Nutanix .NEXT 2026 | Erik Littlejohn & Mike Donahue, CloudWave

Clips
More from Nutanix .NEXT 2026

Erik Littlejohn

President & CEO

CloudWave

Mike Donahue

Chief Operating Officer

CloudWave

play_circle_outline Healthcare IT at a Crossroads: Opportunity and Urgency to Secure Vast Data and Critical Infrastructure from Ransomware

play_circle_outline Ambient AI Boosts Clinical Efficiency but Spurs Shadow AI PHI Risks: Implementing Governance, Policies, and Guardrails

play_circle_outline CloudWave Helps Mid‑Market and Rural Hospitals Weather Staffing Shortages and Medicare Reimbursement Cuts

play_circle_outline CloudWave migrating ~100 private‑cloud customers to Nutanix for simplicity

Info
Transcript

Erik Littlejohn & Mike Donahue, CloudWave

Erik Littlejohn

President & CEO CloudWave

Mike Donahue

Chief Operating Officer CloudWave

In this interview from Nutanix .NEXT 2026, Erik Littlejohn, president and chief executive officer of CloudWave, joins Mike Donahue, chief operating officer of CloudWave, to talk with theCUBE's John Furrier and co-host Alison Kosik about how mid-market healthcare organizations are navigating the dual pressures of AI adoption and escalating cybersecurity threats. Littlejohn maps the mounting financial strain on community and rural health systems — from Medicare reimbursement cuts tied to the Big Beautiful Bill to relentless ransomware campaigns targeting organi... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What factors are currently driving IT decisions at CloudWave? add

Has shadow AI reached healthcare, and if so, how widespread is its deployment and what is its impact? add

What types of customers does CloudWave serve, which market segments do you specialize in, and what are the main needs and challenges those providers face? add

Why did your organization choose Nutanix for its private cloud, and how will that choice benefit your customers and IT operations? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Erik Littlejohn & Mike Donahue, CloudWave

search

Alison Kosik

>> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are in Chicago and we are streaming live at Nutanix.NEXT. I'm Alison Kosik. I'm hosting with my co-pilot, great analyst here, John Furrier. He's the co-founder and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE theCUBE. And I know with all of these discussions that we're having right now, healthcare really is... Healthcare IT seems to be at the center of this because it seems to be at a crossroads.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I mean, healthcare is one of the areas that has all the data. They tagged it for all the wrong right reasons. It's critical infrastructure in the US and North America for sure. And there's a lot of data. And so everything's kind of lined up perfectly for healthcare. It is a crossroad because there's so much benefits that could come from it, Alison. This next segment, we're going to unpack that.

Alison Kosik

>> Yeah. Let's do that with our next guest. We've got Erik Littlejohn, president and CEO, excuse me, of CloudWave, and Mike Donahue, Chief Operating Officer at CloudWave. Thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE.

Mike Donahue

>> Yeah, thank you for having us.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Thank you for having us.

Alison Kosik

>> Let's talk about what's driving the IT decisions at CloudWave at this point.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah. I mean, there's so many factors sort of just even from a macro level. If you think about the last year, the passing of the Big Beautiful Bill is really pressuring Medicare reimbursements for hospitals, particularly rural and community hospitals taken together with tariff uncertainty, cost uncertainty. So those are putting tons of both revenue and cost pressures on healthcare. And on top of that, as you guys know, you see just on a weekly basis, healthcare under assault from a cybersecurity perspective. A lot of bad actors getting in, ransomware, et cetera. And these EHR systems, EMR systems are just so critical that they can't sustain downtime. And so I think a lot of the themes you hear here, resiliency, recovery are so important to healthcare.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. It's a double-edged sword, AI. On one hand, it's got massive opportunities to innovate, streamline, make things go faster, more efficient, better care for the patients, better administrative work for the organizations. And the other side, you've got the dark side, you got the cybersecurity problem. And so you have a cultural also dynamic. IT, no ransomware. We know what's happened there. But then the people who are the practitioners see value in the AI. They can connect the dots. Share your guys' thoughts on this because I think we're seeing a lot of people, for surely people I know in healthcare, like we love AI. We're leaning into it. We see immediate benefits, but slow down. Let's be careful here. Talk about that balance of the innovation mindset, that growth mindset there, and then the pragmatic, whoa, let's make sure we're stable, because AI, this is coming up. Are you seeing the same thing? What's your reaction?

Mike Donahue

>> Yeah, Erik, go ahead.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah. I think definitely the benefits people are starting to see and a lot of adoption of ambient AI is an example, because we can all sort of picture that very easily. We want to maximize the time we spend with our provider so those type of ambient tools can really make them more efficient. They can see more patients. They can actually spend more time providing care to their patients. The downside though to it, to your point is it's sort of like become shadow AI. It used to be shadow IT. Now a lot of these systems don't know what agents are being deployed. Are they accessing data they shouldn't? So there's also huge risk and governance that needs to come along with that adoption.

John Furrier

>> One of the things we've been watching on theCUBE, and this is something that's come up a lot, you mentioned shadow AI. Shadow IT was actually pretty pedestrian compared to what shadow AI is. When you think about shadow IT, "Oh, I got an approval process, budget. I'll just swipe my credit card to get a POC going, show my boss." I mean, still a little bit around the authorities. Shadow AI makes that look like a kindergarten class. Release a bunch of agents, get a Mac Mini, put some OpenClaw on it, go search the network. I mean, it's out of control, some levels, a lot of sprawl of agents. We're seeing that on the enterprise. Has that come to healthcare? And if so, scope the level of deployment or impact. Any thoughts on that?

Mike Donahue

>> Yeah, I would absolutely say we are seeing this impact healthcare at all different levels, whether it's the largest of the large health systems to rural and community health. We actually see more shadow AI, I would say at the community and rural health level, just given the fact that there's not as many governance standards. And I think one of the big things that's missing from healthcare as a whole right now is just broader policy, procedure, and governance. So we are working with a lot of organizations right now to have them come in and build out that governance practice to put guardrails around the use of AI. Far too often, we've actually seen organizations and clinicians unintentionally share PHI with an open model, with the free version of ChatGPT or Claude to try to help with diagnosis, help with discharge instructions. Part of their day-

John Furrier

>> They're getting answers. Why not share? Why not share?

Mike Donahue

>> They're getting answers. Why not? Exactly.

John Furrier

>> They don't know.

Mike Donahue

>> But it causes such a risk for the organization to have that continue without any guardrails around it.

John Furrier

>> All right. Talk about CloudWave and take us through the scope of customers you guys have. We were talking before camera, Mike, around the kinds of providers you guys work with. Lay out the landscape of the customer base and what's different, what are their needs? Some don't have staffing levels. Take us through the levels.

Mike Donahue

>> Yeah. So CloudWave specializes, I would say, in the mid-community health market. So I would always say sub-thousand beds is where we specialize in. And it brings a lot of unique challenges, as Erik mentioned on the onset. That market is the one that's predominantly being hit with the Big Beautiful Bill, the pending Medicare cuts that were passed last year, and also have the biggest risk with some of the proposed regulatory changes that are being voted on in May coming up. So staffing levels continue to be, I think, one of the biggest challenges. And even if you can obtain staff, it's keeping and retaining that staff as they continue to evolve their personal journey.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And one of the things too that we've observed is, like in small, medium-sized businesses on the enterprise side, the budgets aren't huge for IT. And so that also opens up more ransomware targets. So you have an operational challenge on security, you have an operational challenge on execution.

Mike Donahue

>> Yep. And the challenge is for these health systems, their business isn't IT services. Their business is clinical care. So they have a job to take care of the patients and serve that community and IT becomes a cost center. So how do you balance the ever-changing technology enhancements that EHR providers are trying to drive with their adoption of AI tooling native to their platform while maintaining a security footprint and that security moat around the organization?

John Furrier

>> One of the things I like about Nutanix is they're in line with some of the things we're covering. And even in the cloud, had a similar pattern. Horizontal scale with the cloud, apps, vertical apps for SaaS. Here with AI, you got horizontal scale with data and you got vertical specialists with domain expertise. Okay. So how does the Nutanix equation fit in? What are they enabling you guys? Because you guys are in the vertical. You have domain expertise, very acute skill sets to manage and deploy that service. How does it work? And did you like the keynote and content here at the event?

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah, it really resonated with us and sort of reinforced the decision. We went with Nutanix. So we're actually in the process of converting a hundred customers in our private cloud onto the Nutanix platform. And I think it really tells the story sort of Mike was talking about that the most valued time in a hospital, the IT staff wants to be spending with clinicians, helping them with their workflow. What they don't want to be doing is worrying about a hypervisor and an underlying sort of upgrade or a change that doesn't provide a lot of clinical or operational value. And so that's like, we need to bring that innovation to our customers. And so we sort of think of this opportunity with Nutanix is transforming us into sort of a next generation MSP taken together just with that opportunity, the ability to automate it, the efficiency gain we're seeing. It just is such a powerful story and Nutanix has been a great partner for that.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I was talking to Ketan about this who runs, the VP of products, and he was saying to me, "John, it's hard to make infrastructure invisible, but they've kind of done it." How has that enabled you? Can you give some examples of things that enabled you to do better, faster, more effectively?

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah. We'll talk about some of the benefits you're already seeing with the team.

Mike Donahue

>> Yeah. I think really the main focus for us was simplicity, making sure that we had a fundamental partner that understood our industry, being healthcare IT-focused as an organization, was committed in that vertical. But when we look at the ability that Nutanix allows us to streamline migrations, for example, being in this space for the last 10 years and all the technology changes, we have been the ones driving platform to platform migration, to Erik's point, trying to drive innovation for our partners.

John Furrier

>> And you got a lot of legacy too. I mean, I'm imagining these organizations are running-

Erik Littlejohn

>> Very old apps....

John Furrier

>> some systems and apps. Cloud's nice, that's a good move. How are they handling that? Does it be abstracted away? Are they replacing systems? What's the trend?

Erik Littlejohn

>> If you think across healthcare, generally speaking, there's not a lot of born in the cloud applications. So they're very legacy and they sort of really makes it, a private cloud in particular a good fit for those applications and thus Nutanix and what we're doing there to make it really a more cost-efficient solution as well. Because our customers need us to be driving down costs given all the pressures that they have. And this is really just an opportunity like Broadcom coming around and raising everybody's prices. And so we really needed to embrace that as well as a way to sort of bring down our operating costs so that we can provide that, pass along to our customers and they benefit from our adoption.

John Furrier

>> And you were saying earlier that people don't really operationally don't want to hear about this VM and this container. Bottom line, are we getting better results to the enterprise at the C-suite because it's operations where they're talking about business operations. That's going to be a key thing. I guess my question for you would be, pretend I'm the product manager for Nutanix. They're probably watching and they'll come on camera. If you had a magic wand, what should we be building for you now? What do you need? Connect the dots to what you think around the corner you guys see. What's on your radar? What's the to-do? What are you hungry for for capability?

Mike Donahue

>> It's a great question.

Alison Kosik

>> Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Mike Donahue

>> We're going to make sure they deliver it to you.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Here's your chance, man.

John Furrier

>> Go.

Mike Donahue

>> I just got a dirty look from the Nutanix . I think from a trajectory perspective, they're meeting the needs and exceeding where we want to be as an MSP provider. I think simplicity is going to be fundamental as we continue to drive technology enhancements across all industries. And the days of organizations being able to staff and fund and retain talent to manage this large scale infrastructure is a way of the past.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, and the whole skilling and having teams.

Mike Donahue

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> The burden on IT is already heavy in your area.

Mike Donahue

>> Exactly.

John Furrier

>> So agents might be a great win-

Mike Donahue

>> For sure....

John Furrier

>> if done right. Take us through the agent conversation. What are you guys thinking? Okay, obviously compliance and governance, you got regulatory challenges around, but AI can learn that too.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> I mean, there's a lot of opportunity here. Where do you see it?

Erik Littlejohn

>> So we sort of think about it two ways, both internally, how are we going to use the benefit we have of working with hundreds of customers, having insights to their applications, to the telemetry, all the cyber events? And we ought to be able to use that for the benefit of our customers so that we can react more quickly. We can get to the point of self-healing systems, while at the same time, as you said, sort of building guardrails and protections around the adoption of AI, because there's also a threat of if you go too fast and too far, you might actually start automating some things that you shouldn't and create other problems that you might not have attended. And so really our customers are expecting us to bring that to them, given that very small staff, they don't have the time to invest. And so we're really a critical engine in bringing that sort of innovation to them. And so not only leveraging it internally, but also starting to develop our own AI apps that provide additional insights to customers that help them enhance their operations, be more efficient with revenue, operations, clinical operations, et cetera.

John Furrier

>> Yeah, and that's important. I think that the ROI conversation happens a lot. You guys have transparency and reporting. Share some of the things you're working on because this comes up a lot. "Hey, we're going to invest, but I need an ROI." But then people are like, "What are we measuring? What outcomes? What workflows do we want to target?" Are you guys seeing a pattern in how people are thinking through that piece?

Mike Donahue

>> We've been asked that question a lot, and I think one of the biggest challenges at least that we've observed is it's very difficult to get to that ROI right now. Unless you're looking at just straight labor offset and using the agent example, it's very difficult to keep a human in the loop architecture that I believe is required in healthcare.

John Furrier

>> What are some of the reasons it's hard?

Mike Donahue

>> I would say, going back to the agent, I love autonomous technology, but in healthcare, having something act automatically can impact patient safety. And that's where we have to maintain, I believe that we have a responsibility to the communities that we serve, that level of human in the loop diligence. And when you start adding back, the human in the loop is where you lose that ROI very quickly if it's not just going to be replacing functions.

Erik Littlejohn

>> And a lot of times I would say what we find is our customers might have bought some tools that they need, but they sort of lack the staff to monitor that 24/7. And it's sort of like, who's going to catch that ransomware event at 2:00 in the morning?

Alison Kosik

>> Especially small hospitals.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Especially, yeah. Their IT staffs could be five or six people in some cases. So they really need partners like ourselves and breadth experience and some scale that they just don't have on their own.

John Furrier

>> The good news is your customers are already doing the AI,, and unfortunately, putting it into open models. So the tooling is changing. That'll change the roles. Any thoughts on that behavioral side of it? Assume tooling becomes easy, secure, how that affects the people, because we're hearing CEOs, if you're not using AI as a tool, you probably will be replaced. People who use AI and are affluent with as a tool, I mean, it's like a saw. I got a manual saw, now I got a little power saw. I mean, tooling is a tool. It's only as good as the human behind it.

Mike Donahue

>> Yes. And I agree with that mindset that we challenge our staff even at CloudWave that you should be using AI every single day. It is a force multiplier. And if you don't leverage it, unfortunately you may find yourself being replaced. I think when we look at the impact to healthcare especially, and I'll go back to the community and rural space, I think we're going to rely on vendors to drive that innovation into healthcare and we're not going to see a lot of native tooling adoption being developed in-house. And I think that's important, but it goes back to what we started with is having governance and making sure that you have regulations in place to stop your clinicians and stop your employees because the sensitive nature of the data, it's going to take one very public lawsuit that comes out of this to completely, I think, pause a lot of the innovation that we see health systems running towards right now.

Erik Littlejohn

>> And we're kind of getting in front of it with our customers right now. They traditionally would engage us for security risk assessments. And so now the scope of that's really expanding to also come in and look at how they're using AI, what are best practices that they can put in place, how can we help them remediate the lack of those best practices, and ultimately help them govern, put guardrails in place against the wrong agent isn't talking to the wrong data source. And then you can sort of treat it in the same way you almost would like a cyber attack.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And bad agents get in there too. There's evil agents out there.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah. That's the other thing is the acceleration of cyber attacks with the use of AI. It used to be they would create this code and then send that to these internet cafes and they'd have hundreds of actors that would go out and do these things. Well, now they can use agents to really accelerate that. And it's just, again, it's just reinforcing how difficult it is for these small organizations to fend off those type of attacks without partners at more scale.

John Furrier

>> All right.

Alison Kosik

>> All right. Mike and Erik, Erik and Mike, thanks so much for stepping by theCUBE. Really enjoyed your insights today.

Erik Littlejohn

>> Yeah, thank you so much for having us. Enjoyed it.

Mike Donahue

>> Thank you for having us. Really appreciate it.

Alison Kosik

>> My pleasure. All right. We're going to be back right after this break. You're watching theCUBE live from Nutanix.NEXT. We'll see you after this break.