Nutanix Weekly: Talking Healthcare with Nutanix Field CTO Kurt Telep

In this episode, we talk with Healthcare Field CTO for Nutanix, Kurt Telep.  The conversation talks about trends in healthcare, challenges that healthcare customers are seeing and the ways that Nutanix can help customers facing thin margins, compliance and business pressure to operate IT efficiently.

Host: Phil Sellers
Co-Host: Kurt Telep

Transcript

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Philip Sellers: Hey? And welcome again to another episode of Nutanix Weekly. I'm your host, Phil Sellers. I'm the practice director for Modern Data Center at Zintegra

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Philip Sellers: This is one of our many podcasts. And I lose count how many we actually have and produce on a regular basis anymore.

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Philip Sellers: But we like to call this along with our blog posts and other things, content with context, because

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Philip Sellers: we like to take and review things that have been posted online, and then bring the real world to them. Our real world experiences those of my co-hosts. And speaking of co-hosts today, I've got a little different treat. We've got Kurt Telep.

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Philip Sellers: Kurt is the field CTO for healthcare at Nutanix and Kurt and I go a long way back. We we share a bond over something called Nutanix Community edition.

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Philip Sellers: Kurt. Somewhat the head tinkerer for community edition. A huge champion for that special release of Nutanix. But Kurt, it's great to have you on the podcast.

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Kurt Telep: It's awesome to be here, Phil, and it's it's funny. I was just at a an event in Maryland yesterday, and I I prided myself on not mentioning community edition at every single speaking event that I do. But yes, thank you, I do. I do appreciate the shout out for community edition. It is a big passion of mine.

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Kurt Telep: besides community edition. Right? So at Nutanix, I kind of have a really cool role. So I'm the field CTO for healthcare. I'm a member of the Cta team.

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Kurt Telep: What I love is that I kind of span the range from

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Kurt Telep: the field engineers marketing engineering on the back end alliances I really get to be your one stop shop of where does healthcare fit? What do we do with healthcare? Whether it's a technical conversation, whether it's a strategic conversation. I basically get as far into it as the the customer or the rep, or the engineer needs me to be right.

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Kurt Telep: And it's great because I do have a technical background, right? I've been in it for over 25 years. 15 of that has been specifically working in healthcare and with healthcare accounts. I've

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Kurt Telep: been yelled at by charge nurses in ers when wristband printers weren't working. You know, I've been director of storage engineering, for you know, large data center firms. So I've kind of got this really wide range of experience that you know, I kind of bring to our everyday conversations around healthcare. Here at Nutanix.

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Philip Sellers: Well, we were talking a little bit about this before we kicked off today, but

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Philip Sellers: Listeners can't see the background that I see as we're on zoom together. I I was sharing with Kurt. There's a legitimacy to when Kurt's on a call with you because he has a full electronics workbench behind him. And

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Philip Sellers: we're talking about some of his passions outside of work. And you know that it gets used. It's a real thing. It's not just a background. So he's the real deal when we're talking about technology. And and I agree, you've got a a huge, wide, varied background that you bring to the table. And that's a huge benefit for our customers, your customers that you're working with. Because you're seeing things from a more global perspective.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah, thanks. It's

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Kurt Telep: and I think that's 1 of the key things that makes me effective within my particular role. But I think that's something that you know, as engineers. Many of us bring to the table, and I think some of us forget to bring it to the table when we talk to customers. Right?

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Kurt Telep: There's something to be said for being there at 2 o'clock in the morning, when you know you were in a really bad situation as a systems administrator, and knowing and empathizing with the pain your customers been through, and then saying, Hey, here's a way I can help. Right, you know I joke. I really have been yelled at by a charge nurse at a hospital because I couldn't get her wristband printer working

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Kurt Telep: but that's an experience, though, that taught me how important it is for those end clinical users. Right? And it's not just in healthcare. It's really the end user working in a factory. You know the fact that if barcode scanners are unavailable in a distribution center that may mean that somebody doesn't get to go to their daughter's play right? It's bringing the human side of what we do in it. And then being able to tie that back to

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Kurt Telep: business, challenges business objectives. How am I more efficient? How do I get my time back?

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Kurt Telep: Right?

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Kurt Telep: A. And I think that's really one of the crux of everybody that works in. It's goal here, especially lately, is

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Kurt Telep: we want to be more efficient in the things that we do, not because we all want to really do more work. It's because we want to be able to to not have to be working. 24, 7, 3, 65, irregardless, of which vertical we're in.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah 100%. And and you know, it's interesting. You talk about other verticals, but

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Philip Sellers: in healthcare it is a little different. You are literally, sometimes dealing with life and death. And so that's a completely different context. It's also one of the most challenging compliance environments in all of business. So.

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Kurt Telep: Correct.

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Philip Sellers: The the challenges there are exponential compared to other places.

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Philip Sellers: And oh, yeah, let's let's add some razor, thin margins. And then you've got just an amazing mix. Right? It's.

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Kurt Telep: I. I have the the CTO share with me recently of a a health system out West, he said. I can't raise prices

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Kurt Telep: like it's it's you know, with with everything that's going on today in the world of virtualization and hypervisors and stacks right like

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Kurt Telep: you can't get more money out of healthcare. How do healthcare organizations actually make a profit is with elective procedures? Right? You're not going to get more money from people coming into the er you're not going to make more money. You're not gonna be able to change that bottom line, and you can't raise your prices right. In many cases the health system is not even setting its own pricing right.

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Philip Sellers: That's up to the insurance partners, or the government, or again, other agencies outside of themselves.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah. So a lot of times, it's, you know, we always used to talk about. You know, the the value of any anything that you're working with a customer on is, how does it reduce risk? How does it reduce cost, or how does it increase their profitability? Right? Well, in healthcare? It's really the the 1st 2 are the most important right like, how do I reduce risk? Right? Because and and just to make sure that we clear the air. And don't be like, you know.

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Kurt Telep: fearmongers. Listen.

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Kurt Telep: If the it system in a healthcare environment goes offline.

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Kurt Telep: People don't just start

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Kurt Telep: fallen dead right. Everybody is a flat line because their geiot heart monitor doesn't report back right. Every single health system has paper processes in order, you know, to handle those situations. They're not going to get the same quality of care right? There's definitely going to be challenges. Everything's going to slow down right? Which is going to directly impact patients. But people aren't just going to be keeling over.

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Kurt Telep: But we don't ever want them to be in that situation, and sometimes, especially in healthcare.

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Kurt Telep: You know, we, we always talk in healthcare about the electronic medical record systems. Or we talk about the Pacs environment for imaging. Or we talk about end user compute right the way that everybody comes in.

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Kurt Telep: People forget the

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Kurt Telep: hundreds of other tiny little applications that glue all of that together, right? Whether it's like Hl. 7 routers. If it's just even things as simple as file shares that are used for dropping data and then being picked up by another application Edi tools, there's a lot of things that make up healthcare that that keep it running. And in many cases it's those those environments have grown over time.

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Kurt Telep: and they become the spider web of applications that nobody really knows who owns and runs everything. Nobody knows what's connected or why it's connected.

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Kurt Telep: And that's where things start to become even more critical from things like a simplification and a high availability and an efficiency perspective. Right? How can I keep all those other bits and pieces that we haven't focused on

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Kurt Telep: safely running.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and and call back to your charge, nurse, right? The friction of a printer not working. How does that affect patient care? How does it back up the er or triage and intake and things like that? Because that's a compensating control that wristband identifies the person. It makes sure that the correct things are going to the correct people.

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Philip Sellers: It is a part of that overall process.

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Philip Sellers: and I know with our experience being an Euc centric partner. We see all those peripherals and stuff that are at that endpoint. You know. It may be cameras now to capture a photo of the person during intake. It may be electronic signatures on their topaz. It may be a credit card reader, and a scanner for the insurance card.

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Philip Sellers: You know those those clinical stations at the intake desk are probably the most complicated thing that we deal with. Sometimes the

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Philip Sellers: the clinical environment, once you're, you know, actually checked in is probably easier than that front desk or the billing clerk, or cause they've got so many things hanging off a machine.

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Kurt Telep: You're a hundred percent correct, right? And you know, a lot of those tools were not originally built to increase efficiency, but more to increase data accuracy, right? Like, when you've got somebody hand keying in personal information versus just scanning an Id card. Right? Yeah, we've added this technology peripheral. But we've also gained a whole lot of accuracy. There.

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Kurt Telep: One of the challenges in healthcare also ties to data, gravity and latency and applications. Right? I've worked with really one of the great things about the healthcare vertical at Nutanix is we just cover all healthcare right? If you see patients right. That's under Nutanix healthcare, whether you're Springford family Dental in Royersford, Pennsylvania, right? Who's got 2 doctors and 6 hygienists and a 3 node cluster in the basement

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Kurt Telep: all the way up to, you know some of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States that run Nutanix as their platform. Right? We cover it all right. So when I start to look at what are organizations, healthcare organizations doing when they're talking about? Where am I going next with it? How do I make things more efficient? Do I go into the cloud. Don't I go into the cloud? What goes to the cloud?

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Kurt Telep: The 1st thing we always want to talk about is healthcare application, rationalization, right? Because

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Kurt Telep: something like a Nicu monitoring tool

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Kurt Telep: is super latency sensitive right? That still needs to live on. Prem, right? I just can't, or or in many cases, you know, packs environments where I need to keep my short term storage that still needs to live on Prem, because I got to be able to get access to those images instantaneously or as quickly as possible. Right?

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Kurt Telep: Maybe archive workloads, though, like I've got an old emr that's still hanging around because we got acquired, or I acquire another health system. But I still got to keep that Emr around for archival use case. Well, maybe that's something that we want to talk about pushing up into the cloud or pushing off into another platform versus keeping that in my most high performance on Prem environment.

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Kurt Telep: And as healthcare systems have been admittedly being

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Kurt Telep: purchased. There's been acquisitions. There's been mergers. There's been investment. There's been divesting of health systems, right? It's I feel like every couple of years. A lot of health systems. Just throw everything in a box, shake it up and decide which ones they want to roll out to use. And all the C-level execs all get shuffled around

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Kurt Telep: It's it's always interesting to see. Well, how do I rationalize the application? They run? What stays where it needs to be.

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Kurt Telep: And what can I move to make it more efficient, irregardless of what size that healthcare organization is.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and it's interesting that you talk about. You know, legacy applications, things that have been inherited and are still required in that archive state. It's also really hard to rationalize refactoring something like that to move it to cloud.

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Philip Sellers: And so

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Philip Sellers: you you really want to maintain status quo with a lot of those older applications. Which means, Where do I host that in a place that's gonna have the same uptime and availability? And all the same characteristics is on Prem, but giving me the flexibility of of cost or locality, or consolidation, and things like that.

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Kurt Telep: And that's where you. You have to look at some of those older applications. And yes, there are. There are tools that healthcare application

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Kurt Telep: consumers can use to pull data out, create an archive of it. But

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Kurt Telep: a lot of times it is. There's that old Cerner oracle database that's running in the quarter or an old meditech environment that they need to keep around

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Kurt Telep: and the challenges start to be not just

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Kurt Telep: that application, but the infrastructure, all the infrastructure components supporting it right like, Hey, I need to keep this around, but it's still running windows. 2,008

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Kurt Telep: right? And I can't upgrade if if I upgrade windows. I got to upgrade the application. But I don't really have a contract to support that application anymore. So now I've got this windows 2,008 vm. Well.

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Kurt Telep: how do I also maintain my hipaa compliance and my compliance? Right? And and that's 1 of those things, whereas nutanix we come in and have a conversation about using micro segmentation as a tool

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Kurt Telep: wrap that old virtual machine. Hey?

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Kurt Telep: We put a flow policy on that virtual machine when somebody needs to use it, you simply update the policy or change the category user hops and uses it. And then when they're done, you flip the category back, and that Vm is completely locked down again. Right? And we can work with you in order to identifying the risk and the documentation of that. So that becomes hipaa compliant, right? But then

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Kurt Telep: I can take something like that, which is, you know, server, 2,008, even older. Right?

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Kurt Telep: Those aren't really easy to move into the cloud. Right? You're not going to find a server 2,008 ami. And aws right. But we that's where we can bring in things like Nc 2, right? Because with Nutanix cloud clusters well, shoot if it runs on Nutanix and Ahv on prem. It's gonna run on Nc. 2, up in the cloud. Right? So we can then give that availability to that virtual machine. We can replicate that virtual machine, and you can stick it up in the cloud in a corner.

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Kurt Telep: and maybe you hibernate that entire cluster off, and then you only bring it up when somebody has an actual request, you know. Maybe it's for legal purposes. Whatever reason. There's a reason to bring that and rehydrate that back up right? There's lots of technology within the Nutanix stack that we bring into healthcare

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Kurt Telep: that simplifies those processes

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Kurt Telep: and makes it so that data becomes much more on demand versus saying, Oh, I gotta go back to tape and restore this.

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Kurt Telep: build this entire environment from scratch. And yes, there are still health organizations that are going to tape

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Kurt Telep: much to my chagrin. They are still out there. Right? Healthcare is one of the slowest to adopt new technologies, because in general healthcare is really risk averse right? So the ways that we can use things like Nc. 2. To enable those risk averse organizations to leverage new technologies that are in the cloud that become available. Has really been valuable really been valuable, especially on some of those archive use cases.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and what I love about this conversation is we're talking in a healthcare context. But I come from, you know, a customer background coming into integra. 2 years ago I worked for a large insurance company and we weren't necessarily healthcare focused. We did some group benefits, but we were a broker. We did mostly property and casualty.

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Philip Sellers: but we were merger and acquisition heavy. These are the same things I was talking about with my leadership with my business partners as well?

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Philip Sellers: Do we keep this historical system around? How do we mitigate the risk of, you know, vulnerabilities and things on an older operating system that's out of support today.

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Philip Sellers: We chose micro segmentation to be able to solve some of those challenges. We we reduced the risk profile.

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Philip Sellers: By using the technology as an enabler. And again to your point, you know, sometimes you can relocate these things, not refactor anything, and then just shut it down until it's actually needed.

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Philip Sellers: For cost savings and things. So burstability in the cloud becomes a huge

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Philip Sellers: asset to you. Burstability is is a great concept. But it's really hard to implement in reality for most applications. They're just not built in a way that you can burst.

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Philip Sellers: So again you you get some of the goodness by abstracting and and adding Nutanix as a layer. There, between the bare metal and the cloud.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah, and especially when you're and and again, I can. I'll talk in the healthcare context. But we see this in multiple industries when you've got mergers and acquisitions going on right? One of the key things that you need to handle when you've acquired another organization as much due diligence as an organization does right.

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Kurt Telep: especially when you're acquiring a much smaller organization. Not everybody is as forward thinking as Springford family dental is right. You may run into, you know, hey? The the owner's nephew, son was the guy who happened to do something with it right? And you need to really stabilize that environment. You don't really know what it what's in there. You really just want to get the day and the applications out of whatever they have and into something, you know, that's going to be a stable platform.

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Kurt Telep: That's where things like Nc. 2. That's where things like having that burst ability, the ability to very quickly get that infrastructure up and running, and just lift and shift

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Kurt Telep: and then figure it out. Now that you're at least in a known safe place, right.

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Philip Sellers: Well, and you hit a huge one for us. You know, over the acquisitions that I helped digest.

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Philip Sellers: For my organization, you know, we acquired a few firms that had a a past issue in their environment, you know. Maybe some sort of a cyber type issue in their past. And so

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Philip Sellers: in those situations you may want to be more prescribed. You may not necessarily just want to lift and shift. You may want to do a rebuild in place. And then how do you do that without additional hardware? And how do you do that? And so this flexibility, this agility, really becomes a huge advantage to you as an organization.

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Philip Sellers: You also touched on something that I really want to talk about. And that's data gravity, because this is huge in multiple industries, but especially in healthcare, because it's so compliance. Driven data. Gravity also dictates what we're able to do with that data because of where it lives. What are the implications there, as you think about that in your healthcare customers? And

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Philip Sellers: new technology coming out like AI, and how it affects this data set.

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Kurt Telep: So you know, data gravity for those that kind of don't know the term right data. Gravity is the idea that I have. I have a piece of data. And maybe this data is latency driven. I need to keep it close to where I'm going to process and manage the data.

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Kurt Telep: Or it's just so large that I can't move it around. It's truly like a weighty. It has mass right? And in healthcare. Usually we're talking about things like Pax data, right? Super large detailed images. Hospital goes by, goes and buys a brand new modality. I will tell you. Back in the days when I sold storage

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Kurt Telep: right? I'd be super excited when one of my customers would buy a new. You know mammogram modality because I knew the new ones. It was going to go 10 x and how much storage that they were going to need, and that was definitely going to drive up things like the size of arrays.

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Kurt Telep: But that's a lot of data that all lives in one place. Now, when we start looking at other uses for that data, if we roll back 10 years ago Pax was really just about storing images and having them available for when somebody called for them.

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Kurt Telep: Nowadays every single piece of data that we have within the health system has potential to be used in order to provide better care for future patients or you yourself as a patient.

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Kurt Telep: So all of a sudden, I I'm doing more than just putting this data on slow and cheap archive drives. Right? Like, I want to process this data. I want to start to turn on this data. I want to start using things like AI and building models that leverage this data for training purposes. Well.

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Kurt Telep: when I need this massive quote, massive AI infrastructure in order to do that, what am I going to do? Take that to every single one of my facilities? No right.

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Kurt Telep: What we're starting to look at is the opportunities to do

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Kurt Telep: high performance, compute processing in a much smaller footprint and bring it directly to the data.

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Kurt Telep: Right? I can do things like deploy a gpt in a box.

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Kurt Telep: or you know, Nutanix enterprise. AI, and put it, you know, in

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Kurt Telep: for you in a rack right next to where my Pax environment is right. Next to where my data lives, I don't have to build racks and racks and racks of hardware anymore in order to get the value out of that data that I did before.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And and again, you know, you say

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Philip Sellers: the the weightiness of it, or the latency sensitivity. I also bring compliance. You know some people are just not comfortable with their data, living outside of

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Philip Sellers: the 4 walls of their facility. You know, this being their crown jewels.

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Philip Sellers: It's another use case, for you know the on Prem. Gpt in the box and learning from that data. But

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Philip Sellers: I think healthcare is unique in the fact that

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Philip Sellers: we do maintain so much of this data. And Pax is a great

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Philip Sellers: example of that. These diagnostic images across all sorts of different conditions is a training set is is and potential

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Philip Sellers: increase in the

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Philip Sellers: ability to help.

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Philip Sellers: not necessarily diagnose, but maybe raise potential issues for the trained eye to investigate.

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Kurt Telep: Well, listen! There's there's the sexy side of AI within healthcare, and that's what people want to hear and talk about. Right? It's the hey? The AI reviews the chest X-ray that was taken for somebody who had a pneumonia diagnosis to validate the diagnosis, and maybe the radiologist doesn't see the shadow that's higher up. That may be indicating of early onset lung cancer, or something like that, right like that's those are the big wins that we see

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Kurt Telep: but the ones that we don't always talk about are some of those real back office use cases in health right? Where healthcare organizations can

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Kurt Telep: take the same types, same types of data, right? And maybe it's analyzing diagnosis diagnosis codes. Are they actually properly billing and coding for what the work that they've done, or for the imaging, or for what's being seen in the images, right? And a lot of that is even pulling out of Emr data right?

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Kurt Telep: Like, it's really easy. I don't want to say it's easy, but it's less of a challenge to do things like anonymize Pax data. Right, you're updating the dicom metadata. Maybe it's a, you know, a redaction within the image. It's very automatable to then make that data set available for AI training generically.

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Kurt Telep: but actual Emr. Patient data is much more difficult to do that with right, because every single part of your healthcare record

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Kurt Telep: typically can be tied back to you, no matter how big or small, that healthcare facility is right. A healthcare record from a dental office carries just as much pii

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Kurt Telep: as a healthcare record from a major hospital. Right? So

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Kurt Telep: when you're looking at different use cases for things like AI or machine learning processing, you want to try to keep those closer to your data which you're keeping as secure as you can in many cases that means on prem in your own core data center and not extracting that data and then trying to get it up into some other location where that data is going to get processed right.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And it strikes me healthcare is an interesting place when we talk about edge, too. Right? Because you mentioned neonatal sensors. But e even other general diagnostic things like maybe blood pressure or heart rate monitoring and things like that.

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Philip Sellers: There's telemetry

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Philip Sellers: everywhere in this environment. And so

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Philip Sellers: I think about all the data created in a smart car.

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Philip Sellers: Connected cities and videos. Healthcare is a microcosm of all of this telemetry, too. And yeah, I'm curious to see. Where is that going.

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Kurt Telep: I IoT and healthcare has been exploding over the past few years. Right? So at 1st it was connected tools and connected monitoring, so that instead of just having it make a really loud beep in the room right? It was showing up on a terminal at the nurses station. Right?

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Kurt Telep: Now we're getting to the point where we we've been talking about

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Kurt Telep: using things like AI at the edge to be able to identify early signs based on monitor output right?

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Kurt Telep: Almost every single.

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Kurt Telep: you know, monitor patch wire that's hooked up to a patient typically today is going to be connected to some type of connected device which we now have a stream of data that's feeding into your Emr or feeding into a system that's physically local to where that device is.

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Kurt Telep: Now, if we can start to build models that have predictive

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Kurt Telep: analytics that tie to when emergencies may occur for a patient, right?

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Kurt Telep: Well, now, if we can layer that right next to where that data is coming in, we can start using the AI to monitor it and provide more backup for that nurse or that collection of nurses that are working in those stations, in those facilities, right, which is going to lead to better patient outcomes, and being able to do that on the edge is really important, right? Because a lot of times that individual hospital or that individual, you know, floor location data closet might not have a full air conditioned data center.

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Philip Sellers: Right.

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Kurt Telep: We're really about talking about deploying, you know, today, some of the you know, some of those healthcare Isvs are deploying just a single Node Esx

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Kurt Telep: server, and they're running a bunch of vms on

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Kurt Telep: right? You know, tomorrow we hope that to be a Hv. Node in there that's running all of those virtual machines on it, or even better, a small. You know, Kubernetes cluster that's actually running those applications at the edge, right? But we want to make sure that the edge is easy. And when you look at health systems that have

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Kurt Telep: in some cases hundreds of very small facilities that have those capabilities.

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Kurt Telep: Centralized management management is one consistency of management. Automation of management starts to become extremely important. Right? It's not just. We don't want to have people have to go out and individual touch every single one of these, at every single facility, we should be able to do it all from one place.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, you know, this is another example, or strikes me as an example of the tides of it. Right? We were heavily consolidated with mainframes and things like that. Then we went to client server, and things were distributed again, and then

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Philip Sellers: things have consolidated again and then distributed again. And this is that redistribution out again? Cause, you know, the trend had been consolidation of data centers and and, like you said, larger and larger healthcare entities.

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Philip Sellers: My wife works for one that happens to have 40 plus different hospitals. They don't have a data center at every one of those. There's been consolidation. It doesn't make financial sense. But to your point it may make a lot more sense for each floor in that hospital or each hospital to have a small cluster running. Some of these new services, as

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Philip Sellers: the need to get closer to that data exists.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah. And in in 10 to 15 years, right? We may. We may pull it all back again. Right? I think most of being somebody who cut his teeth on Mainframe, and as 400, which is why, you know. And we talked earlier about my love for

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Kurt Telep: 8 bit computers from the eighties. You know, typically, what's driven a lot of those trends out and in has been network connectivity and the availability of high performance network connectivity right. When we didn't have great network connectivity, we push things out into the edge, right? Because the data had gravity because the user needed access that data very quickly, but we couldn't pull it from that central location fast enough.

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Kurt Telep: and then we got better connectivity, which said, Well, wait a minute. Now. I can wrap my arms around this, bring this local, and I can either process it all local, or I can do work with it local. But I have enough bandwidth to get out to everybody what they actually need to see when they need to see it right. And I think that's when we saw the big explosion like Vdi, for example, right? Like, instead of me moving data, I'm just gonna move out the screen, the keyboard, the mouse and the USB devices. Right?

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Kurt Telep: I think that with AI with that data being so far out at the edge, right, we can't get those streams of data internally fast enough. And I think that we need distributed computing in order to be able to process all of that data in a meaningful way. So we're going to have it pushed out for a while. But I think once once we get to the point, we're talking about terabit Ethernet connections between hospitals. And you know the the core data center.

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Kurt Telep: Maybe we won't have a problem and we'll be able to start to re collapse some of those things again back into the core data center.

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Philip Sellers: Well, just like the tides. There's always a bottleneck that we're moving around right?

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Kurt Telep: As soon as you fix. As soon as you fix one bottleneck, there's another one that's going.

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Philip Sellers: Like another, one.

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Kurt Telep: You're never gonna

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Kurt Telep: of every bottleneck. It's just which one do you? Are you willing to live with at this point in time?

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Philip Sellers: That's exactly right.

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Philip Sellers: Kurt, I wanna call this part one of our discussion because I I've enjoyed so much of what we've talked about today.

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Philip Sellers: I've got to have you back we. We've got to talk more about healthcare. It's a huge vertical for us, as you can imagine. As a Vdi centric company. That's our heritage. We've we've done a lot in healthcare

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Philip Sellers: but as I focus in on on

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Philip Sellers: the things that Nutanix is doing to make it simple.

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Philip Sellers: To enable choice healthcare is a great place for those things to be really valuable. That's what I'm hearing from you today is that you're driving value for healthcare organizations by enabling that choice by giving them options on the table. And that that to me, makes a ton of sense with the amount of disruption we have going on in our industry, in the infrastructure, space

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Philip Sellers: choice

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Philip Sellers: and go to partners is a huge.

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Philip Sellers: huge thing for customers to to seek out.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah, I you know I have. I have a slide that I use every time I talk to customers, and it's my second slide after my title, and it always talks about one platform right with the Nutanix having that single platform, whether you're unbelievably small, tiny, single doctor facility

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Kurt Telep: all the way up to a massive healthcare organization that's nationwide. Right? There's 1 platform to manage one platform that's going to give you all the functionality that you need, whether you're tiny or small. That freedom of choice piece then ties directly into it, making a

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Kurt Telep: it's hard to move the ship. That is a large healthcare organization. I really am curious in 3 or 4 years. What is it? Gonna what projects didn't get done because we're changing hypervisors.

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Philip Sellers: Right, right.

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Kurt Telep: Whereas, you know, a platform like Nutanix changing the Hypervisor should not be a we're putting every project on hold for a year until we figure out what we're gonna do with this right? And again it talks to the simplicity. And then the last one that's on that side slide is the customer delight piece, right healthcare organizations. When things are not going well.

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Kurt Telep: they need to know that they're

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Kurt Telep: vendors are behind them. We're there to support them, and that we know what we're talking about when we show up right that when you place a call because you've got something because you have a nicu that doesn't have availability because of its application, because you may have a cluster that has the challenges with performance, and clinicians are saying, Hey, I'm trying to do notes, and this is going to reduce the number of patients that I can see right.

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Kurt Telep: knowing that we can be there to stand with them, to to get things resolved. Get them resolved quickly, and make sure that they're running as optimal as they can, is something that I hold very true to my heart, in new tax, so.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah, well, and and that's something across the entire organization. I shared with you before our our recording started today. But I bring the support organization. Every time I bring a customer to Nutanix headquarters to meet with the team. Support is a big part of that conversation. You guys approach it differently. It's a huge value to the customer, and when arguably, most of your competition is trying to cut costs

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Philip Sellers: and cut back on the way that they deliver support. This is still a very big strategic advantage to working with Nutanix. Can't underscore enough because there's gonna be. There's gonna be bad days, and we're all gonna have bugs and problems. How you respond to it is the key.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. Well, Kurt, a hundred percent.

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Kurt Telep: Senate.

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Kurt Telep: okay.

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Philip Sellers: Sorry I didn't mean to cut you off.

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Kurt Telep: No, it's you know what. It's 1 of the reasons that I love working here at Nutanix, being being somebody who can walk into a customer and know that I never have to be there for an apology about a elongated outage that was driven by a support issue is something that I'm really really proud of every day here.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah. And you talked to me a little bit offline about the difference of coming into the organization and and

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Philip Sellers: how it's been different for you personally. That's gotta be a huge

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Philip Sellers: weight off your shoulders.

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Kurt Telep: Yeah, I.

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Philip Sellers: You've got that organization behind you.

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Kurt Telep: Sleep a lot better now, knowing that I've got a phenomenal sport organization to back me up. That's for sure.

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Philip Sellers: Yeah.

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Philip Sellers: Well, you heard it from the horse's mouth. If you're listening to this one Kurt is great people. I've really enjoyed getting to know you. Over the last few years.

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Philip Sellers: I'm absolutely dedicated to this being part one of an ongoing conversation, so I can't wait to have you back here on the podcast and I, I thank you so much for your time.

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Kurt Telep: So glad to be here. Thank you for. Thank you for inviting me. And yeah, we'll definitely do a part 2. And who knows? Maybe we'll turn into a part. 3. Alright!

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Philip Sellers: That'd be fantastic, too, for everybody listening. I want to say, thanks for spending a little time with us. I know that time is your most valuable resource. So thanks for listening, and on behalf of everybody at integra. If we can ever do anything to help you move the needle we're here, for you

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Philip Sellers: have a great day, and we will talk to you on the next podcast.