Why a mindset change is needed to deal with the IT rebellion

Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey said velocity and agility requirements are causing agencies to change their technology delivery models through cloud and hyper-convergence.

Disruption is a word that is used commonly when it comes to technology, especially over the last decade.

The ever-growing challenge around cybersecurity has been and continues to be a disruptor.

The cloud, many said, was the ultimate disruptor. Until it wasn’t.

In the federal market, there are companies who are supposed to be disruptors, changing how agencies buy and use technology.

For Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey, disruption isn’t a technology or a company, rather it’s a mindset.

“At the core of this is the velocity and agility requirements of our customers. People want to move fast because everything around them, their customers, their consumers and even their adversaries, like the hackers around the world, are moving very fast,” Pandey said on the IT Innovation Insider. “And then you have such high velocity environment, people want to look for ways to consume technology and infrastructure as fast as they can. That also means they don’t have time for specialists. They cannot go to too many teams of people, one doing storage, one doing networking, one doing compute, one doing virtualization and yet another one doing servers and applications.”

Instead, the need for velocity and agility is forcing agencies to move from what Pandey called a “highly fragmented infrastructure” to one that is hyper converged, where services and people are centered around a multi-cloud environment.

“I think there is this rebellion happening right now in the IT industry about where we have too many people doing too many specialists niche things. We need to step back and understand do we simplify technology and have more people use technology to meet their needs,” he said. “What’s happening to personal computing is the same thing that happened to enterprise computing. If you go back in time 10 years ago before the introduction with smartphones, we used to have 50 devices that we’d interact with, not the least of which were music players, cameras, video cameras, GPS devices, flashlights and I can go on and on talking about devices. Then they all converged as pure applications running on a common operating system, whether Android or IOS, and that’s exactly what is happening in enterprise computing as well.”

The combination of velocity and agility as disruptors, the convergence of services, usually in the cloud, and the growing use of artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation is forcing agencies and industry alike to shift their thinking about how they serve customers or meet their mission.

Pandey said hyper-convergence around a multi-cloud approach helps push data and compute power to the edge, whether it’s through mobile devices or how services are consumed by an organization’s customers.

“At the end of the day, the network is the enemy because of the amount of data we are producing is just enormous. Data has immense gravity,” he said. “You really want the applications to move to the data rather than the data to move to a large cloud data center itself. That is what is causing this demand for dispersing computing to where people are, to where machines are and to where the operations are.”

The end goal, in many ways, is to make infrastructure invisible to the user and consumer in such a way it doesn’t matter if the agency owns or rents the servers and cloud instance. Pandey said hyper-convergence makes that happen.

“Many organizations like the Navy, for example, have this view that they need to have a cloud at the edge in these battleships. They need to have extremely space efficient, power efficient and skillset efficient infrastructure that can be used by application folks,” he said. “Then they have remove offices, branch offices and then they have core large data centers. And finally, they also are now scratching the surface of renting it from a secure public cloud service looks like.”

Pandey said hyper-convergence and cloud give the users more power, and the thus the agility and velocity to meet customer needs.

“At the core of all of this is how do you democratize technology and democratize computing and bring it to anyone at a click of a button,” he said. “That is what hyper-convergence aims to do. Bring all this computing power at the click of a button to folks who really run applications because that’s where the business logic runs. These are the people who have deadlines, budgets and heads roll if applications are not available, not reliable or not fast enough.”

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