Speaker 0 | 00:09.567

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. We are going to take a very much more relaxed approach today, talking about technology or lack thereof or not a need there of with Mr. Robert Wilcox. sales engineer at not you know you i don’t want to butcher this so i’m just going to let you say where you’re from uh it’s a little company called nutanix we’re a little leader in hyperconverged right now excellent excellent okay why don’t we just define that in case there’s actually non-nerds listening to this um what what in your opinion because hyperconverged can be kind of this you know we can think about immediately i start thinking of uh I don’t know, like network diagrams and deep philosophies on technology, but I’ll let you define that. And after that, you have to define visceral along with that, along with this at the same time and how the two coexist. How about that? This is like test number one.

Speaker 1 | 01:16.874

Defining visceral? Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 0 | 01:24.156

And I’m only saying that because you yourself used the word and bolded it in your last article. It’s just so you know, I’ve been stalking you. So go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 01:32.842

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m on the LinkedIn. Yeah. Okay. Well, it’s a little bit early. I’ll do my best. So HyperConverge, that’s where we’re going to take our traditional, you know, three-tier architecture plane. You’ve got your storage plane, your compute, sorry, your storage plane, your compute plane, and your network plane. And, of course, we’ll just say your Mannington plane as well. And we’re going to flatten it down. So instead of having, you know, a bunch of SAN and SAN controllers and boxes of disks and then, you know, multiple compute hosts and all the networking in between, you probably use a different networking fabric between your storage environment and your compute environment. And of course, the proper acquisting and so on and so forth. We flatten that down to where you’re basically running everything in a series of nodes, as we call them. And those nodes include the storage architecture path. the data path, the hypervisor, and all the appropriate management layer to manage that system. So we effectively take things down from, you know, a rack or multiple racks worth of equipment down to, you know, a few U. And then you can scale it because it’s built off of, you know, web scale architecture. So this is, you know, one thing that makes like a true HCI, like a purpose-built HCI versus something, a company that’s like Stan Principles and put it in a similar form factor. One of those differentiations is being able to scale to, you know. and number of nodes with linear progression of your performance. And that’s been one of the things that Google and Amazon and those large hyperscaler public cloud vendors have done is be able to do that. Because they don’t really wait for a node to die and then replace it or a disk to die. They wait for that entire rack to go out. And then they wheel a rack out and they put a new one in place. And so because of that type of scale, native scale. they’re able to get super dense and super large really fast. And that’s really what hyperconvergence is about.

Speaker 0 | 03:25.156

I perked up when you said Amazon. I want you to pretend I’m like the, I don’t know, like glazed over CFO. And you’ve just said everything you just said at the boardroom table. I perked up when you said Amazon and Google. And I perked up when you said something about two IUs because… I know that I get a bill every month and I’m paying for a certain number of IUs from, I don’t know, Equinix or something like that. But from like a real layman standpoint, what does all this mean? We’re going to scale faster, be able to do more faster for less or, and take up less space or that’s, that’s what I hear as a, as a CFO. Yeah. So,

Speaker 1 | 04:09.381

I mean, that’s exactly right. You’re going to have a much smaller physical footprint. You’re going to require less power and cooling. You’re going to require, again, that smaller rack space. And then you’re also going to get this simplification of your management layer. You’re going to save a lot of time and effort and have fewer management points to touch in the entire stack. So, you know, we really, the idea of the hyper-converged through all the different hyper-converged vendors, not just Nutanix, is to make things easier for your team. So you’re enabled to power the business. better instead of just spending 80% of your time, which is usually what we see keeping the lights on, so to speak. Is it less points of failure also?

Speaker 0 | 04:54.968

In a very does it mean less points of failure also and faster scalability?

Speaker 1 | 05:01.065

Yeah, absolutely. That is very true. Again,

Speaker 0 | 05:04.087

you’re talking to a guy who stayed back in first grade that’s in technology. This is how we have to speak. Ironically enough, this might be why I’m successful because I can speak in first grade terms, I guess, and twice because I stayed back twice. That was excellent. Now, how much do we need technology? Do we overkill it? Do we overkill on technology sometimes? And that’s where I came with the visceral thing, because you used the term visceral, to be honest with you. And I just pressed down the, what do we call this? It’s the plunger, I think. I just pressed down the plunger on my French press. So I’m drinking coffee in an old-fashioned way, in a visceral way, because I like the experience. Do we overdo it too much, you think, on technology sometimes? Do we overcomplicate things?

Speaker 1 | 05:59.649

So, yeah. I like to think so, yeah. It’s overcomplication for the sake of complication. And you get to the point to where you start to, and this is outside of corporate IT technology, this is just general consumer technology. And you get to the point where you’re kind of… Exactly, you know, all the smart house stuff and all these things, I mean, they’re cool, but when you sit back and think about what problem did I really solve? Was that really a problem for me in the first place? You mentioned the French press. We’ve had various ways of making coffee automatically, you know, for decades, right? You’ve got percolators and coffee pot machines, all these wonderful things. I mean, the crew egg comes along, right? You know, way back. So, you know, then you’ve got things like the crew egg machine, and the crew egg’s great. I put in a pod of whatever I want, I push the go button. and there we go.

Speaker 0 | 06:53.550

Okay, great. Just so you know, I absolutely hate it and the reason why I hate it is because I don’t, I have this perception that there’s not enough caffeine in it and I really like to get high. I’m a complete straight edge person and it’s kind of a joke between me and my friends. I’ve said this before but we’re joking around because I don’t drink. I don’t, nothing. I drink coffee but we always joke around like, hey, you want to get high and really that’s the code word for let’s get some coffee. But anyway, let’s go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 07:20.773

Yeah, we’re based in coffee grounds. So, you know, again, with the coffee analogy, you know, we’ve got this ability now to basically create this on-demand cup of coffee, single serving. So was that really a problem? You know, does it really take so much time to make a cup of coffee? No, hell no. However, we now have this new, easy, more, you know, air quote, technologically advanced way of producing. single serving cup of coffee for the sake of convenience. What is the outcome? Subpar coffee and an obscene amount of weight. We have single serving plastic cups that make an obscene amount of weight. And now you see that in every home, most homes, a lot of homes, you see that in almost every office you go to, you know, as a kind of a consultancy role at Nutanix, I’m going to a lot of clients. Those things are everywhere. You know, back in my, you know, back before that, when I was, you know, IT manager guy, they would be at him there. And it takes away from that experience of taking just an extra couple of minutes.

Speaker 0 | 08:25.769

You know what, I think you threw me away. First of all, if I could have been the inventor of that, I’d probably, I would check that off on my list, just saying no. You know, like the Keurig or the Frigate. Like I would probably accept that and then we would move our company into a, you know, some kind of environmental role where now you see how people are recycling all of them. And like, you know, the even… I don’t know if it’s the Nescafe one that has the little metal cups and now they’re showing how to recycle those and you can use a reusable cup and load it with your own coffee, etc. That’s not the point. The point is, like you said, every office has like a Keurig sitting in the corner with the little tree of the cups and you’re allowed to make yourself a cup of coffee. And well, some do, some don’t. It’s kind of nice. It’s kind of nice. But to your point, what if you created this whole… I’m a black apron. I’m an ex-Starbucks black apron, by the way. I’m a coffee master. I know a ton about coffee, right? And I know a ton about the experience. And I can taste a cup of coffee. I can tell you what region it’s from. Or I can tell you if it’s pretty, pretty good at telling you whether it’s a blend or not. But you just amazed me because if I had a technology office, let’s say I came into Nutanix. Maybe it’s a job interview. Maybe… Um, we’re bringing, I don’t know, do you guys do, uh, like data center walks or anything? I’m sure there’s some sort of sales process that you, I’m not sure. I know for a fact, you guys have probably a very scientific sales process that you take people through, but. What if we added to the whole customer experience, say, while you’re waiting in the waiting room, a black apron experience where someone comes out with actually like a boiling kettle of water and presses you a French press and sits down and talks with you? Yeah, maybe it’s not coffee.

Speaker 1 | 10:18.159

That is exactly what I’m talking about. That is, there’s something you’re going to feel, I’m going to use that visceral word, something that is really tactile that you cannot replace with convenience. You know, convenience will be an off. but it’s not going to be a replacement of that same experience. And so, you know, this morning I used my French press because it’s better and it just takes a minute. And it’s kind of part of the ritual as well. You know, we’re such a fast-moving society now. Everything’s going, moving so fast. The information age is literally a blur and it’s speeding up. It’s nice sometimes just to take a minute and do things a little bit old school, you know, because you can still do just as good of a job or better you know, in my article I liken it to, you know, saving with a straight razor or a DE razor or something like that, where you’ve got all these additional kind of products to use and it’s more of a ritual and you take your time and it feels good. The same thing with, you know, all the net nannies in cars. All the nannies in cars now, the lane keep assist and the auto braking and all the lane warning stuff, it removes from that experience of… Driving and kind of getting lost in your own mind and enjoying the drive and feeling the road It’s it’s it’s a test point either. We’ve introduced the technology in the cars on screen To do all these wonderful things with new touch buttons that you got to look down away from the road You’ve got a you’ve got things playing you’ve got Matt. You got all these distractions now We’ve got to create these electronic aids to help you be safe with the tracks that we created and again, you created issues without solving the problem because it wasn’t a problem in the first place and the end result is now their experience is now diminished yeah and and well first of all you’ve hit on so many things that hit home to me personally one my daughter has her driver’s permit right now um

Speaker 0 | 12:16.036

oh my goodness and her her like she’s going to this like the class like in massachusetts if you go to you know whatever it is like the driver’s ed class which is you like way over the top from what I remember it to be. It was, you know, seven or five, eight hour classes. Like she’s going for like the whole day, the whole day, like during, like I guess whenever it was spring break or something, you know, she’s going Monday through Friday for eight hours. You know, people, police officers are coming in and talking, drunk driving, people that killed their friend in an accident come in and talk. And then all the, you know, all those different things. And then she’s got to do however many hours with the, with the driver’s ed teacher and then however many hours observing. And then there’s a checklist with me and a spreadsheet to keep track of all the hours she drives with me. But her teacher is this kind of like edgy, a little bit kind, you know, like Massachusetts, Northeast Massachusetts attitude, was a bus driver, you know, not taking any crap from any of the kids. And there’s absolutely no way you’re like allowed to use the backup camera or any of that stuff. You know, it’s like, she’s kind of good.

Speaker 1 | 13:26.054

Those are big skills.

Speaker 0 | 13:27.515

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, because if it can handicap you, I mean, God forbid the lane assist stops working. How many times have people just swerve into a lane and because they trust their lane assist, you know, there’s, there’s just going to be, that’s going to be problematic at some point, but I’m sure there’s plenty.

Speaker 1 | 13:47.331

Here’s another example. Oh, there’s a ton, but here’s another example of inputting technology into a. space that it doesn’t need to exist and and this is something i say kind of in jest but you know really out of concern because i’m a technologist i have been forever and i probably will be until i you know not here anymore so you know there’s a there’s a there’s always a place for something that that actually is beneficial and then there’s times where it’s just unnecessary the cadillac has a rear view mirror that is a screen they have a camera that now uses your rear view mirror space as another screen. Why? What’s wrong with the mirror? The mirror will not just automatically stop working. It will not get dirty and have a blurry image. The mirror will work. Yet, we’re going to replace the mirror with a camera.

Speaker 0 | 14:36.472

I’m just waiting for him to replace the whole windshield. I’m just waiting for the whole windshield. Yeah. You know, someday.

Speaker 1 | 14:41.954

We’re just going to do VR goggles now. We’re just going to drive in VR now. That’s what we’re going to do.

Speaker 0 | 14:46.455

I watch this social media. I’ve been contemplating how to get out of social media entirely. I don’t think it’s going to work for me.

Speaker 1 | 14:53.026

Oh my God, we all are.

Speaker 0 | 14:54.647

I don’t think it’s going to work because the majority of my work is done on LinkedIn. But the thing is, we get lost sometimes in completely wasting time. We get lost and then we get lost sometimes in doing what is good but not great. We waste time doing what’s good, but we really could be super hyper-focused on doing something great. But I listened to the social media, I’ll have to find the link, about the psychological effects of social media and how it came about to begin with. And if you think about how they were saying how social media came about there, the theory is that social media came about from people that didn’t have social skills that needed to mathematically make a way to somehow socialize and the whole idea of like the likes and how it like. you know triggers norepinephrine in your brain when someone likes a post and all this goes on and on and on it was like i was it was like an hour and a half lecture that i was watching on this and and how the whole way that it was engineered to begin with is not really how human socialization should be taking place yet that’s it’s it’s been basically like eventually like 50 of society is going to be doing everything on social media and the other 50 is going to be not on social media at all and there’s going to be a complete psychological difference between the two the two types of people i need you to send me that i want to see that yeah so it’s quite mind-blowing because how it’s how like you know like facebook and these social media sites are engineered um it was engineered in in I mean, I guess the premise is that it was engineered, the premise from this psychologist standpoint is it was engineered from a very kind of almost evil standpoint of how it was using human psychology to leverage things. But, you know, I’ll send it to you. But eventually there’s going to be people that are on social media and people that are not. People are going to choose to not be on social media, and those people are going to have a completely different psychological makeup than the people.

Speaker 1 | 17:01.001

You’re starting to see some of that now. I mean, I can’t tell you how many people that I know personally that have, oh, yeah, I’m going to drop Facebook. And then they do. Sometimes they come back. But, you know, a lot of them do. Or I’ve got friends who just never did it in the first place. And so, you know, it’s kind of like the cord cutting movement. You know, it’s going to start small. It’s going to get big. And then there’s going to be some adjustment that kind of levels out, you know, becomes the level set. But even statistically,

Speaker 0 | 17:25.318

just before I forget this, statistically he was measuring. like, you know, sub 1985 or sub whatever before, prior to 1990. Right. He was measuring anxiety and stress and suicidal tendencies and depression in high school students. Right. From like 1994. And then, and then then from social media on and it has increased something like two thirds. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like a drastic, drastic increase.

Speaker 1 | 17:56.305

uh you know dude we can think of the age ranges is a good a good point to hit on because you know people like ourselves that grew up you know before the 90s or you know before the 2000s we have a different set of social skills and also uh ways of seeing ourselves and being validated with who we are whereas you know this younger generation who grew up with these social media platforms they don’t have those same mechanisms so if they don’t get the light it hurts If they get bullied or teased or re-scared in a negative fashion, it hurts. I mean, that is their hair pulling and being pushed down on the playground,

Speaker 0 | 18:35.469

right? Yeah. And the other thing, though, is the measurement of the likes. So let’s say you’re one of these kid YouTube guys. Let’s say you even have, I don’t know, 200 followers. Yeah. And you get 200 likes on one video. If you get only 100 likes on the next one, it’s not good enough. So there’s an anxiety that’s in. So you can never, it’s never good enough. So it’s this constant kind of like shallow buildup. I mean, from my standpoint, I mean, I think it’s ultimately like, I would definitely like to be the guy that’s not ever on social media. But, you know, I use LinkedIn because I like the fact that I can find, you know, people like yourself and I can search. There is a benefit to the tool of being able to find the right people that I want to talk with in technology. But if I sit there and I just watch the stream, right, and I just try to, like, get involved and, you know, like, it just becomes a real, real tiring waste of time. Like, I’ve got to use it for the database, not for the, you know, like, the social aspect.

Speaker 1 | 19:36.291

Right. And that’s a good point because, you know, each of the social platforms has a different set of tools or culture around it that makes it either, you know, a negative or a positive to you. So, you know. My space was a hodgepodge of things and it kind of got, you know, the whole ball rolling. Facebook comes along and becomes something that’s actually pretty cool. You know, I still use it for the purpose of keeping in touch with family and friends. And every time I want to pull out a Facebook, you know, it’s, well, I’m also using it for local community stuff. I’m also using it for my neighborhood. I’m also using it to, you know. Local classified because it’s a little more…

Speaker 0 | 20:10.531

Classified ads like Facebook Marketplace is great. I can put up… I sold a boat last week. I sold… I mean, I put it up there. I click like within one click, it’s already on Craigslist and listed on all the other little like, you know, things as well. So from that, yeah. There is definitely a lot of tools. I am not… I am in no way the guy that’s not on… Like that has completely left social media altogether. I guess I could just hire.

Speaker 1 | 20:38.814

And then you’ve got, yeah, you hire somebody else. And then you mentioned LinkedIn. LinkedIn is probably the best, you know, as far as a professional, if you’re not using LinkedIn, in my opinion, you’re doing it wrong. Understand it. You come to me and I’ve got my IT director hat back on and we’re going through the interview process. You don’t have a LinkedIn. It’s very hard for me to take you seriously. If you’re a technologist, why are you not using the tool provided to promote yourself and your network as a technology? So again, I’m kind of, you know, flip-flopping on where my mind is.

Speaker 0 | 21:10.131

I’m very judgmental. I am very judgmental.

Speaker 1 | 21:13.053

My professional world is a little different than my personal world. And then you’ve got, of course, you’ve got your really fast paces. You’ve got your Twitters and Instagrams and TikToks and Snapchats and all that, where I think it even gets worse because there aren’t really any rules. The social norm is get as much out there, get as many, you know, likes or follows as possible. And that is the goal. I think that’s far more toxic than some of the other more, you know, trying to be more of a community-driven social media platform. So, you know, you go back to your Facebook. And then we haven’t even touched on, you know, the way things are curated in, you know, we’ll just use Facebook again. You know, they’re targeting, you know, political ads or what, you know, things of that nature to you. Whatever your belief system is, it’s either, it’s kind of amplified. So if you’re super far right wing or super far left wing, you’re going to get that amplified. And that is now your norm. And that’s now how you see the world in a very myopic view. And that’s extremely dangerous.

Speaker 0 | 22:18.362

I think one of the most dangerous things is that you can continue to go through life without ever asking, why am I here? I think you can become, Oh,

Speaker 1 | 22:25.887

absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 22:27.147

I think you can be distracted so much. you know, technology even aside, I think it can be distracted so much even by the career growth path. And I only say this because I’m 43 and my dad’s 84 and, you know, my dad’s 84, my mom’s 79. And it’s just interesting because I’m 43 and if I think about it, you know, like even if I live another 20 years, okay, great. Why am I still so concerned with this kind of like facade of like, you know, retirement and everything. So. It’s a weird duality because we talk a lot on this show about working to live, not living to work. And I think it’s kind of split down the middle. I think a lot of people would say, no, I live to work. I really want my job to be that thing that I really love. And other people say, no, man, I don’t want to waste a lot of time at work. I don’t want to be that guy that I’m 43 and I’ve been at work the whole time.

Speaker 1 | 23:26.830

So, I mean, that’s an interesting point because now you’re touching on the difference in a major generational difference because the world in which we live is now different. It’s really difficult and it’s extremely rare to be at a company for 20 or 30 years and climb the ranks and then retire and have a nice retirement. The average job placement or the position for an IT person right now is two to three years. So we’re hopping every two to three years. And that’s not just because of various reasons, but usually it’s because of the way we live. you’re finding new opportunities, you’re finding new challenges, there’s a new technology you need to embrace, whatever it is, you’re hopping that market a lot. So you’re not going to be at that one company until you retire. Plus our retirement age now is some absurd number. We’re basically going to have to work until we can. And then you’ve got that, I’m going to use the air quote, millennial mentality of, well, if I don’t get enjoyment and enrichment from it, and I’m not living my best life, then it’s not worth doing. So You’ve got to find that job or something where at least it’s good enough to keep you fed, but also in game enough that you’re not going to burn out. Because if you do something for 30 years and you burn out and you’ve got another 30 years to go, that’s pretty painful. And so, I mean, there’s a little bit of, I think everything comes with a balance. You find that right balance of, I enjoy this enough. It pays the bills. I could see myself doing this until either something better comes along. or I just keep doing it because, you know, I need to. Retirement is something that we’re all going to strive to do, but do we ever attain it? We’ll wait and see.

Speaker 0 | 25:04.839

So… So let’s bring that back in then. So, because there is like the, we might actually get to some substance in this show. Not that this is not substantial at all. This is very substantial. But to talk specific about IT leadership, technology, engineering. Here we go. And the business and why someone would hop from company to company, maybe because things get stale. They become the… basically a cog in the bureaucratic machine. They’re keeping the systems up and running and thank you very much, here’s your paycheck and that’s it. Whereas I think there should be much more of a, and you see this a lot, MBOs, management by business objectives. You see a lot of IT directors or technology people that have MBOs. So we have our general salary. We have achievements that we need to hit. And then we have other… Business objectives and goals that if we overachieve on them, management by business objectives, sales increase or whatever it is, efficiencies increase, then you get a bonus or you get ownership in the company or you get moved up to more of a, I don’t know, there’s just more of a seat at the table philosophy, so to speak, that I think needs to change and it’s not changing fast enough. And where it doesn’t change fast enough, companies go out of business or become kind of stagnant or the Amazon effect. rolls in and then all of a sudden suddenly we have to, we really have to do something. So I don’t know if there’s, if there’s really a question there for me to ask you, but, you know, it’s that kind of that leadership, that leadership within the technical space. And, you know, you, you hint at it through the kind of visceral technology experience, but, you know, you’re, you’re, I mean, you’re an engineer. So how does an engineer, you know, How does an engineer do such a thing? Does that make sense? Are you looking at it from a how can I analyze these humans and insert myself into the machine and make it visceral?

Speaker 1 | 27:12.161

So, those are all really good points. So, my background was a little bit interesting because every job position I took from my engineering days even my help desk stage, every next step was quite a major leap from the last one. I didn’t like slowly climb the ladder and you know, I went from, you know, a junior to a senior to do that. I didn’t do that. I went from basically, uh, uh, I helped this guy to a consultant to a super farm guy to, you know, systems engineer, the network engineer is doing a little bit of both to a consultant at a firm here in MSP. And then I got, you know, my feet wet in management and, and that kind of just took off from there. So every job was kind of a week. And I think that gave me a pretty interesting perspective on different management styles because I work for different managers, different organizations and organization types, but also having that technical background. I’m not saying that every manager needs to be like super duper technical background, but it helps because to be able to liaise between the business and your technical staff can be difficult if you don’t know the lingo. And it’s not just I can learn some, you know, some terms. You’ve got to understand how engineers think, whether they’re software engineers, you know, server engineers, network engineers, all of the above. Because nowadays, you know, the lines blur. You know, we’re wearing multiple hats. Even at the management level, you’re wearing multiple hats. Are you the network manager, the CIO, or the, you know, CSO, or some other security role today? It depends on what day of the week it is. So being able to have that background and see everything from kind of a multi-faceted perspective will give you a pretty good idea of how to interact yourself. I think I get it.

Speaker 0 | 29:00.300

I get it. But I’m going to ask you a very, this is just going to be as straight to the point as possible. Are you happier? Are you happier being a sales engineer, being on the sales side? I always joke around about like. like the sales engineer. I used to, we used to have all kinds of like jokes about the sales engineer. Like the sales engineer exists to make sure that the sales person isn’t over-inflating and telling ridiculous like lies, you know, and over-promising ridiculous things to the client. That is why the sales engineer, it’s okay. But honestly,

Speaker 1 | 29:41.304

very stupid fear. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 29:45.167

But it is a, I mean, it is a sales job. It is a client-facing job. It’s a customer-facing job. And my assumption would be is that you’re happier as a sales engineer than you were as an IT manager.

Speaker 1 | 29:59.882

That is a very safe assumption. That’s very true. And this is, I can actually build on that a little bit or explain. So I’ve been doing management work for, let’s say 12-ish years or something, I lost track of time. And I learned a lot of lessons along the way. I saw a lot of technologies come in, come out, emerge. We started with virtualization, cloud became the next buzzword thing, hyper-convergence is a thing, various next-generation networking application level security platforms have come and gone. There’s a lot of things that have come into play. You’ve got to manage and learn what’s out there on the market and what’s real and what’s not. You’ve got to kind of see through the vaporware while maintaining high-level standards for support.

Speaker 0 | 30:43.572

That’s great.

Speaker 1 | 30:45.273

While speaking to the business and meeting business objectives. While making sure that everything is online and you’re meeting your change windows. While keeping security compliance in place. So what happens is, in a lot of these, especially these kind of mid-market companies, where you don’t have the large enterprise scale, You’re wearing multiple hats and those hats eventually wear you down. You get kind of exhausted because, you know, you’re even as a manager or director, I was always the next level of escalation for the business. So even when I’m not on call, I’m on call. We’re kind of always at this heightened state, right? After hours, weekends, knowing what’s coming up on a change window, you’re always in a heightened state. So you have that going on. You have anything that fails in the environment is now my fault. It’s not. fault but responsibility to resolve and no matter how well you build your organization your technology at one of my previous companies for example it kind of ran itself um but even though you’re still you’re still on the hook for that and then there’s the actual you know things that bring in you know the business like at one of the companies i worked at we built a gas plant up in idaho and i had to help with you know bring in ghost it because they started to do things on their own that were outside of standards correct that and then help them with all these other challenges around networking and that site, make sure the control network’s secured and things. So your head’s always in this space, and that’s not even thinking about all the administrative stuff. The infinite number of meetings that could have been done in an email. I mean, all the things that you would go, ha-ha, we joke about online. There’s our social media. Oh, this is the office experience. No, that stuff is very relevant. That’s true.

Speaker 0 | 32:23.474

It’s funny. I didn’t bring it up. I already had kind of… like comments a today, like, you know, I exist because the engineers like, so I can speak to the engineers. Uh, anyways,

Speaker 1 | 32:36.317

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy my management experience and just got to the point where I stopped and said, do I want to do this exact thing for another 30 years? Even if I moved to a different company and I started over and I met their challenges and then do it again and again, is this what I want to do? And so the answer is, I don’t know. I’m good at it. But do I enjoy it? Not like I used to, because I thought climbing the ladder was the important thing. And that’s kind of what drives a lot of people. If I want to get to this position up here, and I was working for that pretty hard. Now I’ve been on the other side of the fence on the sales engineer role. This is the most fun I’ve had in, I can’t tell you how long. And not just the sales cycle of interesting.

Speaker 0 | 33:18.471

Let me guess.

Speaker 1 | 33:19.291

I’m an engineer again.

Speaker 0 | 33:20.913

Can I guess? Can I take a guess? A few guesses? Yeah,

Speaker 1 | 33:23.335

yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 33:25.116

I think one, it’s more exciting. I think number two, you’re more free from that kind of hyper tense state of constant responsibility with like an alarm going off or I don’t know, some kind of security issue keeping you up at night, all of that. You have to somewhat confront your fears in your own kind of personality on a daily basis by talking with new people every single day. So you have to kind of, there’s a certain excitement factor to that. And I think most people, when they look at sales in general, they see, they just, they don’t see the picture of really working on your own personal development, your own internal personal development and how you talk with people and how you confront your own fears in general. And I think really, really, really good salespeople are obviously not salespeople. They’re really genuine. consultants that help people fill a need, solve a problem. So you’re doing that. You’re filling a need and solving a problem, but you’re doing what the dream IT director role does, right? So the dream IT director is someone that’s kind of given a budget and said, we need your help. Money’s really not an issue. You know, we’re not going to like, you know, you’re not, you’re not in a cost center here. We want you to help drive this company forward. We want you to make things more efficient. We want to connect you with, we want the end users to get the right tools in their hands to do their job right. We want, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, and we want a seat at the table and we want you to help us solve our problems. That’s the dream IT director role. But you get to do that every day with a different new person every single day. You get to see a different problem and solve a different problem every day. I’m assuming that’s what makes it.

Speaker 1 | 35:17.911

That is exactly, that is, that is, that is nail on the head. That’s probably like 80% of it because I was actually here in the Houston area. I was also leading the user group. I’ve done countless referrals for Nutanix. I’ve spoken at a couple of events. Like I was already pretty comfortable with the public aspect. And as you can see now, I’m pretty chatty dude. So that wasn’t really an issue. So I didn’t worry until you bring it up. I didn’t even think about that fact that, but that makes so much damn sense.

Speaker 0 | 35:48.102

It’s a new problem to solve. It’s like a, it’s like a new Lego set to put together every day. It’s not the same one.

Speaker 1 | 35:54.305

Right. I get to go in and help architect something and kind of pass it along. It’s fun. Now we have a great support at new standards. We have a great support org under us. If something happens, you know, they have that, but yeah, I’m not on the hook for the alarms. But the other, the other thing was, um, being able to be an engineer again because when you have a staff of people under you and you have a training budget guess where that money goes i don’t have the time nor the budget to spend on myself because i have people who need to do this type of work every day they need the skills not me and so you know i’m going to do my personal development on personal time which you know with that type of job and a family of five and all these wonderful things you know your time is not exactly a resource you have an abundance of

Speaker 0 | 36:38.594

And so it’s called audible and in your car. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 36:42.655

Oh God. I know. I try, I try to absorb whatever I can. Um, no, I hear you, but you know, coming back over here and building out my home lab and, and like brushing the dust off and the rust off and going, wow, I can still do this. I’m still actually really good at this. I can, I can dive into this switch config and figure out this, this weird thing that I would usually pass off to my network guys. Or I take it so far and go, okay, this is, I don’t have time for this. I can still do these things. And I think there’s a bit of an enrichment since that was my background to go back and say, I spent, you know, a decade plus being a manager director. Still fairly flexible, but, you know, more of that high level technical, you know, I’m not the guy turning every single switch.

Speaker 0 | 37:27.509

You’re a savior for so many people because there’s so many entry level, college level sales reps. And I, this is my, I’m kind of like the enemy to sales. I’m because I’m on indirect. the indirect side. So I basically come and say like, why would you talk to one company at a time and talk to a sales rep that just got hired out of college that does not have the knowledge, you know, whereas I actually have like an agnostic kind of look at all the vendors in the marketplace and I have access to over, you know, 70 plus sales engineers at any given time. Right. So, but every time that there’s a specific product or a specific need in place, you better believe I’m calling my insiders on the back end and saying, no, I need this guy. And it’s always one or two sales engineers. No, I refuse to bring in this person if you do not bring in this guy. So, I mean, you are like, I mean, honestly, it’s a fun role. And the only reason why I’m going so off topic on this is because I’ve probably got a ton of IT directors out there that are going to listen to this show. Hopefully they get this far in. We’ve been talking for about 40 minutes now. Hopefully they get this far in. where there are a ton of IT directors out there that are unhappy. They are unhappy. They are stuck in a cost center. They are stuck in this whatever it is. They’re unhappy. This is an opportunity to possibly maybe, thank you, might not have ever even thought of it, might have even crossed your mind, to become a sales engineer at a technology-driven company vendor, vendor, you know, provider. And I’m happy to make introductions for anybody because I know… tons of companies that need sales engineers roles to be filled and you may have never thought of it and it might be scary to you to think wait a second sales engineer talk to people every day but it’s not it’s it’s actually that exciting role where you get to um you know use your knowledge to solve problems every day and besides you’re going to be given a product anyways um you’re going to be given something and you just need to learn that very very well exactly

Speaker 1 | 39:27.109

so i’ll give you my options of that is but before we go you can take that same mentality Oh, real quick. If you take that same mentality, let’s say you can’t leave the company you work at, you can still take the same principles and just try to change your role. Flip it over a little bit. You know, use these same things and try to present as if you’re that internal sales engineer to your company instead of going through the typical, you know, we’ll say industrial traditional type of process to get up through the ranks in our sales process.

Speaker 0 | 39:58.898

Yes.

Speaker 1 | 39:59.458

In the same way internally. Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 40:02.399

And we’ve been talking about that for a long time. Like how do we go from, you know, butt in the seat, slipping pizzas underneath the server room door, don’t talk to IT, you know, to a seat at the table. And it starts with getting out, talking to people, asking what their problems are, translating, asking people, you know, of all of the IT department, you know, what’s the single biggest frustration problem that you’re having with technology in the workplace right now here at this company? and how can I help you? And, you know, sitting down with the CFO and understanding their job and how their numbers work, sitting down with the CEO and what his vision is, and then helping take technology and drive that vision forward. That’s, I mean, that’s the goal of kind of what this podcast is at the same time. But the other secondary piece is to not have technology leaders be stuck in a cost center and be absolutely miserable either. So this is like a nice little sidebar. You know, you know, you can always go into sales. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 | 40:55.861

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 0 | 40:57.494

But with that being said, I want to give you a few minutes just to talk about Nutanix. And this is not me plugging you guys at all. I don’t even have any way of selling you guys. There’s no bias here, although we may talk about that after this call. But I do want to give you a chance to just talk about what you guys do well. And is there any, you know, like, what’s the number one problem you guys fix? If someone has a certain problem, they’re looking to do something, what do you do? How do you help?

Speaker 1 | 41:26.346

Thank you. Yeah, so I love the Nutanix Kool-Aid, so here we go. The biggest problem that we solve is really management specifications. A lot of our clients have a small staff pulled in a lot of directions, or they’re using 20 different management interfaces to manage their environment, and it causes a very slow update cycle through the month. It’s just the way we had to do things before. And now we want to take that time and put it back into your team’s hands so they can really keep up with the business needs. Because most of the time, what are you doing? You’re keeping the lights on. You’re keeping those update cycles just to keep the lights off. You’re doing your three to five year upgrade cycle of your infrastructure gear to keep the lights on. So the amount of time you have to put toward real business problems. is much less. And so you’ve always got to backlog a project. Nutanix takes all of those management layers and flags it down into one because we own, again, we own the data plane. We own the hypervisor. We have our own. You can also roll ESX or Hyper-V. We’re agnostic. And kind of simplify everything you’re doing and consume it like a cloud. So Nutanix is a private cloud. So if you take the same ideals that you have in… an AWS or a GCP or an Azure. I’m going to log into a web-based UI. I’m going to go click a couple buttons, and there’s my VM. I’m going to go click a couple more buttons. There’s a Kubernetes container. I’m going to start to scale that out and run containerization. I’m going to go create an object store and put my backups to it. You’re going to consume these resources on a tablet, on your phone, on a laptop, at the airport, at Starbucks. We give you the same capabilities in Nutanix. So we have our core HDI. which is our hyper-converged platform that everything’s built off of. And then we put different layers on it that you can get into to solve those same problems. So we have a thing called Prism, which is our management UI. It’s the same across the board, management UI. We have Calm, our cloud application lifecycle manager. Basically, it’s your marketplace. Build your own app, bring in best in the marketplace, deploy them, role-based access. Very similar to what you would do with your role-based access, but for into your cloud vendors. deploy VMs on our hypervisor. We’re going to give you a tool called Aira, which is our database as a service. We have Crane desktop as a service. So we have all these these things that kind of make, you know, go to the top of the pyramid where you’ve got HCI at the bottom and the management UI at the top. They give you that same experience. But now it’s in your if you’re in your walls, you have it in whatever colo you are, you know, colos you’re in probably or remote sites, you know, because we do robo as well or. you know, your own data centers. So take those same principles and distill it down. That’s what HCI or new chances can give you inside your own data center. And a lot of people like that because it’s more of a predictable spend. You know, we’re seeing, um,

Speaker 0 | 44:31.556

what’s your ideal customer size of the company? What’s your ideal customer size of company and, and, uh, kind of like a solution, like just a, like a real, uh, you know, a real briefcase study and what’s your ideal. So as far as, as,

Speaker 1 | 44:46.466

as Rob Wilcox or Nutanix, because Nutanix is anything.

Speaker 0 | 44:53.151

Let’s say you, fine. Let’s say, let’s use you. Is it, is it a, is it a, maybe like a, I don’t know, manufacturing company with, you know, locations all over the world. I mean, what is it?

Speaker 1 | 45:05.644

um ideal customer view is whatever your business is doing we can handle it um you know we look at our customer base we we have we have labels in basically every vertical click the vertical we’ve got people we’ve got companies um

Speaker 0 | 45:20.870

you know we were very well let me ask you this way on a daily basis you’re on a daily basis when you walk into clients how big are the companies usually you know how many users 500 a couple thousand i mean what are we talking enterprise here in the commercial

Speaker 1 | 45:35.697

space. Yeah. Here in the commercial space, this is the way that we have our, our, our, uh, account split up. Um, since I’m on the commercial team, it’s about 502,000. You start to go beyond that. That’s usually going to be a larger enterprise, not always, but mid market. Yeah,

Speaker 0 | 45:49.548

exactly. Perfect. And you’re going to take a lot off their plate and help them stop drinking from the fire hose, uh, uh, purposely.

Speaker 1 | 45:58.435

All right,

Speaker 0 | 46:00.577

man. Um, I mean, it’s been a pleasure. This has been a very, very fun show for me. And I feel like we’ve possibly changed something. And I have this idea now of, you know, well, if you really hate life, become a sales engineer. If you really hate life, go into sales and completely flip your entire world around of everything that you thought and every person that you might have. hated or looked down upon. You know, I used to always say, I’m never going to be in sales. I’ll never be in sales. I’ll never this. I’ll never marry a cheerleader. I’ll never have kids. You know, now I’ve got, I’ve got eight kids. I married the captain of the cheerleading team and I’m in sales. So, you know, go figure. I mean, I believe that.

Speaker 1 | 46:44.097

Never say never. Yeah. I had a similar thing. I’ve had experiences where you let the sales team come in and the sales rep does their thing. And it might be the same thing, you know, two or three meetings in a row. Okay, dude, I need to talk to the engineer now. You’ve done your role. Thank you. I need to talk to the engineer. No, I got one more slide. No, no, no. I really need to talk to the engineer.

Speaker 0 | 47:02.993

I’ve heard enough about the Gartner Magic Quadrant, and I’ve seen enough death by PowerPoint. You know, I mean, come on.

Speaker 1 | 47:13.101

Yes, you’re good. Cool. I need to talk to this guy about the thing that, you know, you’re going to solve. He knows what an IP address is,

Speaker 0 | 47:20.147

please.

Speaker 1 | 47:22.541

Uh,

Speaker 0 | 47:23.261

right. Uh, it’s been a pleasure, man. Uh, thank you so much.