you're gonna see a lot of Nutanix providers continue to crop up out in space.

Max:01:02:26

Explain to me Nutanix and where Nutanix fits and where Nutanix wins.

Dustin:01:02:30

I think they're originally, they were the big, let's unseat the XRail. I I really think that was the model. Let's go unseat the X Rail. Create our own hypervisor, you know, AHV, and and go to space. So in my past life, I actually Nutanix was a product we sold.

Dustin:01:02:46

Incredibly challenging. Was already very expensive. They're trying to claim they're cheaper than VMware, which just blows my mind because they were way more expensive at the time than any VMware solution I sold. So maybe VMware is just coming on par with them in cost, or they've done some cost cuts I'm unaware of. It's hardware based.

Dustin:01:03:00

So that enterprise space that is gonna buy, and they get they get the hypervisor with it and the software with it, and they get away from VMware, I think that's a really good place for Nutanix. Although their earnings suggest maybe not so. Interesting. They announced they were I mean, they built a team. There's a specialty team that I don't know if people know about that their only job is to go out to the enterprise and remove them from VMware.

Dustin:01:03:20

They built that team in January.

Max:01:03:21

I'm asking this question because now my view is limited or is more focused on, say, mid market and also service providers. Right? So we're we look at this from, like, what service providers are offering into the space. And so we see this more of, like, the intersection between service providers and then mid market, you know, customers.

Dustin:01:03:36

The

Max:01:03:36

overwhelming majority of Nutanix that I have seen in that world

Dustin:01:03:38

is advertising by Nutanix or use our Nutanix

Max:01:03:39

hardware in our environment to run your VMware workloads as in run the VMware hypervisor on top of Nutanix. And And you look at it, and you're like, that's a very interesting positioning.

Dustin:01:03:54

It was a migration strategy. Do you remember when everybody ran around and said, like, Office 365 was the gateway drug to cloud? Like, that was sort of the message. Go sell a bunch of you'll get people using cloud email, and they'll they'll sort of then they'll adopt all the rest of cloud services. So Nutanix in its original messaging was AHV one Doctor location that they sent stuff to that was just a big stack of servers, and you bought AHV.

Dustin:01:04:16

Well, they realized they weren't doing so well in the beginning, and so they nested the hypervisor and said, yeah. Yeah. You can run VMware on here. Every time I got in a meeting, all the engineers would be like, hey. We'll sell you Nutanix.

Dustin:01:04:27

We'll put you your VMware environment right on it. And then when you're ready and over time, you know, we'll move you to AHV. Every sales process sounded just like that. So it was actually, in my opinion, a migration strategy because the cost, like, you're like, okay. So Nutanix is $1.

Dustin:01:04:42

So VMware on itself is $1. Nutanix is $1. Nutanix with VMware is $1.50. And you're just like so the point was it was so much more. You had to eventually remove VMware from it or you saw and you didn't get the efficiencies, so you lost some of the efficiencies of running their native hypervisor which allows.

Dustin:01:04:58

Right? Native hypervisors like us, like, because we don't we didn't manipulate the KVM hypervisor. We use we we participate in Linux Foundation, and we don't go manipulating a bunch of that stuff. Right? We didn't try to monetize it in a manner in which we didn't participate.

Dustin:01:05:10

We are not AWS, and we didn't go down that wonderful road of using somebody else's knowledge and then shutting it off. In that process, right, what makes a portal really work well is all the API calls to all the things. That's what gives you the abstraction layers in order to build these great solutions. Well, Nutanix at one point very much was abstraction layers and seemed very open standard in their design. And now they're more like a closed cell architecture where they want you in their world, and you're using their technologies.

Dustin:01:05:36

And you you don't really get outside of it. And, yes, you can run VMware on it, but especially now that would be a wildly expensive decision. So now they're positioned, I think, as the alternative because they were given that gift from Broadcom.

Max:01:05:48

I'm obviously not in any of the rooms where any of these decisions are being made. I think about it from the primitive. Right? What are you actually running on it and what becomes the lineage of it right now? This goes back again a long time for me to the like Citrix original Citrix days.

Max:01:06:02

Right. You know, and and, you know, at some point you have an application and that application is running on something. And now you say how is that application actually running and what's the natural evolution and in state of that application? So that application is either running directly on a host operating system. Right.

Max:01:06:18

So you've got is that host operating system? I mean, really, for all intents and purposes, is it Windows based or is it Linux based? Because we don't talk about Sun or SGI or Altice, you know, it is a platforms anymore, right? Is it Windows or is it Linux based? I mean, maybe actually, maybe you're still you've got a you've got an AS 400.

Max:01:06:33

You know, you've used you've got a mainframe out there. You've got a specific application. I those do oh, and they're running and they run great. I mean, love me some IBM. So then you look at it and say, okay, are you Linux based or are you Windows based?

Max:01:06:44

And then what becomes that lineage? Right? So VMware and vSphere and all these things had a very elegant management platform to maintain Windows based virtualization and way better than what Microsoft was offering you to support maintain Windows based virtualization. And the ability to take and have a VM and create migration, you know, between, you know, nodes and be able to say, okay, you know, the VM got busy, you could promote it because it had more priority or if the node failed, you could move it. And then wrapping all that up with network as well and some very interesting acquisitions in the network space that could give you a lot of value in terms of actually doing some interesting things against your your environment.

Max:01:07:22

But if you're a Windows based shop, Microsoft wants you to be an Azure based platform customer. Right. And Microsoft doesn't feel like they're trying to dethrone VMware and giving you a Hyper V solution to run on your premise to dethrone VMware. They really want you to be moving from your on premise. You know, Azure Virtual Desktop is an extension of this and remote app you know, an extension of this.

Max:01:07:43

You know, so I'm kind of curious if you're a Linux based environment easier for you maybe to containerize and you look at containerized solutions in theory again based on just what you're assumed languages and it's a very interesting gamble for VMware if they're in state is actually to create a hypervisor to compete and because who are they competing with and what are they competing for and where is that space workout you know now I say that and at the same time I 100% hope that that is actually where they're trying to get to because more competition is good, especially if you're talking about the AWS, GCP, Azure trifecta. Right. Of like, you know, is there another is there, you know, options are good. Options are good for everybody. And we could use another one because I don't know what else we have.

Dustin:01:08:24

It's gonna be an interesting transition over the next 24 months. I think we've seen the beginning of some version of a public cloud platform. They can afford to build a public cloud platform. Again, I go back. Wall Street's gonna reward that decision every time with growth in their stock and growth for shareholders.

Dustin:01:08:41

And we'll see, I think, ultimately what they do with it. And, yeah, I think the mid market is why they left the service providers in place. Because otherwise, you know I mean, for a long time, service providers didn't do anything on hyperscale. And, technically, they kinda don't. They have management, and and they sort of support it.

Dustin:01:08:57

But the reality is I wouldn't consider the 3 primary hyperscalers actually, high enablers of service providers, but rather enable service providers can figure out how to work on them. Like, they're not enablers. They're not it's not some great training model. All this stuff is really fascinating. You know?

Dustin:01:09:12

A long time ago, I really thought I wanted to understand Google and and I you know, Google will give anybody a $300 a month credit to go learn Google. That's, I mean, I don't at least they did forever. I I don't know about today. I shouldn't say that. But they did forever.

Dustin:01:09:25

And I had one and $300 a month, and I could play with service. And I went to I think and I'm I got a base level GCP certification. That doesn't mean I could actually ever work in it in any truly significant way. It just means I had some understanding of what they were up to. You know, when you sit through those presentations, you ask yourself with all the incredibly powerful tools they have, why do you use other things?

Dustin:01:09:46

We use other things because they aren't the end all be all to every solution. You know, a lot of times, they're they have limitations people aren't aware of. They could be performance limitations. You you and I are experiencing that right now in in a different space. There are all these different things that are their limiting And you've gotta, you know, want to be you have to build an entire team just to manage the cost structure often.

Dustin:01:10:08

And I think that's where VMware head ultimately to.

Max:01:10:10

Inzu is your bare metal provider, and you're a private cloud provider, really, which is a platform on top of your bare metal. Right? So I really put you in like you're a bare metal provider that just happens to have like this additional stuff if you don't have the ability to do the additional stuff yourself. How do you see, you know, the companies that you're working with, your customers as they come in? And, you know, there's the simplicity, right?

Max:01:10:31

There's a block, right? Like, I need these many units of compute. I need this many units of storage. You know, there's like a kind of like there's like base layer of like foundational stuff that comes about that. But then that becomes the business in the application.

Max:01:10:41

We need to run this application to power our business. Do we run this in bare metal? Do we run this on private cloud? Do we figure out how to containerize it? I'm curious what you're seeing in these conversations of how people are, you know, evolving forward and then coming backwards to some sense.

Max:01:10:56

Right? Because there was this big push into away from having your own hardware. And now we're in this resurgence of hardware. You know, people talk bare metal as a daily conversation. You know, people are really looking at this and coming back towards it as an idea.

Max:01:11:08

And maybe it's the idea of is it the idea of, like, we still want bare metal, we want control, we just need some sort of orchestration. Like, what does that ebb and flow look like right now for you?

Dustin:01:11:16

Yeah. So bare metal has never been unpopular. It's just who would the buyers were. Right? So edge computing, bare metal, pick a synonym, has, you know, been going on.

Dustin:01:11:26

Carriers buy lots of bare metal at the edge in order to distribute something, some network component they need somewhere. Right? So there's always gaming companies. They they are bare metal based organizations. They build their own applications that run cloud native to the bare metal.

Dustin:01:11:42

And those applications sit and do their jobs, and they or OSes, you know, often like an Ubuntu. Like, they're they're simplified architectures. Right? So they don't use overhead intensive softwares in order to run their worlds. Right?

Dustin:01:11:55

And so repatriation is really another term for cost containment. I mean, it used to mean something else. But today, it's really a word that gets thrown around that tends to mean cost containment. People let their IT staffs sort of run wild in the hyperscale world. And then they said, okay.

Dustin:01:12:11

Why is this bill growing without revenue to match the growth of IT resources? And that led in this cost containment conversation from my perspective to seeing a resurgence in the mid market and small enterprise size companies to go, why aren't we cloud native? Why are we using the overhead? Virtualization is overhead. It consumes resources, which on the server.

Dustin:01:12:33

So if you're consuming resources, those resources can't be applied to revenue because there are resources that are at some cost at that point. And so you get into these conversations and then again, containerization has been around for a long time, but it's the big thing with containerization, it's it's historically requires a pretty competent IT staff because it's it's historically been intensive in order to deploy. Well, that's not really true anymore. And it's getting easier and easier. There's tools out there and, you know, we'll we'll talk about that.

Dustin:01:12:59

We actually partnered with a company and have built a pretty incredible platform to go with it. So bare metal is enabling cloud native application, cloud native applications run. They follow the hyperscale model, put your workloads out near your customer. Although they're if you go look at hyperscale data centers aren't that many in reality, so it's it's sort of a a false truth in some ways that they use to to say you're getting closer to the end user. Right?

Dustin:01:13:22

You know, I I was at the event when Google launched their single IP global web balancer. So there's a lot of things that they've done that are really cool and have advanced what we do. Right? But at the same time, containerization, I mean, if if you're using a hyperscale, a lot of hyperscale have a lot of containerization on it. It has for a long time.

Dustin:01:13:36

I mean, people use the term Kubernetes, and that is a Google product from forever and an age ago that works very well to this day. Right? And and you have all these other Terraform and all these other softwares, but Terraform is intensive to manage. Right? You don't have to know how to code correctly and whether YAML, JSON, all the things, like, you have to understand to do correctly within the tool.

Dustin:01:13:55

But we're seeing a lot more people look at cloud native applications, which means that they're looking at metal and then putting their applications on it, and they just want somewhere to manage networking and all the components of it without having to have a bunch of softwares. And so I think that's why we're seeing a big resurgences. It's not no VMware tax at that point. It's the elimination of the hypervisor tax structure.

Max:01:14:18

Kubernetes, Google, AWS. There's still this perception that they're easier platforms to run. And the reality of it is these are very complex, rich environments. And making what could seem like very benign decisions on these environments have massive implications to you in terms of architecture and then cost. Right?

Max:01:14:37

And how things move around and cost containment is an interesting concept of itself. And I hate the repatriation term, but it's I don't even really kind of think about it in, like, cost containment anymore. I think about it just in terms of, of, like, cost predictability more. Right? Like, you know, we know that this thing is going to cost us this much money this month and the month after that and the month after that and the month after that.

Max:01:14:57

And especially if you're in an environment where you're not attaching revenue directly to infrastructure, you know, if you're some sort of as a service platform yourself, then in theory, your infrastructure cost should decrease as your consumption increases and you have improving margins. Right. But at least you're generating revenue from your infrastructure cost. Right. So it is a cost of goods sold for you.

Max:01:15:13

But if you're not in that position where you're generating revenue from your infrastructure, then you want to actually have relatively fixed overhead in your infrastructure. So that way your business can improve and your margins can improve and your business can generate. You know, it still feels like we're very early innings on this. I mean, I know AWS has been out for a long time and virtualization has been out for a long time, but it still feels like there's a long way to go with these things. And what the future looks like is going to be very different still.

Max:01:15:37

Like, I wouldn't bet I wouldn't bet against, like, an AWS or Google to, like, still make 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars a year. But I'm

Dustin:01:15:42

gonna bet for, the stock in VMware to make 1,000,000,000 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars with, their public platform and add to that arena of public platforms. That's that's my bet.

Max:01:15:51

Yeah. You know, but at the same time, I mean, the reality for enterprises I mean, enterprise versus mid market versus SMB are very different worlds. I think you've you've highlighted that very eloquently. And just, you know, I mean, going back, like, basic needs, we started the story off with a an environment that needed to be able to rationalize their spending, what they actually had, how do they support it, how do they operate it, how do they go out and acquire and integrate additional ones, like basic core business need of, well, how do you accomplish this and actually do what you're doing and generate revenue and grow and be successful. And, it's very good to keep that in mind at the end of the day.

Max:01:16:25

Right? Kubernetes versus Rancher versus this versus that versus the next thing. Like, okay. Who cares? What are you actually doing?

Max:01:16:30

And can you exist in a year from now based on decisions you're making?

Dustin:01:16:34

Right. It's interesting. Our market space is primarily gonna be small mid mid enterprise market. Right? Small business, not so much because we don't do a fully managed platform.

Dustin:01:16:44

Because the way our platform is designed, everything is co managed. And if there isn't somebody to interact with the environment, not really a strong fit. The enterprise may build it themselves. I mean, maybe every now and then we sell the enterprise, private cloud. But I'm and I'm talking about private cloud and virtualization.

Dustin:01:16:59

Bare metal, of course, we support plenty of enterprise. But on on the virtualization stack, they they tend to have that team. They got bird engineers. They got all the people they need. Right?

Dustin:01:17:08

It is that mid market that we give cost predictability to. I actually love the way you said that. Cost predictability too and performance predictability. So that's by getting away from having many softwares in your solution to a single managed platform that is native, that all things are dev and are natively built, you get away from a lot of the somebody updated their software and other things broke, you know. No.

Dustin:01:17:31

We refuse to upgrade from to v ten. We're gonna stay on Veeam 9 because if we go to Veeam 10, we might break a bunch of customers' backups. You know, things like that. So we don't have to have 100 of engineers causing you cost increases simply because we have to sit and live with whatever the software providers do to us. And so I think that's where we really shine for clients.

Max:01:17:49

I wanna highlight that in some way. I'm thinking of how to, like, regurgitate that. But it really your costs are the hardware you're buying, which, you know, when you buy the hardware, how much it's gonna cost. And your hardware manufacturer can't come back to you in 6 months or 12 months or 15 months and say, oh, we want an extra 30% out of you for this hardware you've already bought and provisioned. Software licensing is a very different like at any point, it's a first off, it's a permanent expense annually.

Max:01:18:12

You know, we've gone from this like you buy it and you own it model to like you're renting it every month. And at any point in time, you've got this thing looming now of, you know, does this change? And maybe that's okay for some people, and maybe it's not okay for other people.

Dustin:01:18:25

You know, I I at the beginning before we started, I said there's you know, we've thought a lot about what we've seen. You asked about people coming back, but essentially, it's it's driving the future. We've been in a lot of meetings with clients that are doing pretty cool things on the technology side of the house. We've sat through a lot of proof of concepts and seen the outputs and the outcomes of those proof of concepts. Because outcomes at the end of the day are what matter to the end user.

Dustin:01:18:47

They need their outcomes, whether it's generating revenue to perform a very specific way to to get that revenue generation. And so we tend to look across the ecosystem and say, is there is there anything we should be doing or people we should partner with? So in our private cloud currently, we I just talked about the fact that, you know, it's it's native to us. But on Bare Metal, especially, and even in a private cloud, we've started to look at a couple of partners that that enable people to do some pretty spectacular things mixed with our platform. And so coming soon is gonna be the Enzu Supercloud.

Dustin:01:19:17

I don't know. I still haven't exactly named it. We'll call it the Enzu Supercloud. And this is really fascinating. So you look at we we a managed KH platform.

Dustin:01:19:27

The company is Control Point. And they do, like the CEO is the former chief architect of VMware. It's a project at SAP. I mean, this is a brilliant human being who can code and develop anything he really wants to at this point. And then we look at so you combine that with our bare metal, and these people are building containers, but it's not just the fact that they're now building containerization.

Dustin:01:19:48

Everybody we've met with comes to the realization that they don't have to write code. So they can just say I wanna launch this container, and then it spits out whatever version of code. They copy that, and they paste it into Terraform or wherever it is, whatever native platform it needs pasted into. The other thing, and this is where the supercloud comes in. A lot of times, the reason people struggle with whether or not they're gonna walk away from hyperscaler is that they've they are using certain tools.

Dustin:01:20:11

There's a toolset that they've learned to use and it's doing so. It's enabling something in their business and they become bound to that toolset. Well, you can use tools from GCP, Azure, and AWS on our bare metal because of this solution without the cost of the hyperscaler. So you get that cost predictability and, I mean, IOPS performance. I mean, you've seen some of that data.

Dustin:01:20:29

So I mean, just the way we can build metal into this super high performing architecture for somebody. So you can go from, like, a container per server to multiple containers per server. You you have all these cost optimization models. You know? Even in private cloud, you have always, like, private cloud, you may have certain components like you're running your ERP, but the rest of your business is gonna be containerized.

Dustin:01:20:49

And so you use this platform. And then when people have skill sets around certain tool sets in the hyper scale, they now get to use those tool sets without these high cost structures that are associated historically with those hyper scale infrastructure costs or egress bills. You know, there's the big one for most people. But, anyway, I thought I'd throw that out. There's just such a fascinating change whereas this containers are this old thing that have historically been difficult to manage.

Dustin:01:21:15

Now there's the enablement of managed k its platform, and there's a whole new way to look at using it without losing a lot of your tools.

Max:01:21:22

Before we started recording, I promised you this wasn't gonna turn into a Joe Rogan thing. And if we start going down this path, I'm gonna break my work. I would love to continue this conversation and talk about you've kicked off. At this point, you're just gonna have to call it supercloud. But tools enablement, tooling on your bare metal, and network.

Max:01:21:36

And if you're willing, I'd love to do that in another time and continue this conversation.

Dustin:01:21:40

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You'd ask me a lot of questions, and I'm gonna stumble right now because it where where is still so much development, but it's it's so cool to see being used.

Max:01:21:48

Dustin, this is awesome. I'm gay. So part 2, supercloud. Pleasure having you. I'm looking forward to it.

Dustin:01:21:54

Thanks, Max.

Max:01:21:56

Hi. Max Clark. That was an IT broker.comtechdeepdivewithdustinyoung@enzu. If you are curious about bare metal or private cloud, VMware licensing, the difference between hypervisors, which hyperscale environment you should be on if if you're having conversations related to a spiraling cost controls or performance limitations, if you have questions related to your infrastructure and what the right place to run your infrastructure is and is there improvements or cost containment or cost predictability that you can achieve? Give us a call.

Max:01:22:26

Send me an email. Reach out. Happy to have a conversation with you and see if this is even something that's worth it for you to pursue. No pressure. No commitment.

Max:01:22:35

Just a conversation. We start there. And if it's worth it, we take the next step. I'm Max Clark. Hope this helps.

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