Like so many aspects of the digital world, infrastructure is advancing rapidly. Fitness First Ltd.’s Jon Forster, transitional services program manager, reminisced about how when he first started. He said IT infrastructure was a classic three-tier system and you just ran what was there. Now he sees big changes with everything being virtualized.

Forster spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016.

He said that an additional change to the infrastructure is the introduction of hyper-convergence models. With the old system, it was only possible to move as fast as the slowest part, and that, argued Forster, killed the business. With the move to hyper-convergence, it’s now a unit of computing without needing engineers to make sure each individual piece works. It also has cut down the time involved to 10 percent of what it previously cost.

Changes to operations

With such a big shift, what happens to operations?

“When I first worked with Fitness First and they said they’d use new architecture, many people asked, ‘How is it going to affect their jobs? What does this mean?’ And I said, it’s going to mean you’re going to have a far more interesting job,” Forster recalled.

He asked his employees to think about the parts of their job they dislike and enable them to do things more quickly. Through training employees on the new systems, he managed to keep his core IT team of people who were skilled and found themselves more than capable of learning and adjusting to the new system.

The other change in operations revealed itself in what is traditionally considered to be a sign of a failing business – closing down offices. But in this case, it’s because the new way things are run allows people to access work and collaborate from anywhere. And if you can do that, why pay for admin and offices?

“You can flex, you can move, you’re not tied back,” Forster said. This way, true to Fitness First form, if you want to go to the gym at lunch time, you can do so and still get the work done outside of regular business hours but still in time for a morning meeting.

Watch the entire interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE