The introduction of database as a service is a big deal for companies experiencing delays on the digital transformation journey, especially now that the pressures of COVID-19 are forcing fast adoption and adaption.

“In the short term, there’s hardly any industry which is not touched by COVID,” said Taj Singh (pictured, right), senior vice president of information technology services company HCL Technologies Ltd. “In the long-term, we strongly believe that the customers will be in a hybrid/multicloud world.”

Nutanix Inc. is one company responding to the growing demand for DBaaS and upgrading multi-cluster management. The company announced today its general availability for Era 2.0.

Singh along with Thenu Kittappa (pictured, left), director of strategic initiatives and business strategy at Nutanix, and Anand Akela (pictured, center), product marketing leader at Nutanix, joined Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Nutanix: Introducing a New Era in Database Management virtual event. They discussed how database as a service can speed up the cloud transformation journey. (* Disclosure below.)

Cheaper, faster, automated database management

Fulfilling that need for a multicloud database solution, HCL has built on Nutanix’ Era to simplify database operations and provide a full-stack solution for the customer. “HCL becomes their extended arm,” stated Kittappa, explaining how the solution allows IT departments to securely offload their database management and operations to HCL.

The solution is available in a pay-as-you-use model, “which is very relevant to the existing times where everybody’s trying to cut their CapEx costs and optimize on their utilizations,” Kittappa said.

Flexible pricing isn’t the only cost benefit. A Forrester total economic impact study commissioned by Nutanix found that customers received total return on investment in less than six months, with an ROI over three years of 164%. And this was before today’s announcement of Era 2.0.

“With this new launch, I believe that it will just go to the next level,” Akela said. “All the things about provisioning, copy data saving … all of that adds to the ROI.”

Things go faster as well. India’s RBL Bank Ltd. experienced a six-fold increase in application response speed after deploying its database applications and solutions on Nutanix, according to Akela. “It used to take like 180 seconds to log in into the application, and now it’s 30 seconds,” he said.

Another successful use case comes from Delaware Valley Community Health Inc., which was forced to go remote due to COVID-19 restrictions. Lag meant it took almost 3 minutes for staff to log into the system to access the electronic medical records system. After Nutanix implementation, that dropped to just 19 seconds.

Speed is also increased thanks to Nutanix’ ability to have self-service with dynamic provisioning capability, according to Singh.

“We have cases where customers were waiting for about a week, 10 days for the environments to be provisioned to them. And now it’s a matter of seconds or minutes where they can have a full-fledged environment leading to developer productivity,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video below, and be sure to check out more of theCUBE’s coverage of Nutanix: Introducing a New Era in Database Management. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Nutanix – Introducing A New Era in Database Management. Neither Nutanix Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE