As the influx of data sources and tools for the management and analysis of these sources continues to diversify, companies are finding themselves in urgent need of ways to keep their utilities from turning into an overwhelming mess.

At the Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe conference in Vienna, Austria, Tim Zonca, VP of Product Marketing at Puppet Inc., sat down with Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, to discuss what Puppet brings to its customers, the benefits of its work with Nutanix and how things are moving forward.

Initial run

Zonca provided an overview of how Puppet works early in the conversation. He started out by explaining that Puppet is basically an automation and orchestration platform that allows people to manage everything they have in their data center in a standard way.

“And, so, we don’t care if it’s resources that you’re running on the mainframe, if you have a development environment running dockers in AWS, or you’re running mission-critical systems in something like Nutanix,” he explained. He stated that Puppet provides one language, one standard way for managing all of it.

He was also enthusiastic about the variety of ways in which customers have been applying Puppet’s platform.

“I think that’s part of a vision that we share, is being able to run your infrastructure with the middleware on top of it, the applications on top of it, more simply,” Zonca stated. “And it’s not really just simple for the sake of simplicity, but ultimately to deliver better software faster to the people who are using the applications or the services that IT provides.”

Versatility in standardizing

As the discussion continued, Zonca explored other aspects of Puppet’s usage, with the Nutanix link being a point of prime interest. He said one of the things he’s excited about is working with Nutanix to combine some of the optimization and capabilities Nutanix has, especially at the infrastructure layer, alongside the orchestration and automation capabilities Puppet has for doing “smart things all the way from provisioning to ongoing management of the infrastructure,” he said.

Zonca also explained that “we bring a lot of experience, I think, especially around the middleware and applications stack for ultimately the solution that both of us would push out together.”

And the range of utilization is where Puppet is finding the most excitement from their customers. Zonca went into further depth on an example use-case. “You may have an application that spans thousands of nodes. Being able to use the same language that they already had a bunch of these Lego blocks that they built for extending it, so that they can now define services and applications that span thousands of nodes across a data center, using the same sorts of tools that they had already gotten used to,” he said.

He went on to explain that Puppet now has customers that use its solutions “from kind of core infrastructure up through middleware up through full applications. They may be off the shelf, they may be ones that they’ve built themselves, where they can use Puppet as kind of the common language and standard way for delivering all of it through that stack.”

Future aims

To Zonca, the ways in which Puppet allows its users to link and streamline operations is a major part of how the company and its customers are moving toward an improved and progressive state.

“It allows [users] to kind of move to the future,” he said, “where they can adopt new technology, at scale and in production, and then as it makes sense and their workloads are defined in more traditional infrastructure, move those … into some of the new-world sets of technologies like Nutanix, like AWS … things like that.”

With Puppet, as organizations define the infrastructure that they want to run, it doesn’t matter where it’s deployed, Zonca explained. “And so it allows people at least to get their first steps in kind of standardizing across a multi-cloud environment, where they have a consistent set of workloads, a language to describe it all, and a standard way for the provisioning,” he added.

*Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. and other companies sponsor some Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE