Transcript
cloud. And then Nutanix NC2 has been a great solution to get us to where we need to be. So 4Wheel Entertainment, we're a professional lighting, video, and rigging company. We do everything from fixed events, corporate events, movie sets, fixed installations, everything in the entertainment industry. We're a high-growth company. We do a lot of acquisitions, a lot of M&A. During M&A, you buy a company and they have their infrastructure. And so we have to shift our technology to them and then pull them in-house to sort of run that company and our technology. When I joined them, they didn't have the proper infrastructure in place to sustain that type of business. Our biggest challenge was we had many locations, servers everywhere. And so the first thing we did was consolidate some of those locations into Nutanix, and then from that, we further consolidated down into our corporate headquarters. So our cloud strategy, we've moved most of our applications to software as a service, SaaS. Our internal private cloud, which is where we're hosting all of our core applications, our ERP systems, our financial systems, BI reporting systems, we're doubling in size every two years. In order to sustain that model, you have to have the infrastructure in place to do that. By moving to public cloud, it gives you that ability to scale, expand, and grow. So we're an Azure shop. We have public cloud services in Azure and AWS, both. Most of my staff and team are trained and certified in Azure, and we are a heavy Microsoft shop. For that reason, that's probably our biggest cloud provider. A lot of our core applications, like our ERP system, our reporting system, our financial system, typically that's run in-house. But for us, there are components and pieces of that that we've started to shift those workloads into the cloud. By going with Nutanix, we've been able to scale those workloads. We can shift and move anytime we want, depending on how the business needs it. Originally, we used Nutanix to consolidate our server infrastructure, and then we've slowly added onto that. We're no longer using VMware. We're using the HV product. We're using the files product. We're using the disaster recovery piece. And so it started out as being a hardware exercise, just getting us in hyper-converged hardware and software to the point now where we're actually utilizing and taking advantage of some of the advanced features that Nutanix gives us to grow our business. Probably the biggest value we have is moving from VMware to AHV. That's been a huge benefit to us. We had a difficult time getting our internal staff to move off VMware, but by doing so, we've simplified our environment. The administration is super easy, very, very sustainable from a small team. There's cost savings. There's efficiency. There's so many things you gain from that, and Nutanix has allowed us from a technology standpoint to grow the business and not have to worry about the infrastructure. The service, the support, all the applications that they have available have been amazing for us. It's allowed us to do so many things in our business that we wouldn't have been able to do had we been running off traditional servers, traditional infrastructure.
