Transcript
Welcome back to Nutanix Cloud Interlock. We are here for season two. With me today, you may know her from LinkedIn or YouTube or TikTok. We're talking to Alexis, who is now renowned for making networking cool again, Alexis, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Welcome to APJ. It's my first time here. What brings you to this wonderful continent we have? While I was flying 30 hours over to Malaysia, I decided to take a little stop by Singapore and visit some customers while I'm out here. Nice. It's a beautiful home. It's a great, great place to be. Gorgeous here. Again, now I've been in the game obviously a lot longer than you have. I've been talking to a lot of customers this week, especially around Nutanix as I travel. And you know, they know Nutanix from 10 years ago. So part of what I do is educate them on what's new. Why is Nutanix cool? Why is it really, you know, a change from the Nutanix that you knew before? Now I look at networking as complex. I think we were chatting about it complex and challenging. Cool is not the word I would use. So how are you making that happen? How are you making networking cool? Yeah. So I like to think about it more from the beginning stages of when people are choosing a career. You know, I'm online today. There's so many people who want to jump right into cloud or AI or cybersecurity or you name it. Right. Everything else is cooler than networking. But when you talk to a lot of industry veterans like yourself, where did you start? Help desk, network, security. Right. And these, you know, cloud, AI, cyber, they're not entry-level roles. And people almost want to skip step one and jump ahead, which not to say that you can't, but there's something to be said about the fundamentals because say you're going into cybersecurity, how are you going to secure something you don't understand how it works? And so starting and getting that experience and, you know, an entry-level knock help desk position so that you're understanding, you know, what you're doing later on is super important and I don't think it's talked about enough. Yeah. It's spot on. It's interesting because I also talk to a lot of people and they say, well, where have you come from? And I said, well, I started in the help desk and then I moved into delivery. So when I talk about this product has these features and capabilities, I actually have an understanding of it. And I know when it goes wrong, it goes wrong pretty badly. So I agree completely. You really have to have that core, I think, infrastructure, network, security, you have to have that understanding to be able to fully utilize AI and modern services in cloud. So I love the perspective on that. Right. And when you look at the industry today, you know, we have engineers who are retiring faster than new people are coming into the industry. Every single customer I supported, every time someone left, they'd call me and say, hey, Alexis, I've got this job open. Can you can you refer someone? I don't know who to hire. I've been looking to hire an engineer for six months. My team is super stressed. I can't find talent. And at the same time, to support these advanced technologies, I mean, who knows what we're going to throw at the network next? We're going to need people who understand it to support it. And so it's it's kind of this inflection point where it's going to start becoming a problem. And I think it's a great segway onto the next part that I wanted to ask you was, we've often seen and I always used to blame networking for whatever it was, whatever the delay was, it was always the network's fault, it was too hard or we needed to go to these remote sites. Right. You know, across ASEAN, across and especially Australia, we have such a huge geography. We've seen huge gains, I think, really over maybe the last two years, especially with say Starlink coming out. Where do you see us going, being able to really utilize cloud effectively where we have low latency requirements, high bandwidth requirements, but we're in remote locations? What's your thought of where, you know, where the industry is going and how Megaport can help customers get there? Yeah, absolutely. I think that's where we're starting to see more software defined networking come in, being able to have flexibility in how you deploy services, where you deploy services, when you deploy services and make sure that they're flexible and scalable to support your workloads and your infrastructure needs. I mean, I can't tell you how many customers pivot on a dime based on cloud spend, right? The change in cost when things like VMware get acquired. There's all sorts of reasons where your cloud strategy might change. You know, when we saw cloud first become a thing, maybe five or six years ago, it was still, what am I going to do with it? What am I going to do with the cloud? So you're right, I think it's moving there, but that flexibility of being able to consume it as a service on demand, being able to integrate into the providers, that's a huge benefit for customers. Well, and I think from an infrastructure standpoint, you know, whether we're talking networking or data center, as the providers of those services, we're just trying to make sure that we can support the demand when it comes. No one really knows what that's going to look like yet. I think we're still all figuring it out, like you said, but when things start to ramp up, when the businesses decide to go full bore, we need to make sure we have the infrastructure built out and ready to go, that we can provide that for them. Yeah, yeah. The other one that I often see at the moment is customers are almost too timid to make a change. They think it's going to be too hard. I think everybody tries to adopt the new tech. So I'm going to adopt AI, even if it's just co-pilot, I'm going to do something. But when we talk about core infrastructure services, so core info, security, networking, I think everybody gets put off thinking it's going to be a lot harder. Now with the invent of a software defined pretty much everything, and again, you know, we're very much in that space in the software defined infrastructure side. People can start. They can start really easy and they can take advantage of the services that are available today. What's your sort of feeling there? Do you see people still hesitating a bit? Well, I mean, people have been hesitating with automation for ages. I do think having, you know, software or a GUI or something to make it more consumable versus learning Python is always a good thing. But there is some level of, you know, peeling your fingers off the steering wheel and trusting that the automation is going to work. But as we're seeing again, like you said at the beginning, networking is complicated. Being able to monitor security services across hundreds or thousands of locations, it's just not scalable anymore for a human to do all of that. And so I think we're starting to see customers, like you said, put feelers out, start to build that trust and scale from there. And like you said, it's not something you need to jump in 10 feet deep. You can dip your toes in. You can do one site. You can do two sites. If you're on the Megaport backbone, you can spin up a port, test it out, see what you think. I spoke to a lot of customers this week. They're adopting services in one cloud. They're looking at the other. Maybe it's vendor lock-in. Maybe it's just a different service or price point they're looking at. Can I talk to them about the ease of being able to shift workloads and interoperability between clouds? Is that something as well that you're seeing and how is that something that Megaport can help customers address? Yeah, absolutely. So like you said, most customers today have a multi-cloud strategy, whether that's to take advantage of better pricing, avoid vendor lock-in, or at the end of the day, different clouds are better at different things. You might be utilizing some services from one cloud, some services from another. Where Megaport comes in is we're really a vendor agnostic provider. So whether you're looking at leveraging multiple CSPs, we're in all of them. Whether you're looking at leveraging multiple data center providers, we're in all of them or most of them. We've got 950 data centers we're connected to now, so just a couple. When you're looking at your multi-cloud strategy, making sure that your network is as flexible and scalable as your cloud is super important because at any point, the business could decide to pivot. Or maybe you want to take advantage of a new service or maybe there's a new AI offering. And if you're locked into these traditional networks or telco contracts, you're not going to be able to pivot like the business needs to. We're in all of their cloud gateways and on-ramps, whatever you need. But making sure that your network is as flexible as your cloud is super important. Yeah. And that's a really good point actually, because a lot of the times we see the network is almost an inflexible junction on it. So maybe it's the hardware contract that they're locked into for a really long period of time or a facility that they're locked into. You're right. The ability to now decouple that and make it flexible with your business is going to allow customers to drive themselves forward as they need to. A hundred percent. Or what we're seeing a lot of when I talk to our partners is even things like mergers and acquisitions, saying you're merging with a company or acquiring a company who's in a different data center or in a different cloud than you are, and now you need to migrate all of that over to consolidate your services. Well, if you're standing up a traditional link, that could take three to six months. Think about the time that adds to your merger just because you're waiting for circuits. And again, once the merger's done, you don't need those circuits. So being able to have a service that you can provision on demand to move that data, take advantage of the services wherever you need it, and then turn down, super important. Yeah, really important. And I don't think we've ever seen that before in terms of that level of flexibility on a backbone service like networking. Yeah, you can spin up some services in cloud and turn them off, but to have an interconnect between GCP and AWS that you only need for three months to migrate over to Amazon, that's an amazing service to be able to have. Absolutely. Yeah. It goes to another thing I was talking about yesterday was around, you don't need to really design the whole world for the future. And I think this is where customers are getting a bit stuck at the moment. The one I was with was talking about how they're trying to build a five-year strategy. And I said, you do understand that with a five-year strategy, you don't have to have an architecture prescribed for those five years. You can start off with one and you can pivot. But again, that flexibility is the critical piece there. So making sure it's software defined, making sure the tools you're using can work between different providers. I think that's critical. Is that as well what you would sort of think? Absolutely. You upgrade your phone every two years, don't you? Maybe not that one, but yes. When we're looking at, I mean, when you think about the pace at which technology is increasing, just look how far we've come with AI just in the past year and a half, year and a half now. The technology is growing and growing. And if you want to make sure your business is on the edge and staying competitive, it's important to leave some leeway to adopt those services. So in my last role, I'd walk into a customer and they'd say, hey, Alexis, I had this last set of switches for 10 years. I need to upgrade my environment, their end of life. Can you guarantee I'm going to get 10 years out of the next set? And it's crazy because when you think about it, you upgrade your phone. Most people upgrade their phones every two years. And technology is advancing at such a crazy rate, especially, I mean, look at what we've done in the past year and a half with AI. We have no idea what we're going to need to throw at the network tomorrow, let alone five to 10 years from now. And so I think a really important point for customers is just making sure that you're building flexibility into your environment. You're building in ways that you can continue to adopt new technologies, scale to new technologies to make sure your business is staying competitive. That's a great point, actually, because when I think about that, it's not just the placement of your workloads to get the best performance out of it. It is to be able to adopt the new technology set that's going to come out. And I think understanding that and how that affects your decision-making when you're doing that five-year strategy or blueprint plan that you're trying to go for is really important because you not only want to make yourself available to adopt the services, but you want to be dynamic to offset what your competitors are doing. And I think that's where we obviously provide a lot of insights, and that's something that customers should take, I think, more advantage of. Yeah. I say all the time, I wish more customers took better advantage of their account teams. Whether they're at Nutanix or at Megapore or their technology partner, their VAR, we're there to help you. Whether you need insights into what your competitors are doing, whether you're in banking or finance or healthcare, whatever it happens to be, there's a good chance we're working with other businesses like you. So if you want to know, hey, what's that guy over there doing? There's a good chance we're also working with them and we can help give you additional insights to help you stay competitive. Yeah. I think it's important. Obviously, we won't give you their designs, don't worry about that bit, but we do publish a lot of papers. Like recently we launched our enterprise cloud index, and that gives sort of industry spins and blueprints and breakdowns of what people are doing in different verticals. And I think having a level of understanding of that, even just that spend and that adoption rate, just lets you know what other people are doing and how I should be gearing my business for that. Keeping yourself locked into a 10-year refresh lifecycle on infrastructure always drives me crazy. You know, we've spoken a lot today about being flexible, being dynamic with your workloads. I think the key takeaway I always have is don't exclude yourself. You can start small, but, and here's the real but, you've got to choose a trusted provider that's going to enable you to be dynamic and flexible with where you want to go in the cloud. Any other final thoughts, Alexis? Man, I hate saying build for the future. Build for the future. Build for the future or future-proofing. It sounds like a real... Man, it's such a buzzword when you say future-proof your network. Future-proof your network. Well, those other customers... It is one of my least favorite buzzwords out there, but really, if you're developing a cloud strategy, trying not to lock yourself in because we don't know what's coming down the road tomorrow. We don't know what's coming down the road in five years, in 10 years. And when you're making these very significant investments, you want to make sure that you're going to be able to pivot when you need to. Yeah, yeah. Good point. So you've heard it from us today. You don't need to go all in and redesign your entire network. You can start really small. Nutanix are here to help you on that journey as you move into the cloud. We can help you get there. Make sure you're onboarding with vendors like Megaport that are going to give you that flexibility to move forward. Thanks for joining us.
