[digital Music] >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE," Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." We got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming by the show. >> Good to be here, John. >> We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the Supercloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations, developers are doing great, but now something magical's happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that, that's called Supercloud. >> Indeed. >> How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great. Ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? >> Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term supercloud. We've been calling it hybrid multicloud essentially, but the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do they sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers and some of these applications increasingly are going to run in edges. And now what most companies struggle with is every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, their edge is different and they then have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations. But you need to think about cloud as an operating model and what the supercloud or hyper multicloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model. One way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's managed point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency, and the IT teams can help support that easily. >> You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformation, certainly from customers, they were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx now is covered by the cloud, so it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time the vendors are saying, "Hey, you know, buy our stuff." And so you have the change over, how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on-premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model, Where's the gap? 'Cause nobody wants complexity, and you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. >> That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally complexity has been a friend for vendors, but the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff, you need very specialized teams, and guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people, process, technology. There's plenty of technology out there, but right now there's a big scarcity of people, and I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer like experience with their experience with software and applications, and they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. >> You know, it's just so you mentioned that when the hyper converged, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration, that's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration, but that's a trade off. So we're seeing a new trend in the supercloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture, where there's trade offs. How do you see some of these key trade offs? I know you talked to a lot of your customers, they're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day zero mentality. What are some of those key trade offs and architectural decision points? >> So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of thoughts and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solved this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now this notion of supercloud is just simply about converging different clouds and different data. >> Kind of the same thing. >> And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. >> Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting with the supercloud was, you get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premise, which is, I mean, basically cloud operations. >> Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud is an operating model. It's a way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. >> Okay, so when I hear about substrates, abstraction layers, I think two things, innovation cause you extract away complexity, then I also think about from the customer's perspective, maybe, lock-in. >> Yes. >> Whoa, oh, promises, promises. Lock in is a fear and ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. >> Yes. >> Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. I mean, like, whatever runs the software, go faster, but ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So, what's that trade off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic, and how to get around. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's been some of the fundamental tenants of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. Our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack, you don't want to lock to your point. So, if at the very bottom hardware, choice of hardware. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with or public cloud, Bare Metal. When you look at hypervisor, lots of choices. You got VMware, you got our own Ahv, which is KBM-based open source hypervisor, no lock-in there, provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributor storage stack, which we provide. And then of course layers about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes, runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes, orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go with the full stack or how much they want to go piecemeal it, and there's a trade off there. And they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity, and that, I think, is the trade off that each customer has to weigh. >> Okay, you guys have been transforming for many, many years. We've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE to software. >> Yes. >> I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? 'Cause public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What are you guys doing? What specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? >> Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell anymore hardware. They're not on our books anymore. We're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud soft platform on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the supercloud. I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes. That's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS. And we are extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data, blocks, files, objects, are all part of the platform. And we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations, and we deliver the cloud operating model. >> So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore. >> We don't sell hardware anymore. We work with a whole range of hardware partners, HP, Dell, Supermicro, name it, Lenovo. >> Okay, so if I'm like a Telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? >> So you buy the software from us and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. >> So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you send on the server. >> Yeah, we send on the server. >> Yeah, sound's good. So no hardware, so back to software that could transfer. How's that going, good? >> It's gone very well because, you know, we made two transformations. One is of course we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions. They have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long term lock-in here. We are happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. >> I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer. It's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? >> What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCI, Hyperconverged Infrastructure. They see us as a leader there and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workload, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on the journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever, they may be, including the most mission critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we are on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on. Modernizing the infrastructure, which we help and then creating a cloud operating model, and making that available everywhere. >> Yeah, and I think one, that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to supercloud, which I want to get your thoughts on because AWS, for example, spent all that CapEx, they're called the hyperscaler. They got H in there and that's a hyperscale in there. And now you can leverage that CapEx by bringing Nutanix in, you're a hyperscale-like solution on-premise and edge. So you take advantage of both. >> Absolutely. >> The success. >> Exactly. >> And a trajectory of cloud, so your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud, plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe. >> Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. >> Yeah, please do. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSP. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem, but what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was, they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month, and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized that they could just take the exact same software that they were running on our platform, and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month, and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. >> That's agile, that's agile. >> Agile. >> That's agile and a great... >> Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. >> Months, first of all, I mean, just think about, they have to open a data center, which probably takes them, they have to buy the hardware, which, you know, with supply chain deliveries, >> Supply chain. and God knows how long that takes. >> Oh God, yeah. >> So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. It's a, just one example of a very compelling value proposition. >> So you feel good about where you guys are right now relative to these big waves coming? >> Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and. >> What are the biggest ones that you see? >> Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware and great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. >> Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? >> Yes, I mean a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. >> A lot of VMware alumni at Nutanix now. >> Yes, there are certainly, we have our share of VMware alumni. We also have a share of alumni from others. >> We call the V mafia, by the way. (laughs) >> I dunno about the V mafia, but. But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen, and therefore, they are looking at potentially what are the other alternatives? And we are very much front and center in that discussions. >> Well, Dave Alante and I, and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations. You guys are doing there. How would you describe the supercloud concept to a customer when they say, "Hey, what's the supercloud? "It's becoming a thing. "How would you describe what it is and the benefits?" >> Yeah, and I think the first thing is to tell them, what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is, they have applications everywhere. They have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're on Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prim, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably fourth, and it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a supercloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute storage network needs, one way of handling your security policies, and security constructs, and giving you that, so such a dramatic simplification on the one side, and it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want completely free. >> Yeah. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SAS and IAS, solves a lot of problems, highly integrated, that takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. >> Exactly. >> That's a super cool environment. >> (John speaks over Rajiv) Across any environment, wherever. It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. >> And that's essentially the goodness of cloud, going everywhere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but that extension is what you call a supercloud. >> Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable, and you got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. >> Yes. >> It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge. You got the IOT edge and just the edge in general. On-premise, I think, is hybrid, it's the steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course, things with cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic, a lot of shifting, OT, IT, that's actually transformed. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying, you know, industrial robots now. >> Yes. >> Space is around the corner, a lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things, so the edge is exploding. >> Yeah, you know, and I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand, but you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges, because a lot of these are crunching, crunching applications that require a crunch and generate a lot of data, crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you and there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is. >> The edge is the data center now. >> Exactly. Think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely remove. >> Self-healing, all this good stuffs. >> Exactly. It has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradeable and you know, life cycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud, and you're going to actually, essentially what you need is a cloud managed edge. >> Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends, where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning. There'll be more. >> Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who code that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. >> Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical architectural knowledge to the table on supercloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. >> No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. >> Okay. Supercloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to watch it. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and on the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

>>Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warda. Who's the director of information technology services at the Hotchkis school, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut. Hello, Kevin? >>Hello. It's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. >>Yeah, you, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about the Hotchkis school and your role. >>Sure. The hacha school is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 K 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role is as the director of information technology services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >>Yeah. And you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens what's, what's the unique, you know, or not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you. >>I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of it, security it in general sometimes. So I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into, >>Because specifically you are potentially spread thin underfunded. You gotta, you, you got students, you got teachers. So there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >>Certainly because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center. So data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights Ferra, some of our students are under 18. So data privacy laws such as Copa apply HIPAA can apply. We have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition. So it's, it's a unique place to be. Again, we operate very much like a college would, right? We have all the trappings of a, of a private college in terms of all the operations we do. And that's what I love most about working education is that it's, it's all the industries combined in many ways. >>Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in, in drew to the conversation. So what are the, the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your, your data? >>Well, we take a defense and depth approach. So we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses. We also keep it simple. You know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching using multifactor authentication and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >>Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what, what, what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >>Yeah, I, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what, what he's doing going back to our prior conversation about zero trust, right? That defense in depth approach is beautifully aligned, right? With a zero trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and, and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right. They need to make sure that the data that they're keeping evidence right. Is secure and imutable right, because that's evidence, >>Well, Kevin paint a picture for us, if you would. So you were primarily on, Preem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and, and the kind of, I wanna get to the before and the, after wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >>Sure. Well, I came to the hatchet school about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal. So again, not a lot of funding for it in general security or infrastructure in general. So Nutanix was actually a solu, a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hodges and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system, that students would use financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SAS solutions coming in play. We had also taken some time to do some business continuity planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue. I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that. So as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud based, we didn't really need as much of the on premise compute and storage as, as we had. And it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a, a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well. And it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small it shops like ours. >>Yeah. AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor. And so you migrated off of VMware avoidance V the VTax avoidance. That's a common theme among Nu Nutanix customers. And now did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >>We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, WASA became across our, our desks. And it was such a low, low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month. And then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time. It wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network. Some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on, on the internet that they could be stored as well. >>So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast security wise. It has all the features of, of S3 compliance that works with, with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily. And then there was no egress fees. We can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing us any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs. We need to know what we're gonna spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for, for egres or, or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously. We need, we need that. We, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >>So Kevin, you, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed. Were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those, those concerns as an it practitioner? >>Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing. There's lots of companies with funny names. >>I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from and really looking into the technology, understanding that the value proposition, the ability to, to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology, in which it lays down data. So, so having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for it. It may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's, it's not cheap. It's not, you know, it's, it's reliable. And that was really our concern. So we, we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >>Yeah. Thank you for that. Drew explain the whole egres charge. We hear a lot about that. What do people need to know? >>First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, date, just like the cube. Let's be very clear about that. Second of all egres charges. So, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get every, put every list, everything okay. It's, it's part of their, their, you know, their, their process. It's part of how they make money. It's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services. We don't do that. And I think, you know, as, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond. What is the list price? In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then right. Their, their additional cost, the egres cost, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >>So you used the little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation. So I'm, here's what I'm imagining. Like I have a lot of stuff. Right. And, and I, I, I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly. I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff. That's kinda the same thing here. >>Oh, that's a great metaphor, right. That, that storage locker, right? Yeah. You know, can you imagine every time you wanna open the door to that locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >>No, no, that would be annoying. >>Or, or every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard. You have to pay a door opening fee. Right. And then if you wanna look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay and it's ridiculous. Yeah. It's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker. You've already paid the annual fee probably cuz that they gave you a discount on that. So why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what wasabi does. And I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody >>Else. Okay, good. That's helpful. It helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin. I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in, in, in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and, and ransomware protection? For example? >>Yes. Cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too. Right? This is, this is often the checking, the box kind of activity. Insurance companies require it, but we wanna make it something that people want to do and wanna engage with. So even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that. So it wasn't just about protecting our school data. It's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something you do in all aspects of your life. Especially now that the folks are working hybrid off of working from home with equipment from the school, this stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home. And so knowing how to protect that is important. And so we definitely run, run those programs in a way that, that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >>So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until of course we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can, you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples. Is that what you're talking about? About having fun? >>Yeah. I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories. You know, they, they, they, they stop as they run. So they're, they're, they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going. So you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic. Yeah. That's why I think is, is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun. It's not, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure, you know, the sender of, of the email. Now you you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not. So that's where I think the learning comes in. >>Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much. Appreciate your time. Kevin drew awesome. Having you in the cube. >>My pleasure. Thank you. >>Yeah. Great to be here. Thanks. Okay. In a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage. You're watching the cube, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

>> The rapid rise of ransomware attacks has added yet another challenge that business technology executives have to worry about these days, cloud storage, immutability, and air gaps have become a must have arrows in the quiver of organization's data protection strategies. But the important reality that practitioners have embraced is data protection, it can't be an afterthought or a bolt on it, has to be designed into the operational workflow of technology systems. The problem is, oftentimes, data protection is complicated with a variety of different products, services, software components, and storage formats, this is why object storage is moving to the forefront of data protection use cases because it's simpler and less expensive. The put data get data syntax has always been alluring, but object storage, historically, was seen as this low-cost niche solution that couldn't offer the performance required for demanding workloads, forcing customers to make hard tradeoffs between cost and performance. That has changed, the ascendancy of cloud storage generally in the S3 format specifically has catapulted object storage to become a first class citizen in a mainstream technology. Moreover, innovative companies have invested to bring object storage performance to parity with other storage formats, but cloud costs are often a barrier for many companies as the monthly cloud bill and egress fees in particular steadily climb. Welcome to Secure Storage Hot Takes, my name is Dave Vellante, and I'll be your host of the program today, where we introduce our community to Wasabi, a company that is purpose-built to solve this specific problem with what it claims to be the most cost effective and secure solution on the market. We have three segments today to dig into these issues, first up is David Friend, the well known entrepreneur who co-founded Carbonite and now Wasabi will then dig into the product with Drew Schlussel of Wasabi, and then we'll bring in the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda of the Hotchkiss School, let's get right into it. We're here with David Friend, the President and CEO and Co-founder of Wasabi, the hot storage company, David, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Great to have you, so look, you hit a home run with Carbonite back when building a unicorn was a lot more rare than it has been in the last few years, why did you start Wasabi? >> Well, when I was still CEO of Wasabi, my genius co-founder Jeff Flowers and our chief architect came to me and said, you know, when we started this company, a state of the art disk drive was probably 500 gigabytes and now we're looking at eight terabyte, 16 terabyte, 20 terabyte, even 100 terabyte drives coming down the road and, you know, sooner or later the old architectures that were designed around these much smaller disk drives is going to run out of steam because, even though the capacities are getting bigger and bigger, the speed with which you can get data on and off of a hard drive isn't really changing all that much. And Jeff foresaw a day when the architectures sort of legacy storage like Amazon S3 and so forth was going to become very inefficient and slow. And so he came up with a new, highly parallelized architecture, and he said, I want to go off and see if I can make this work. So I said, you know, good luck go to it and they went off and spent about a year and a half in the lab, designing and testing this new storage architecture and when they got it working, I looked at the economics of this and I said, holy cow, we can sell cloud storage for a fraction of the price of Amazon, still make very good gross margins and it will be faster. So this is a whole new generation of object storage that you guys have invented. So I recruited a new CEO for Carbonite and left to found Wasabi because the market for cloud storage is almost infinite. You know, when you look at all the world's data, you know, IDC has these crazy numbers, 120 zetabytes or something like that and if you look at that as you know, the potential market size during that data, we're talking trillions of dollars, not billions and so I said, look, this is a great opportunity, if you look back 10 years, all the world's data was on-prem, if you look forward 10 years, most people agree that most of the world's data is going to live in the cloud, we're at the beginning of this migration, we've got an opportunity here to build an enormous company. >> That's very exciting. I mean, you've always been a trend spotter, and I want to get your perspectives on data protection and how it's changed. It's obviously on people's minds with all the ransomware attacks and security breaches, but thinking about your experiences and past observations, what's changed in data protection and what's driving the current very high interest in the topic? >> Well, I think, you know, from a data protection standpoint, immutability, the equivalent of the old worm tapes, but applied to cloud storage is, you know, become core to the backup strategies and disaster recovery strategies for most companies. And if you look at our partners who make backup software like Veeam, Convo, Veritas, Arcserve, and so forth, most of them are really taking advantage of mutable cloud storage as a way to protect customer data, customers backups from ransomware. So the ransomware guys are pretty clever and they, you know, they discovered early on that if someone could do a full restore from their backups, they're never going to pay a ransom. So, once they penetrate your system, they get pretty good at sort of watching how you do your backups and before they encrypt your primary data, they figure out some way to destroy or encrypt your backups as well, so that you can't do a full restore from your backups. And that's where immutability comes in. You know, in the old days you, you wrote what was called a worm tape, you know, write once read many, and those could not be overwritten or modified once they were written. And so we said, let's come up with an equivalent of that for the cloud, and it's very tricky software, you know, it involves all kinds of encryption algorithms and blockchain and this kind of stuff but, you know, the net result is if you store your backups in immutable buckets, in a product like Wasabi, you can't alter it or delete it for some period of time, so you could put a timer on it, say a year or six months or something like that, once that data is written, you know, there's no way you can go in and change it, modify it, or anything like that, including even Wasabi's engineers. >> So, David, I want to ask you about data sovereignty. It's obviously a big deal, I mean, especially for companies with the presence overseas, but what's really is any digital business these days, how should companies think about approaching data sovereignty? Is it just large firms that should be worried about this? Or should everybody be concerned? What's your point of view? >> Well, all around the world countries are imposing data sovereignty laws and if you're in the storage business, like we are, if you don't have physical data storage in-country, you're probably not going to get most of the business. You know, since Christmas we've built data centers in Toronto, London, Frankfurt, Paris, Sydney, Singapore, and I've probably forgotten one or two, but the reason we do that is twofold; one is, you know, if you're closer to the customer, you're going to get better response time, lower latency, and that's just a speed of light issue. But the bigger issue is, if you've got financial data, if you have healthcare data, if you have data relating to security, like surveillance videos, and things of that sort, most countries are saying that data has to be stored in-country, so, you can't send it across borders to some other place. And if your business operates in multiple countries, you know, dealing with data sovereignty is going to become an increasingly important problem. >> So in May of 2018, that's when the fines associated with violating GDPR went into effect and GDPR was like this main spring of privacy and data protection laws and we've seen it spawn other public policy things like the CCPA and think it continues to evolve, we see judgments in Europe against big tech and this tech lash that's in the news in the U.S. and the elimination of third party cookies, what does this all mean for data protection in the 2020s? >> Well, you know, every region and every country, you know, has their own idea about privacy, about security, about the use of even the use of metadata surrounding, you know, customer data and things of this sort. So, you know, it's getting to be increasingly complicated because GDPR, for example, imposes different standards from the kind of privacy standards that we have here in the U.S., Canada has a somewhat different set of data sovereignty issues and privacy issues so it's getting to be an increasingly complex, you know, mosaic of rules and regulations around the world and this makes it even more difficult for enterprises to run their own, you know, infrastructure because companies like Wasabi, where we have physical data centers in all kinds of different markets around the world and we've already dealt with the business of how to meet the requirements of GDPR and how to meet the requirements of some of the countries in Asia and so forth, you know, rather than an enterprise doing that just for themselves, if you running your applications or keeping your data in the cloud, you know, now a company like Wasabi with, you know, 34,000 customers, we can go to all the trouble of meeting these local requirements on behalf of our entire customer base and that's a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective than if each individual country has to go deal with the local regulatory authorities. >> Yeah, it's compliance by design, not by chance. Okay, let's zoom out for the final question, David, thinking about the discussion that we've had around ransomware and data protection and regulations, what does it mean for a business's operational strategy and how do you think organizations will need to adapt in the coming years? >> Well, you know, I think there are a lot of forces driving companies to the cloud and, you know, and I do believe that if you come back five or 10 years from now, you're going to see majority of the world's data is going to be living in the cloud and I think storage, data storage is going to be a commodity much like electricity or bandwidth, and it's going to be done right, it will comply with the local regulations, it'll be fast, it'll be local, and there will be no strategic advantage that I can think of for somebody to stand up and run their own storage, especially considering the cost differential, you know, the most analysts think that the full, all in costs of running your own storage is in the 20 to 40 terabytes per month range, whereas, you know, if you migrate your data to the cloud, like Wasabi, you're talking probably $6 a month and so I think people are learning how to deal with the idea of an architecture that involves storing your data in the cloud, as opposed to, you know, storing your data locally. >> Wow, that's like a six X more expensive in the clouds, more than six X, all right, thank you, David,-- >> In addition to which, you know, just finding the people to babysit this kind of equipment has become nearly impossible today. >> Well, and with a focus on digital business, you don't want to be wasting your time with that kind of heavy lifting. David, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE, a great Boston entrepreneur, we've followed your career for a long time and looking forward to the future. >> Thank you. >> Okay, in a moment, Drew Schlussel will join me and we're going to dig more into product, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, keep it right there. ♪ Whoa ♪ ♪ Brenda in sales got an email ♪ ♪ Click here for a trip to Bombay ♪ ♪ It's not even called Bombay anymore ♪ ♪ But you clicked it anyway ♪ ♪ And now our data's been held hostage ♪ ♪ And now we're on sinking ship ♪ ♪ And a hacker's in our system ♪ ♪ Just 'cause Brenda wanted a trip ♪ ♪ She clicked on something stupid ♪ ♪ And our data's out of our control ♪ ♪ Into the hands of a hacker's ♪ ♪ And he's a giant asshole. ♪ ♪ He encrypted it in his basement ♪ ♪ He wants a million bucks for the key ♪ ♪ And I'm pretty sure he's 15 ♪ ♪ And still going through puberty ♪ ♪ I know you didn't mean to do us wrong ♪ ♪ But now I'm dealing with this all week long ♪ ♪ To make you all aware ♪ ♪ Of all this ransomware ♪ ♪ That is why I'm singing you this song ♪ ♪ C'mon ♪ ♪ Take it from me ♪ ♪ The director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince Nairobi ♪ ♪ 'Cuz he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ (gentle music) >> Joining me now is Drew Schlussel, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Wasabi, hey Drew, good to see you again, thanks for coming back in theCUBE. >> Dave, great to be here, great to see you. >> All right, let's get into it. You know, Drew, prior to the pandemic, Zero Trust, just like kind of like digital transformation was sort of a buzzword and now it's become a real thing, almost a mandate, what's Wasabi's take on Zero Trust. >> So, absolutely right, it's been around a while and now people are paying attention, Wasabi's take is Zero Trust is a good thing. You know, there are too many places, right, where the bad guys are getting in. And, you know, I think of Zero Trust as kind of smashing laziness, right? It takes a little work, it takes some planning, but you know, done properly and using the right technologies, using the right vendors, the rewards are, of course tremendous, right? You can put to rest the fears of ransomware and having your systems compromised. >> Well, and we're going to talk about this, but there's a lot of process and thinking involved and, you know, design and your Zero Trust and you don't want to be wasting time messing with infrastructure, so we're going to talk about that, there's a lot of discussion in the industry, Drew, about immutability and air gaps, I'd like you to share Wasabi's point of view on these topics, how do you approach it and what makes Wasabi different? >> So, in terms of air gap and immutability, right, the beautiful thing about object storage, which is what we do all the time is that it makes it that much easier, right, to have a secure immutable copy of your data someplace that's easy to access and doesn't cost you an arm and a leg to get your data back. You know, we're working with some of the best, you know, partners in the industry, you know, we're working with folks like, you know, Veeam, Commvault, Arc, Marquee, MSP360, all folks who understand that you need to have multiple copies of your data, you need to have a copy stored offsite, and that copy needs to be immutable and we can talk a little bit about what immutability is and what it really means. >> You know, I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about Wasabi's solution because, sometimes people don't understand, you actually are a cloud, you're not building on other people's public clouds and this storage is the one use case where it actually makes sense to do that, tell us a little bit more about Wasabi's approach and your solution. >> Yeah, I appreciate that, so there's definitely some misconception, we are our own cloud storage service, we don't run on top of anybody else, right, it's our systems, it's our software deployed globally and we interoperate because we adhere to the S3 standard, we interoperate with practically hundreds of applications, primarily in this case, right, we're talking about backup and recovery applications and it's such a simple process, right? I mean, just about everybody who's anybody in this business protecting data has the ability now to access cloud storage and so we've made it really simple, in many cases, you'll see Wasabi as you know, listed in the primary set of available vendors and, you know, put in your private keys, make sure that your account is locked down properly using, let's say multifactor authentication, and you've got a great place to store copies of your data securely. >> I mean, we just heard from David Friend, if I did my math right, he was talking about, you know, 1/6 the cost per terabyte per month, maybe even a little better than that, how are you able to achieve such attractive economics? >> Yeah, so, you know, I can't remember how to translate my fractions into percentages, but I think we talk a lot about being 80%, right, less expensive than the hyperscalers. And you know, we talked about this at Vermont, right? There's some secret sauce there and you know, we take a different approach to how we utilize the raw capacity to the effective capacity and the fact is we're also not having to run, you know, a few hundred other services, right? We do storage, plain and simple, all day, all the time, so we don't have to worry about overhead to support, you know, up and coming other services that are perhaps, you know, going to be a loss leader, right? Customers love it, right, they see the fact that their data is growing 40, 80% year over year, they know they need to have some place to keep it secure, and, you know, folks are flocking to us in droves, in fact, we're seeing a tremendous amount of migration actually right now, multiple petabytes being brought to Wasabi because folks have figured out that they can't afford to keep going with their current hyperscaler vendor. >> And immutability is a feature of your product, right? What the feature called? Can you double-click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the term in S3 is Object Lock and what that means is your application will write an object to cloud storage, and it will define a retention period, let's say a week. And for that period, that object is immutable, untouchable, cannot be altered in any way, shape, or form, the application can't change it, the system administration can't change it, Wasabi can't change it, okay, it is truly carved in stone. And this is something that it's been around for a while, but you're seeing a huge uptick, right, in adoption and support for that feature by all the major vendors and I named off a few earlier and the best part is that with immutability comes some sense of, well, it comes with not just a sense of security, it is security. Right, when you have data that cannot be altered by anybody, even if the bad guys compromise your account, they steal your credentials, right, they can't take away the data and that's a beautiful thing, a beautiful, beautiful thing. >> And you look like an S3 bucket, is that right? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fully compatible with the S3 API, so if you're using S3 API based applications today, it's a very simple matter of just kind of redirecting where you want to store your data, beautiful thing about backup and recovery, right, that's probably the simplest application, simple being a relative term, as far as lift and shift, right? Because that just means for your next full, right, point that at Wasabi, retain your other fulls, you know, for whatever 30, 60, 90 days, and then once you've kind of made that transition from vine to vine, you know, you're often running with Wasabi. >> I talked to my open about the allure of object storage historically, you know, the simplicity of the get put syntax, but what about performance? Are you able to deliver performance that's comparable to other storage formats? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, and we've got the performance numbers on the site to back that up, but I forgot to answer something earlier, right, you said that immutability is a feature and I want to make it very clear that it is a feature but it's an API request. Okay, so when you're talking about gets and puts and so forth, you know, the comment you made earlier about being 80% more cost effective or 80% less expensive, you know, that API call, right, is typically something that the other folks charge for, right, and I think we used the metaphor earlier about the refrigerator, but I'll use a different metaphor today, right? You can think of cloud storage as a magical coffee cup, right? It gets as big as you want to store as much coffee as you want and the coffee's always warm, right? And when you want to take a sip, there's no charge, you want to, you know, pop the lid and see how much coffee is in there, no charge, and that's an important thing, because when you're talking about millions or billions of objects, and you want to get a list of those objects, or you want to get the status of the immutable settings for those objects, anywhere else it's going to cost you money to look at your data, with Wasabi, no additional charge and that's part of the thing that sets us apart. >> Excellent, so thank you for that. So, you mentioned some partners before, how do partners fit into the Wasabi story? Where do you stop? Where do they pick up? You know, what do they bring? Can you give us maybe, a paint a picture for us example, or two? >> Sure, so, again, we just do storage, right, that is our sole purpose in life is to, you know, to safely and securely store our customer's data. And so they're working with their application vendors, whether it's, you know, active archive, backup and recovery, IOT, surveillance, media and entertainment workflows, right, those systems already know how to manage the data, manage the metadata, they just need some place to keep the data that is being worked on, being stored and so forth. Right, so just like, you know, plugging in a flash drive on your laptop, right, you literally can plug in Wasabi as long as your applications support the API, getting started is incredibly easy, right, we offer a 30-day trial, one terabyte, and most folks find that within, you know, probably a few hours of their POC, right, it's giving them everything they need in terms of performance, in terms of accessibility, in terms of sovereignty, I'm guessing you talked to, you know, Dave Friend earlier about data sovereignty, right? We're global company, right, so there's got to be probably, you know, wherever you are in the world some place that will satisfy your sovereignty requirements, as well as your compliance requirements. >> Yeah, we did talk about sovereignty, Drew, this is really, what's interesting to me, I'm a bit of a industry historian, when I look back to the early days of cloud, I remember the large storage companies, you know, their CEOs would say, we're going to have an answer for the cloud and they would go out, and for instance, I know one bought competitor of Carbonite, and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, they couldn't figure out how to compete with the cloud in part, because they were afraid it was going to cannibalize their existing business, I think another part is because they just didn't have that imagination to develop an architecture that in a business model that could scale to see that you guys have done that is I love it because it brings competition, it brings innovation and it helps lower clients cost and solve really nagging problems. Like, you know, ransomware, of mutability and recovery, I'll give you the last word, Drew. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, the on-prem vendors, they're not going to go away anytime soon, right, there's always going to be a need for, you know, incredibly low latency, high bandwidth, you know, but, you know, not all data's hot all the time and by hot, I mean, you know, extremely hot, you know, let's take, you know, real time analytics for, maybe facial recognition, right, that requires sub-millisecond type of processing. But once you've done that work, right, you want to store that data for a long, long time, and you're going to want to also tap back into it later, so, you know, other folks are telling you that, you know, you can go to these like, you know, cold glacial type of tiered storage, yeah, don't believe the hype, you're still going to pay way more for that than you would with just a Wasabi-like hot cloud storage system. And, you know, we don't compete with our partners, right? We compliment, you know, what they're bringing to market in terms of the software vendors, in terms of the hardware vendors, right, we're a beautiful component for that hybrid cloud architecture. And I think folks are gravitating towards that, I think the cloud is kind of hitting a new gear if you will, in terms of adoption and recognition for the security that they can achieve with it. >> All right, Drew, thank you for that, definitely we see the momentum, in a moment, Drew and I will be back to get the customer perspective with Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information technology services at The Hotchkiss School, keep it right there. >> Hey, I'm Nate, and we wrote this song about ransomware to educate people, people like Brenda. >> Oh, God, I'm so sorry. We know you are, but Brenda, you're not alone, this hasn't just happened to you. >> No! ♪ Colonial Oil Pipeline had a guy ♪ ♪ who didn't change his password ♪ ♪ That sucks ♪ ♪ His password leaked, the data was breached ♪ ♪ And it cost his company 4 million bucks ♪ ♪ A fake update was sent to people ♪ ♪ Working for the meat company JBS ♪ ♪ That's pretty clever ♪ ♪ Instead of getting new features, they got hacked ♪ ♪ And had to pay the largest crypto ransom ever ♪ ♪ And 20 billion dollars, billion with a b ♪ ♪ Have been paid by companies in healthcare ♪ ♪ If you wonder buy your premium keeps going ♪ ♪ Up, up, up, up, up ♪ ♪ Now you're aware ♪ ♪ And now the hackers they are gettin' cocky ♪ ♪ When they lock your data ♪ ♪ You know, it has gotten so bad ♪ ♪ That they demand all of your money and it gets worse ♪ ♪ They go and the trouble with the Facebook ad ♪ ♪ Next time, something seems too good to be true ♪ ♪ Like a free trip to Asia! ♪ ♪ Just check first and I'll help before you ♪ ♪ Think before you click ♪ ♪ Don't get fooled by this ♪ ♪ Who isn't old enough to drive to school ♪ ♪ Take it from me, the director of IT ♪ ♪ Don't click on that email from a prince in Nairobi ♪ ♪ Because he's not really a prince ♪ ♪ Now our data's locked up on our screen ♪ ♪ Controlled by a kid who's just fifteen ♪ ♪ And he's using our money to buy a Ferrari ♪ >> It's a pretty sweet car. ♪ A kid without facial hair, who lives with his mom ♪ ♪ To learn more about this go to wasabi.com ♪ >> Hey, don't do that. ♪ Cause if we had Wasabi's immutability ♪ >> You going to ruin this for me! ♪ This fifteen-year-old wouldn't have on me ♪ (gentle music) >> Drew and I are pleased to welcome Kevin Warenda, who's the Director of Information Technology Services at The Hotchkiss School, a very prestigious and well respected boarding school in the beautiful Northwest corner of Connecticut, hello, Kevin. >> Hello, it's nice to be here, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you bet. Hey, tell us a little bit more about The Hotchkiss School and your role. >> Sure, The Hotchkiss School is an independent boarding school, grades nine through 12, as you said, very prestigious and in an absolutely beautiful location on the deepest freshwater lake in Connecticut, we have 500 acre main campus and a 200 acre farm down the street. My role as the Director of Information Technology Services, essentially to oversee all of the technology that supports the school operations, academics, sports, everything we do on campus. >> Yeah, and you've had a very strong history in the educational field, you know, from that lens, what's the unique, you know, or if not unique, but the pressing security challenge that's top of mind for you? >> I think that it's clear that educational institutions are a target these days, especially for ransomware. We have a lot of data that can be used by threat actors and schools are often underfunded in the area of IT security, IT in general sometimes, so, I think threat actors often see us as easy targets or at least worthwhile to try to get into. >> Because specifically you are potentially spread thin, underfunded, you got students, you got teachers, so there really are some, are there any specific data privacy concerns as well around student privacy or regulations that you can speak to? >> Certainly, because of the fact that we're an independent boarding school, we operate things like even a health center, so, data privacy regulations across the board in terms of just student data rights and FERPA, some of our students are under 18, so, data privacy laws such as COPPA apply, HIPAA can apply, we have PCI regulations with many of our financial transactions, whether it be fundraising through alumni development, or even just accepting the revenue for tuition so, it's a unique place to be, again, we operate very much like a college would, right, we have all the trappings of a private college in terms of all the operations we do and that's what I love most about working in education is that it's all the industries combined in many ways. >> Very cool. So let's talk about some of the defense strategies from a practitioner point of view, then I want to bring in Drew to the conversation so what are the best practice and the right strategies from your standpoint of defending your data? >> Well, we take a defense in-depth approach, so we layer multiple technologies on top of each other to make sure that no single failure is a key to getting beyond those defenses, we also keep it simple, you know, I think there's some core things that all organizations need to do these days in including, you know, vulnerability scanning, patching , using multifactor authentication, and having really excellent backups in case something does happen. >> Drew, are you seeing any similar patterns across other industries or customers? I mean, I know we're talking about some uniqueness in the education market, but what can we learn from other adjacent industries? >> Yeah, you know, Kevin is spot on and I love hearing what he's doing, going back to our prior conversation about Zero Trust, right, that defense in-depth approach is beautifully aligned, right, with the Zero Trust approach, especially things like multifactor authentication, always shocked at how few folks are applying that very, very simple technology and across the board, right? I mean, Kevin is referring to, you know, financial industry, healthcare industry, even, you know, the security and police, right, they need to make sure that the data that they're keeping, evidence, right, is secure and immutable, right, because that's evidence. >> Well, Kevin, paint a picture for us, if you would. So, you were primarily on-prem looking at potentially, you know, using more cloud, you were a VMware shop, but tell us, paint a picture of your environment, kind of the applications that you support and the kind of, I want to get to the before and the after Wasabi, but start with kind of where you came from. >> Sure, well, I came to The Hotchkiss School about seven years ago and I had come most recently from public K12 and municipal, so again, not a lot of funding for IT in general, security, or infrastructure in general, so Nutanix was actually a hyperconverged solution that I implemented at my previous position. So when I came to Hotchkiss and found mostly on-prem workloads, everything from the student information system to the card access system that students would use, financial systems, they were almost all on premise, but there were some new SaaS solutions coming in play, we had also taken some time to do some business continuity, planning, you know, in the event of some kind of issue, I don't think we were thinking about the pandemic at the time, but certainly it helped prepare us for that, so, as different workloads were moved off to hosted or cloud-based, we didn't really need as much of the on-premise compute and storage as we had, and it was time to retire that cluster. And so I brought the experience I had with Nutanix with me, and we consolidated all that into a hyper-converged platform, running Nutanix AHV, which allowed us to get rid of all the cost of the VMware licensing as well and it is an easier platform to manage, especially for small IT shops like ours. >> Yeah, AHV is the Acropolis hypervisor and so you migrated off of VMware avoiding the VTax avoidance, that's a common theme among Nutanix customers and now, did you consider moving into AWS? You know, what was the catalyst to consider Wasabi as part of your defense strategy? >> We were looking at cloud storage options and they were just all so expensive, especially in egress fees to get data back out, Wasabi became across our desks and it was such a low barrier to entry to sign up for a trial and get, you know, terabyte for a month and then it was, you know, $6 a month for terabyte. After that, I said, we can try this out in a very low stakes way to see how this works for us. And there was a couple things we were trying to solve at the time, it wasn't just a place to put backup, but we also needed a place to have some files that might serve to some degree as a content delivery network, you know, some of our software applications that are deployed through our mobile device management needed a place that was accessible on the internet that they could be stored as well. So we were testing it for a couple different scenarios and it worked great, you know, performance wise, fast, security wise, it has all the features of S3 compliance that works with Nutanix and anyone who's familiar with S3 permissions can apply them very easily and then there was no egress fees, we can pull data down, put data up at will, and it's not costing as any extra, which is excellent because especially in education, we need fixed costs, we need to know what we're going to spend over a year before we spend it and not be hit with, you know, bills for egress or because our workload or our data storage footprint grew tremendously, we need that, we can't have the variability that the cloud providers would give us. >> So Kevin, you explained you're hypersensitive about security and privacy for obvious reasons that we discussed, were you concerned about doing business with a company with a funny name? Was it the trial that got you through that knothole? How did you address those concerns as an IT practitioner? >> Yeah, anytime we adopt anything, we go through a risk review. So we did our homework and we checked the funny name really means nothing, there's lots of companies with funny names, I think we don't go based on the name necessarily, but we did go based on the history, understanding, you know, who started the company, where it came from, and really looking into the technology and understanding that the value proposition, the ability to provide that lower cost is based specifically on the technology in which it lays down data. So, having a legitimate, reasonable, you know, excuse as to why it's cheap, we weren't thinking, well, you know, you get what you pay for, it may be less expensive than alternatives, but it's not cheap, you know, it's reliable, and that was really our concern. So we did our homework for sure before even starting the trial, but then the trial certainly confirmed everything that we had learned. >> Yeah, thank you for that. Drew, explain the whole egress charge, we hear a lot about that, what do people need to know? >> First of all, it's not a funny name, it's a memorable name, Dave, just like theCUBE, let's be very clear about that, second of all, egress charges, so, you know, other storage providers charge you for every API call, right? Every get, every put, every list, everything, okay, it's part of their process, it's part of how they make money, it's part of how they cover the cost of all their other services, we don't do that. And I think, you know, as Kevin has pointed out, right, that's a huge differentiator because you're talking about a significant amount of money above and beyond what is the list price. In fact, I would tell you that most of the other storage providers, hyperscalers, you know, their list price, first of all, is, you know, far exceeding anything else in the industry, especially what we offer and then, right, their additional cost, the egress costs, the API requests can be two, three, 400% more on top of what you're paying per terabyte. >> So, you used a little coffee analogy earlier in our conversation, so here's what I'm imagining, like I have a lot of stuff, right? And I had to clear up my bar and I put some stuff in storage, you know, right down the street and I pay them monthly, I can't imagine having to pay them to go get my stuff, that's kind of the same thing here. >> Oh, that's a great metaphor, right? That storage locker, right? You know, can you imagine every time you want to open the door to that storage locker and look inside having to pay a fee? >> No, that would be annoying. >> Or, every time you pull into the yard and you want to put something in that storage locker, you have to pay an access fee to get to the yard, you have to pay a door opening fee, right, and then if you want to look and get an inventory of everything in there, you have to pay, and it's ridiculous, it's your data, it's your storage, it's your locker, you've already paid the annual fee, probably, 'cause they gave you a discount on that, so why shouldn't you have unfettered access to your data? That's what Wasabi does and I think as Kevin pointed out, right, that's what sets us completely apart from everybody else. >> Okay, good, that's helpful, it helps us understand how Wasabi's different. Kevin, I'm always interested when I talk to practitioners like yourself in learning what you do, you know, outside of the technology, what are you doing in terms of educating your community and making them more cyber aware? Do you have training for students and faculty to learn about security and ransomware protection, for example? >> Yes, cyber security awareness training is definitely one of the required things everyone should be doing in their organizations. And we do have a program that we use and we try to make it fun and engaging too, right, this is often the checking the box kind of activity, insurance companies require it, but we want to make it something that people want to do and want to engage with so, even last year, I think we did one around the holidays and kind of pointed out the kinds of scams they may expect in their personal life about, you know, shipping of orders and time for the holidays and things like that, so it wasn't just about protecting our school data, it's about the fact that, you know, protecting their information is something do in all aspects of your life, especially now that the folks are working hybrid often working from home with equipment from the school, the stakes are much higher and people have a lot of our data at home and so knowing how to protect that is important, so we definitely run those programs in a way that we want to be engaging and fun and memorable so that when they do encounter those things, especially email threats, they know how to handle them. >> So when you say fun, it's like you come up with an example that we can laugh at until, of course, we click on that bad link, but I'm sure you can come up with a lot of interesting and engaging examples, is that what you're talking about, about having fun? >> Yeah, I mean, sometimes they are kind of choose your own adventure type stories, you know, they stop as they run, so they're telling a story and they stop and you have to answer questions along the way to keep going, so, you're not just watching a video, you're engaged with the story of the topic, yeah, and that's what I think is memorable about it, but it's also, that's what makes it fun, you're not just watching some talking head saying, you know, to avoid shortened URLs or to check, to make sure you know the sender of the email, no, you're engaged in a real life scenario story that you're kind of following and making choices along the way and finding out was that the right choice to make or maybe not? So, that's where I think the learning comes in. >> Excellent. Okay, gentlemen, thanks so much, appreciate your time, Kevin, Drew, awesome having you in theCUBE. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Yeah, great to be here, thanks. >> Okay, in a moment, I'll give you some closing thoughts on the changing world of data protection and the evolution of cloud object storage, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. >> Announcer: Some things just don't make sense, like showing up a little too early for the big game. >> How early are we? >> Couple months. Popcorn? >> Announcer: On and off season, the Red Sox cover their bases with affordable, best in class cloud storage. >> These are pretty good seats. >> Hey, have you guys seen the line from the bathroom? >> Announcer: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage, it just makes sense. >> You don't think they make these in left hand, do you? >> We learned today how a serial entrepreneur, along with his co-founder saw the opportunity to tap into the virtually limitless scale of the cloud and dramatically reduce the cost of storing data while at the same time, protecting against ransomware attacks and other data exposures with simple, fast storage, immutability, air gaps, and solid operational processes, let's not forget about that, okay? People and processes are critical and if you can point your people at more strategic initiatives and tasks rather than wrestling with infrastructure, you can accelerate your process redesign and support of digital transformations. Now, if you want to learn more about immutability and Object Block, click on the Wasabi resource button on this page, or go to wasabi.com/objectblock. Thanks for watching Secure Storage Hot Takes made possible by Wasabi. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, well, see you next time. (gentle upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Despite fears of inflation, supply chain issues skyrocketing energy and home prices and global instability caused by the Ukraine crisis CIOs and IT buyers continue to expect overall spending to increase more than 6% in 2022. Now, while this is lower than our 8% prediction that we made earlier this year in January, it remains in line with last year's roughly six to 7% growth and is holding firm with the expectations reported by tech executives on the ETR surveys last quarter. Hello and welcome to this week's wiki bond cube insights powered by ETR in this breaking analysis, we'll update you on our latest look at tech spending with a preliminary take from ETR's latest macro drill down survey. We'll share some insights to which vendors have shown the biggest change in spending trajectory. And we'll tap our technical analysts to get a read on what they think it means for technology stocks going forward. The IT spending sentiment among IT buyers remains pretty solid. >> In the past two months, we've had conversations with dozens of CIOs, chief digital officers data executives, IT managers, and application developers, and across the board, they've indicated that for now at least their spending levels remain largely unchanged. The latest ETR drill down data which will share shortly, confirms these anecdotal checks. However, the interpretation of this data it's somewhat nuanced. Part of the reason for the spending levels being you know reasonably strong and holding up is inflation. Stuff costs more so spending levels are higher forcing IT managers to prioritize. Now security remains the number one priority and is less susceptible to cuts, cloud migration, productivity initiatives and other data projects remain top priorities. >> So where are CIO's robbing from Peter to pay Paul to focus on these priorities? Well, we've seen a slight uptick in certain speculative. IT projects being put on hold or frozen for a period of time. And according to ETR survey data we've seen some hiring freezes reported and this is especially notable in the healthcare sector. ETR also surveyed its buyer base to find out where they were adjusting their budgets and the strategies and tactics they were using to do so. Consolidating IT vendors was by far the most cited tactic. Now this makes sense as companies in an effort to negotiate better deals will often forego investments in newer so-called best of breed products and services, and negotiate bundles from larger suppliers. You know, even though they might not be as functional, the buyers >> can get a better deal if they bundle together from one of their larger suppliers. Think Microsoft or a Dell or other, you know, large companies. ETR survey respondents also cited cutting the cloud bill where discretionary spending was in play was another strategy or tactic that they were using. We certainly saw this with some of the largest snowflake customers this past quarter. Where even though they were still growing consumption rapidly certain snowflake customers dialed down their consumption and pushed spending off to future quarters. Now remember in the case of snowflake, anyway, customers negotiate consumption rates and their pricing based on a total commitment over a period of time. So while they may consume less in one quarter, over the lifetime of the contract, snowflake, as do many other cloud companies, have good visibility on the lifetime value of a deal. Now this next chart shows the latest ETR spending expectations among more than 900 respondents. The bars represent spending growth expectations from the periods of December, 2021 that's the gray bars, March of 2022 survey in the blue, and the most recent June data, That's the yellow bar. So you can see spending expectations for the quarter is down slightly in the mid 5% range. But overall for the year expectations remain in the mid 6% range. Now it's down from 8%, 8.3% in December where it looked like 2022 was going to really be a breakout year and have more momentum than even last year. Now, remember this was before Russia invaded Ukraine which occurred in mid-February of this year. So expectations were a little higher. So look, generally speaking CIOs have told us that their CFOs and CEOs have lowered their earnings outlooks and communicated that to Wall Street. They've told us that unless and until these revised forecasts appear at risk, they continue to expect their budget levels to remain pretty constant. Now there's still plenty of momentum and spending velocity on specific vendor platforms. Let's take a look at that. >> This chart shows the companies with the greatest spending momentum as measured by ETRs proprietary net score methodology. Net score essentially measures the net percent of customers spending more on a particular platform. That measurement is shown on the Y axis. The red line there that's inserted that red dotted line at 40%, we consider to be a highly elevated mark. And the green dots are companies in the ETR survey that are near or above that line. The X axis measures the presence in the data set, how much, you know sort of pervasiveness, if you will, is in the data. It's kind of a proxy for market presence. Now, of course we all know Kubernetes is not a company, but it remains an area where organizations are spending lots of resources and time particularly to modernize and mobilize applications. Snowflake remains the company which leads all firms in spending velocity, but as you'll see momentarily, despite its highest position relative to everybody else in the survey, it's still down from its previous levels in the high seventies and low 80% range. AWS is incredibly impressive because it has an elevated level but also a big presence in the data set in the survey. Same with Microsoft, same with ServiceNow which also stands out. And you can see the other smaller vendors like HashiCorp which is increasingly being seen as a strategic cross cloud enabler. They're showing, spending momentum. The RPA vendors you see in there automation anywhere and UI path are in the mix with numerous security companies, CrowdStrike, CyberArk, Netskope, Cloudflare, Tenable Okta, Zscaler Palo Alto networks, Sale Point Fortunate. A big number of cybersecurity firms hovering at or above that 40% mark you can see pure storage remains elevated as do PagerDuty and Coupa. So plenty of good news here, despite the recent tech crash. So that was the good, here's the not so good. So >> there is no 40% line on this chart because all these companies are well below that line. Now this doesn't mean these companies are bad companies. They just don't have the spending velocity of the ones we showed earlier. A good example here is Oracle. Look how they stand out on the X axis with a huge market presence. And Oracle remains an incredibly successful company selling to high end customers and really owning that mission critical data and application space. And remember ETR measures spending activity, but not actual spending dollars. So Oracle is skewed as a result because Oracle customers spend big bucks. But the fact is that Oracle has a large legacy install base that pulls down their growth rates. And that does show up in the ETR survey data. Broadcom is another example. They're one of the most successful companies in the industry, and they're not going after growth at all costs at all. They're going after EBITDA and of course ETR doesn't measure EBIT. So just keep that in mind, as you look at this data. Now another way to look at the data and the survey, is exploring the net score movement over the last period amongst companies. So how are they moving? What's happening to the net score over time. And this chart shows the year over year >> net score change for vendors that participate in at least three sectors within the ETR taxonomy. Remember ETR taxonomy has 12, 15 different segments. So the names above or below the gray dotted line are those companies where the net score has increased or decreased meaningfully. So to the earlier chart, it's all relative, right? Look at Oracle. While having lower net scores has also shown a more meaningful improvement in net score than some of the others, as have SAP and Teradata. Now what's impressive to me here is how AWS, Microsoft, and Google are actually holding that dotted line that gray line pretty well despite their size and the other ironically interesting two data points here are Broadcom and Nutanix. Now Broadcom, of course, as we've reported and dug into, is buying VMware and, and of, of course most customers are concerned about getting hit with higher prices. Once Broadcom takes over. Well Nutanix despite its change in net scores, in a good position potentially to capture some of that VMware business. Just yesterday, I talked to a customer who told me he migrated his entire portfolio off VMware using Nutanix AHV, the Acropolis hypervisor. And that was in an effort to avoid the VTEX specifically. Now this was a smaller customer granted and it's not representative of what I feel is Broadcom's ICP the ideal customer profile, but look, Nutanix should benefit from the Broadcom acquisition. If it can position itself to pick up the business that Broadcom really doesn't want. That kind of bottom of the pyramid. One person's trash is another's treasure as they say, okay. And here's that same chart for companies >> that participate in less than three segments. So, two or one of the segments in the ETR taxonomy. Only three names are seeing positive movement year over year in net score. SUSE under the leadership of amazing CEO, Melissa Di Donato. She's making moves. The company went public last year and acquired rancher labs in 2020. Look, we know that red hat is the big dog in Kubernetes but since the IBM acquisition people have looked to SUSE as a possible alternative and it's showing up in the numbers. It's a nice business. It's going to do more than 600 million this year in revenue, SUSE that is. It's got solid double digit growth in kind of the low teens. It's profitability is under pressure but they're definitely a player that is found a niche and is worth watching. The SolarWinds, What can I say there? I mean, maybe it's a dead cat bounce coming off the major breach that we saw a couple years ago. Some of its customers maybe just can't move off the platform. Constant contact we really don't follow and don't really, you know, focus on them. So, not much to say there. Now look at all the high priced earning stocks or infinite PE stocks that have no E and divide by zero or a negative number and boom, you have infinite PE and look at how their net scores have dropped. We've reported extensively on snowflake. They're still number one as we showed you earlier, net score, but big moves off their highs. Okta, Datadog, Zscaler, SentinelOne Dynatrace, big downward moves, and you can see the rest. So this chart really speaks to the change in expectations from the COVID bubble. Despite the fact that many of these companies CFOs would tell you that the pandemic wasn't necessarily a tailwind for them, but it certainly seemed to be the case when you look back in some of the ETR data. But a big question in the community is what's going to happen to these tech stocks, these tech companies in the market? We reached out to both Eric Bradley of ETR who used to be a technical analyst on Wall Street, and the long time trader and breaking analysis contributor, Chip Symington to get a read on what they thought. First, you know the market >> first point of the market has been off 11 out of the past 12 weeks. And bare market rallies like what we're seeing today and yesterday, they happen from time to time and it was kind of expected. Chair Powell's testimony was broadly viewed as a positive by the street because higher interest rates appear to be pushing commodity prices down. And a weaker consumer sentiment may point to a less onerous inflation outlook. That's good for the market. Chip Symington pointed out to breaking analysis a while ago that the NASDAQ has been on a trend line for the past six months where its highs are lower and the lows are lower and that's a bad sign. And we're bumping up against that trend line here. Meaning if it breaks through that trend it could be a buying signal. As he feels that tech stocks are oversold. He pointed to a recent bounce in semiconductors and cited the Qualcomm example. Here's a company trading at 12 times forward earnings with a sustained 14% growth rate over the next couple of years. And their cash flow is able to support their 2.4, 2% annual dividend. So overall Symington feels this rally was absolutely expected. He's cautious because we're still in a bear market but he's beginning to, to turn bullish. And Eric Bradley added that He feels the market is building a base here and he doesn't expect a 1970s or early 1980s year long sideways move because of all the money that's still in the system. You know, but it could bounce around for several months And remember with higher interest rates there are going to be more options other than equities which for many years has not been the case. Obviously inflation and recession. They are like two looming towers that we're all watching closely and will ultimately determine if, when, and how this market turns around. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to my colleagues, Stephanie Chan, who helps research breaking analysis topics sometimes, and Alex Myerson who is on production in the podcast. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight they help get the word out and do all of our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our Editor in Chief over at siliconangle.com and does some wonderful editing for breaking analysis. Thank you. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search breaking analysis podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And of course you can reach me by email at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at DVellante comment on my LinkedIn post and please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE insights powered by ETR. Stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (soft music)

(light, upbeat music) >> The last decade of cloud computing introduced and popularized an operating model that emphasized, simplified IT infrastructure provisioning and management. As well, it ushered in an era of consumption-based pricing and much more facile IT management, generally. Now these principles, they've bled into traditional data centers, which have increasingly become software led, programmable and DevOps centric. Now as we enter the post isolation era, it's ironic that not only are IT executives pursuing hybrid strategies, but everyone is talking about hybrid. Hybrid work, hybrid teams, hybrid events, hybrid meetings. The world has gone hybrid and the cloud is no exception. The cloud is expanding. Public cloud models are pushing to the data center and the edge on premises infrastructure is connecting to public clouds and managing data workflows and infrastructure across clouds and out to the edge. Now most leading technology executives that I speak with, they're essentially architecting their own clouds. And what I mean by that is they're envisioning and building an abstraction layer that hides the complexity of the underlying infrastructure and manages workloads intelligently. The end customer doesn't know or care where the data is, as long as it's secure, properly governed, and could be accessed quickly, all irrespective of physical location. Now for the most part, this vision, it can't be bought off the shelf. It needs to be built by placing bets on key technology partners and leveraging the so-called API economy. In other words, picking technology vendors that I trust in programmatically codifying and automating where possible my organizational edicts and business requirements into my own cloud to uniquely support my application portfolio in my modern business processes, which by the way, are rapidly evolving. Now, a key to enabling this vision is optionality. Meaning, not getting locked into one single technology platform, but rather having the confidence that as technology evolves, which it always does, I can focus my energies on adding value to my business through process innovation and human capital growth. Hello, everyone and welcome to this cube conversation and video exclusive on a major new industry development and partnership that's designed to maximize customer infrastructure options and move the new era of hybrid cloud computing forward. We have two industry leaders joining us today. Monica Kumar is the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market from Nutanix, and David Farrell is the senior vice president and general manager for global strategic alliances at Red Hat. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Good to be here today. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, so Red Hat is the poster child for open source success and it's executing on a strategy based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, RHEL and OpenShift, the industry's leading container platform, to drive cloud-like experiences. Nutanix is a pioneering company and was the first to truly envision and successfully bring to market a cloud operating model to data center infrastructure. So you two, are getting together and forming a deeper, more substantive relationship. So Monica, tell us about the hard news. What's the scoop? >> Yeah, of course. So, first of all, I'm so excited to be here with David Farrell from Red Hat and for those of you who may not know this, I have a very deep personal connection with Red Hat from my previous role as well. I've been working with Red Hat since the early 2000s. So it gives me great pleasure to be here on behalf of Nutanix and with David from Red Hat, to be announcing a formal strategic partnership to deliver open hybrid multi-cloud solutions. Now let me explain to you what I mean by that. This partnership that we're announcing today is going to enable best-in-class solutions for building, scaling and managing containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in of course, hyper-converged infrastructure environments. So the collaboration is going to bring together these industry-leading technologies. Enabling and integrating Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, onto the Nutanix cloud platform, which includes, you know, our well-known Nutanix AOS and AHV hypervisor technologies. Now the question is, why are we doing all this? It's because of, as you said, Dave, the rapid evolution of hybrid cloud strategies and adoption of containers and Kubernetes in our customer base to develop, deploy and manage apps. And what we're hearing from our customers is that they want this integration between Red Hat Technologies and Nutanix Solutions. >> Okay. Thank you, Monica. So big news David, from Red Hat's perspective. Okay. So Red Hat, Nutanix, both leaders in their respective fields. David, what spurred the decision to partner from your standpoint? >> Yeah. And listen, let me echo Monica's comments as well. So we're really excited about the partnership with Nutanix. And we're excited because Nutanix is the leader in hybrid cloud infrastructure, but we're even more excited because this is what customers have been asking us to do. And that's really at the core of the decision. I think both teams, both companies have been listening to customers and we've got a groundswell of enterprise customers around the world that are asking us to come together. Bring our technologies together from a certification perspective, which Monica spoke about, right, is number one. So RHEL and OpenShift being certified on top of AHV, right. To provide the best-in-class service for enterprise grade applications, but there's more to it than just the certification. Like customers are looking for a world-class integrated support experience as well as they go into, into production. So we also have integrated support, right. So customers can contact Nutanix, they can contact Red Hat and having that seamless, that seamless experience is really, really critical and something that our customers have been asking us for. And then we'll continue to work from a roadmap perspective as well, from an engineering perspective, to make sure that our roadmaps are aligned and the customers have assurance over time and continuity over time so that they can make investments that they know are going to pay off and be safe investments and scalable investments over the long arc of their technology horizon, so. So those are, those are kind of our view of why this is good for customers and back to your points, David, it's about choice and optionality, right? And choice and consistency, and I think the verdict is in now, in the industry, that hybrid is the future, right? Everybody kind of agrees on that, right? In certain applications and certain workloads are going to run on-prem, others are going to run on the public cloud, and customers need choice to be able to decide what's the right destination for those workloads. And that's what Red Hat's all about, that's what RHEL's all about, what OpenShift is all about, is that it runs on any cloud infrastructure. Now it runs on Nutanix HCI. >> So I liked that two, one virtual throat to choke, or maybe better put, maybe one virtual hand to shake. So David staying with you, maybe you could talk about some of the other key terms of the partnership. Maybe focus on joint solutions that the customers can expect and I'm particularly interested in the engineering collaboration. I know there's a go-to-market component, but the engineering collaboration and technology innovation that we can expect. >> Yeah. So there's a few components to it, David. One is, obviously as I talked about roadmap, right. And that's, you know, our technology teams coming together, looking at the existing roadmaps for RHEL and OpenShift, but also adjacent capabilities that are coming from the Red Hat portfolio and capabilities that are coming from our ISV ecosystems and our respective ecosystems. This is a big win for our partners, as well, that have been asking us to work together. So we'll continue to keep the radar up about what some of those functionalities and capabilities ought to be. Whether we make them or somebody else makes them to pull into the, pull into the strategy, if you will. The second big principle around joint engineering is going to be around customer experience, right. So for example, we're starting off with the agnostic installer and by the way, this is coming Thursday, right? I think we're live on Thursday, the 29th, right? So this is in market, it is GA, it's available today, the 29th, right. And then we will move to the, to the UPI- so sorry, to the IPI installer in the second half of this year, right. To provide a more automated experience and then I think on the Nutanix side, Monica can, can talk to this, that Nutanix is building APIs to also automate installation, right? So first and foremost, we're all about getting the solution and getting the jointly engineered technologies working together and providing a superior customer experience for our customers that are deploying Red Hat on top of Nutanix. And that's going to be the guiding, the guiding driver, if you will, for how we work together. >> Yeah. And let me add to that. Like you said, we are, the engineering is already bearing fruit for our customers, right. As of today, when we announcing, we already have certified versions of Red Hat Linux with AHV, number one. Number two, as you said, the agnostic installer is available. We will make the automated installer available so any customer can deploy OpenShift using the Nutanix cloud platform in the very near future, right. Those are the two sort of the beginnings of the engineering and this is going to, this is a longterm partnership, so we will continue to evolve the different configurations that we, you know, that we test and that we validate as well as we go on. So I'm really excited about the fact that we are going to be offering customers fully tested, validated configurations to deploy. (cross talk) >> Go ahead >> David if I may just in there as well, I mean, so that's on the engineering side, right. But there'll also be an important thing, customers expect us to cooperate in to engage proactively as we face them, right. So that both the Red Hat, part of the agreement is that both the Red Hat and the Nutanix field teams, right the customer teams, will also be enabled, right. We'll do technical enablement for our teams, stand up proof of technologies, right. So that we're burning in some of the technology, if you will, and working out the kinks before the customer has to, right. And this is also a key value proposition is we're doing this work upstream, both in the engineering teams and in the field engagement teams so that customers can get time to market, if you will, and speed of solution deployment. >> Got it. So we'd love to talk about the sweet spot, the ideal customer profile at ICP. So is there a particular type of customer Monica, that stands to benefit most from the partnership and the certifications that you're committing to? >> Yeah. I mean, if you look at, you know, cloud native app development, that's happening across all types of segments, but particularly, you know, enterprise customers running, in all industries practically, running tier one applications or building custom applications in the cloud would be a great focus for this. Our customers who are mature in their cloud native journeys and want to build and run cloud native workloads at scale would be another type of audience. I mean, when you really think about the gamut of customers we serve jointly together, it's all the way from, you know, mid-sized customers who are, who may want a complete solution that's built for them, to enterprise customers and even globals accounts that are actually doing a lot of custom application development and then deploying things at scale. So really, I mean, anybody who's developing applications, anybody who's running workloads, you know, database workloads, applications that they're building, analytics workloads, I think for all of them. This is a very beneficial solution and I would say specifically from a Nutanix customer perspective, we've had a demand for, you know, the certification with AHV and RHEL for a long time. So that's something our customers are very much looking forward to. We have a large number of customers who already are deploying that configuration and now they know it's fully tested, fully supported, and there's an ongoing roadmap from both companies to support it. And then as far as OpenShift goes, we are super excited about the possibilities of providing that optionality to customers and really meeting them at every level of their journey to the cloud. >> So you got the product level certifications, that to me is all about trust and it's kind of table stakes, but if I have that, now I can, I can lean in. What other kind of value dimensions should we be thinking about with regard to this, this partnership? I mean, obviously, you know, cost savings, you know, speed, things like that, but maybe you could sort of add more color to that. >> Yeah. Well, absolutely, look. I mean, anytime there's joint there's integration, there is complexity that's taken out of deployment from the customer's hands and the vendors do the work upfront, that results in a lot of different benefits. Including productivity benefits, speed to market benefits, total cost of ownership benefits, as you said. So we expect that the fact that the two companies are now going to do all this work upfront for our customers, they'll be able to deploy and do things that we're doing, you know, much faster than before, right? So that's, you know, definitely we believe, and then also joined support. I think David mentioned that, the fact that we are offering joint support as well to our customers we'll be problem solving together. So the seamless support experience will provide faster resolution for our joint customers. >> Great. David, I wonder if you could kind of share your view of you know, thinking about the Nutanix cloud platform, what makes it well suited for supporting OpenShift and cloud native workloads? >> Well, I think the, look first off, they're the leader, right. They bring the most trusted and tried HCI environment in the industry to bear for customers, right. And they deliver on the promises that Monica just went through, right, around simplicity, around ease of use, around scalability, around optionality, right. And they take that complexity away and that's what customers I think are telling both Red Hat and Nutanix, and really everybody for that matter, right. Is that they want to focus on the business outcomes, on the business value, on the applications, that differentiate them. And Nutanix really takes away a lot of that complexity for the customer at the infrastructure level, right. And then RHEL, and OpenShift and Red Hat do that as well, both at the infrastructure level and at the application level, right. So when it comes to simplicity, and when it comes to choice, but consistency, both Nutanix and Red Hat have that at the core of how we build and how we engineer products that we take to market to remove that complexity so the customers can move quickly, more cost-effectively, and have that optionality that they're after. >> Yeah and David, if I may add to that, and thank you again for saying the things you said, that's exactly why our customers choose us. One of the key factors is our distributed architecture as well, because of the way it's architected, the Nutanix cloud platform delivers an environment that's highly scalable and resilient, and it's well suited for enterprise deployments of Red Hat, OpenShift at scale. The platform also includes, you know, fully integrated unified storage, which addresses many of the challenging problems faced by operators routinely in configuring and managing storage for stateful containers, for example. So there's a lot of goodness there and the combination of Red Hat, both you know, RHEL and OpenShift, any 10x platform, I believe, offers really unparalleled value to our customers in terms of the technology we bring and the integration we bring to our customers. >> Okay, great. Last question, David, maybe you first, and then Monica, you can bring us home. Where do you guys want to see this partnership going? >> We want to see it going where, customers are getting the most value of course, right. And we would like to see obviously adoption, right. So, anytime two leaders like ourselves come together, it's all about delivering for the customer. We've got a long list of customers that have been asking us, as Monica said to do this, and it's overwhelming, right. So we're responding to that. We've got a pipeline of, of customers that we're already beginning to engage on. And so we'll measure our progress based upon adoption, right, and how customers adopt the solution, the shared solution as we go forward. How they're feeding back to us, the value that they're getting, and also encouraging them to engage with us around the roadmap and where we take the solution, right. So I think those are ways that, you know, we'll be focused on adoption and satisfaction around it across the marketplace and the degree of interaction and input we get from customers with respect to the roadmap. And Monica, how do you feel about it? >> Yeah. What's success look like Monica? >> Yeah, look, we all know that technology is a means to an end, right? And the end is solving customer problems, as David said. For us, success will be when we have many, many, many, joined happy customers that are getting benefit from our platform. To me, this is just the beginning of our relationship to help customers. The best is yet to come. I'm super excited, as I said, for many reasons, but specifically, because we know there's a huge demand out there for this integrated solution between Red Hat and Nutanix and we'll start delivering it to our customers. So we've been, we'll be working very closely with our customers to see how that option goes, and we want to delight them with this, with our joint solution. That's our goal. >> Thank you. Well, David, you kind of alluded to it. Customers have been looking forward to this for quiet some time, and number of us have been thinking about this happening and to me, the key, is you're actually putting some real muscle behind it as seen in the engineering resources. And you got to have that type of commitment before you really go forward, otherwise, it's just kind of a yeah a nice press release, nice party deal, this isn't. So congratulations on figuring this out. Good luck. And we'll be really excited to watch your progress. Appreciate you guys coming to theCUBE. Okay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCube. We'll see you next time. (light, upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (techno music) Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. One of the biggest topics we've been digging into as we head through 2020, has really been multi-cloud and as the customers as they're really going through their own transformations understanding what they're doing in their data center to modernize what's happening between all of the public clouds they use, and all the services that fit amongst them. Happy to bring back one of our CUBE alumni to dig into a specific topic. Simon Taylor, who's the CEO of HYCU. Of course data protection, a big piece. A big buzz in the industry for a number of years, in one of those areas, in multi-cloud, that's definitely of big importance. Simon, great to see you, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me back on, it's exciting to be here. >> All right, so, Simon, first, give us the update. >> Sure. >> It's 2020. We've seen you at many of the conferences we go to. You're based in Boston, so not to far for you to come out to our Boston area studio here. You know a 40 minute drive without traffic so, >> Not bad at all. >> give us the latest on HYCU. >> Certainly well and Stu, thanks again for having me into your studio, it's gorgeous, everything looks great. It's a lot easier than traveling over to Europe to see you. So this is very very convenient actually. But since we last spoke, which I think was about six months ago now, HYCU has been growing fast and furiously, you know we started out with the world's first purpose built backup and recovery product for Nutanix Of course, we added VMware we added Google Cloud, we wrapped all the data together into multi-cloud data protection as a service, and we called that HYCU Protege. Well I am so thrilled to announce that in just the three months since we've launched Protege, we have seen hundreds of customers flocking to it. And what we're finding is that customers are calling us and they're saying things like, "let me get this straight, "I'm already backing up my data on-prem with you, "I can now migrate to the cloud, "bring it back again for disaster recovery as a service, "and it's all part of HYCU?" and we say yes, you know, and they say, "and this is all offered as a service?" Yes, "and it's natively integrated "into all the platforms that I'm using?" Yes. And I think so customers today, are more and more in need of the kind of expertise that HYCUs providing because they're looking now much more strategically than ever before, at what workloads to leave on-prem and which workloads to migrate to the cloud, and they want to make sure that, that entire data pathway is protected from beginning to end. >> Yeah, it's really interesting stuff, I think back to early in my career that you know that data protection layer was like, "well, this is what I'm running "and don't change it." Think about like when you've rolled out like virtual tape as a technology it was, you know, "I don't want to have to change my backup "because that is just something that runs "and I don't do it." For last five years or so it feels like customers. There's so much change in their environment that they are looking for things that are more flexible, you talked about some of the flexible adoption models for payment and the like that they're looking for. So, you know, what do you think customers are just more embracing of that change, is it just that changes their daily business and therefore data protection needs to come along with that. Well it's funny you asked because just a few years ago I was on theCUBE with you and you said to me, "you guys have a perpetual license model, "what are you doing about that?" and I said, "don't worry, it is shifting to as a service it's going subscription," which was super important for the market is, I've had conversations with folks who are selling cooking gear and they're trying to sell that as a service, I saw yesterday, somebody, I think Panera Bread, is offering a coffee as a service. You know, I think what we've started to realize is that the convenience of the as a service model, the flexibility, which I would argue was probably driven by cloud technology and cloud technology adoption, is something the market has truly embraced and I think anybody who's not moved in that direction at this point is probably very much being left behind. >> Okay, another technology that often goes hand in hand in discussion with data protection is security. Of course ransomware is a hot topic conversation the last few years, how does that fit into your conversations with customers, what are you saying? >> That's a great question. So you know one of our advisory board members, his name is Kevin Powers, and he runs the Boston College cyber security program. I had the privilege and the honor of attending the FBI Boston College cyber program recently at a large scale event at Boston College, and FBI Director Ray was actually on hand to talk about this problem, and it was incredible you know he said, "cyber crime as a service "is becoming a major issue," you're talking about the commoditization of hard to build malware, that's now just skyrocketing off the charts, the amount of cyber exploitation that's going on across the world. This is creating massive massive issues for the FBI because they've got so many thousands of cases, they've got to deal with. And while they're doing a fantastic job. We believe prevention is certainly the key. So one of the things that has been really really wonderful as a CEO to watch has been the way that some of our customers have actually been able to crack the code in terms of not having to give in to these bad actors. We've had actual customers who have had ransomware attacks had millions of dollars in data, literally stolen from them, and they've been told, "you've got to deposit, "$5 million on this Bitcoin account by midnight, "or we're deleting the data." Right? Because HYCU is Linux based because HYCU is not Windows Server based because HYCU is natively integrated into all the platforms that we support. We were able to help those customers get their data back without paying a penny. So I think that that's one of those moments where you really sort of say to yourself, "God I'm glad I'm in this business here," we've built a product that doesn't just do what we say it's going to do, it does a heck of a lot more. And I think it's it's absolutely a massive problem and data protection is really a key part of the answer, >> You know it's great to hear their success stories there, you know I think back to earlier days where it'd be like well you know what if I set up for disasters and data protection and things like that, well maybe I haven't thought about it or maybe I kind of implemented it but I've never really tested it, but there's more and more reasons why I might actually need to leverage these technologies that I've deployed, and it's nice to know that they're there. You know it's not just an insurance thing that I've never used. >> Oh absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right. So I started off our discussion time in talking about multi-cloud So you talked about earlier we first first met it was at the Nutanix shows in their environments, and some of that you've gone along with Nutanix as they've gone through hybrid and multi-cloud what they call enterprise Cloud Messaging. >> Sure. >> And play with those environments so bring us up to speed. What have your big customers doing with cloud where does HYCU fit in and what are the updates on your product. >> Yeah, sure. And I'll start off by saying that at this point about a third of all AHV customers are using a HYCU for backup AND recovery. >> And just for our audience that doesn't know, AHV of course is Nutanix's >> Yes. >> Acropolis Hypervisor >> Absolutely. >> That comes baked into their solution as an alternative to people like VMware. >> Perfectly said as always sir, yes very much, and you know we've been thrilled as the rise of AHV and Nutanix has sort of taken the market by storm. And when we started out, you know we use to came on the show with zero customers and a new product and said, "we believe in AHV and we think it's going to be great "and we're going to back it up." And that's really paid off in spades for us, which was wonderful, but we also recognize that customers needed that VMware backups. We built a VADP integration and then we started going after the public cloud. So we started with Google Cloud, and we said we're going to build the world's first purpose built backup and recovery as a service for GCP. We launched that last year and it was tremendous you know some of the world's largest companies and organizations and governments are actually now running HYCU specifically for Google Cloud. So we've been thrilled about that. I think the management team at GCP has done a terrific job of making sure that Google can be really competitive in the cloud wars, and we're thrilled to support them. >> Yeah, and I'm glad you've got some customer stories on Google because you know the industry watchers out there it's like, "well you know Google they're number three," and you know we know that Google has some really strong data products Where they're very well known but I'm curious when you're talking to your customers. Is there anything that's kind of commonalities to why customers are using Google and you know what feedback you're hearing from your customers out there. >> Sure I mean I'll start off by saying this, we've polled our customers and we've now got over 1,300 customers in 56 countries. So we polled all of them and we just said, "how many data silos do you have, "how many platforms, how many clouds?" The average was five. Right, so the first thing to say is that I think almost all of these large enterprise customers in public sector and private sector are really using all of them, the extent to which they may be using AWS versus Azure versus GCP, versus Nutanix versus VMware on-prem. we can argue and debate but I think all customers at this point of any size and scale are trying them all out. I think what Google's done really well is they've started to build a really strong partner program. I think where they were a little bit sort of late to the party in terms of AWS and Azure being there sort of first. But I think what Thomas Kurian did when he came in is he sort of tripled down on sort of building out that ecosystem and saying, "what's really important "to make cloud customers comfortable "that their data is going to be as safe on Google Cloud, "as it was on-prem," and I'm thrilled that they've elected to make data protection sort of one of the key pillars of that strategy, not just because we're a data protection company, but because I do think that that was one of the encumbrances in terms of that evolution to cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, seen a huge growth in the ecosystem around Google. The other big cloud provider that has a very strong partner ecosystem is the one when I went to the show last year, their CEO Satya Nadella talked about trust, so of course talking about Microsoft and Azure, very large ecosystem there, trying to emphasize, maybe against others and by the way you saw this as much of a shot against Google >> Sure. >> you know, how do I trust Google with my data and information from the consumer side as AWS is I might be concerned that they might be competing against them. So, how about the Microsoft relationship? >> It's a great question. So again, so when we started on-prem, with our initial purpose built backup recovery products. We added Google Cloud. You know I'm now thrilled to announce that we're also going to be launching Azure backup and recovery. It's also native, it is purpose built into the Azure Marketplace. All the things you've come to expect from HYCU backup. The simplicity, the fact that it's SLO based. The fact that you can actually go in and decide how many times a day you want a different recovery point et cetera. All of those levels of configuration are now baked in to HYCUs own purpose built backup and recovery as a service for Azure. But I think the important thing to remember about this wonderful wonderful new addition to our portfolio. Is that, it is a critical component of HYCU Protege. So getting back to your question from before about multi-cloud data protection and what we're seeing, we call this the year of migration, because for all of these cloud platforms, what are they really trying to do they need to move massive amounts of data in a safe and resilient manner, to the cloud. So remember after we built out these purpose built backup recovery services, Azure is now one of those. We then pulled all that data together under a single pane of glass we called it HYCU Protege. We then said to customers, we're going to enable you to automatically migrate with the touch of a button an entire workload to the cloud, and then bring it back again for disaster recovery, and we will protect the data on-prem in the cloud and back again. >> Yeah, it's interesting 'cause when we kind of look at what's happening in the marketplace, for many years it was a discussion of what's moving from the data center to the public cloud, some things are moving back from the environment edge, of course, pulls things even further. Often it's, I say it's not even migration anymore it's just mobility, because we are going to be moving things and spinning things up and building things in many more places, and it's going to change. As we started out that conversation, there's so much change going on that so you're giving customers some optionality there, so that this isn't just a one way, you know, let's stick it on a truck put it on this thing and get it to that environment but I need to be able to enable some of that optionality and know what I'm doing today but also knowing that you know six months a year from now, we know things are going to be different >> Yes, yes! >> And in each of these some of those environments. >> Absolutely. We call it the three Ds data assurance, data mobility, and disaster recovery. So I think the ability to not only protect your data, whether it's on-prem as it journeys to the cloud or whether it's in the cloud, the ability to actually assist the customer in the migration. And what I hear time and time again is, "oh but Azure has a tool," or "Google has a tool for migration." Of course they have tools for migration, but I think the challenge for customers is, how do I affect that data resiliency, how do I ensure that I can move the data as a complete workload. Moving an entire SAP HANA instance, for example, to the cloud. And it protected the entire time as it journeys up there, and then bring it back for the disaster recovery without professional services. Because again, you know HYCU it's about simplicity, we want to make sure that these customers can get the same level of readiness, the same ease of deployment that they get from their cloud vendor, when they're thinking about the data protection and the migration. >> All right, I want to click down one layer >> Please. >> in here. We're talking about multi-cloud, you talk about simplicity. >> Sure. >> Well, Kubernetes might not be the simplest thing out there but it absolutely is a fundamental piece of the infrastructure in a multi-cloud environment so you know your partners, Google with GKE, Azure with AKS and >> And Carbon. >> Carbon with a K from Nutanix everyone now, I say it's not about distributions it's really every platform that you're going to use is going to have Kubernetes built into it so what does that mean from a data protection standpoint? Do you just plug into all of these environments you've tested it got customers using it? >> It's a great question it comes up, as you can imagine, all the time. I think it's something that is becoming more and more ready for prime time. A lot of the major vendors are moving to it, making heavy investments in Kubernetes, we ourselves have over 100 customers that are actively using Kubernetes in one form or another and backing the data up using HYCU so there's no question in my mind that HYCU is Kubernetes ready. I think what's really exciting for us is some of the native integrations we're working on with Google and with Nutanix so whether it's Carbon whether it's GKE, we want to make sure that when we work with these platforms that we mimic, how the platform is supporting Kubernetes, so that our customers can get the same experience from HYCU that they're getting from the platform provider itself. >> All right, Simon want to give you the final word. Bring us inside your customers what they're doing with multi-cloud and where HYCU fits there, here in 2020. Sure, we talked about prime time. Cloud for many years has been something that I think large enterprises have talked a big game about, but have been really dipping their toe in the water with. What we've seen the last two years, is a massive massive at scale migration to the largest three public clouds, whether that's GCP, whether that's Azure or the other one. (laughing) We're thrilled to support GCP and Azure because GCP and Azure, we believe do provide the most value to our customers. But I think the name of the game here is not just supporting a customer in the cloud, it's understanding that every customer today is to is on a journey, whether they're on-prem, whether their journeying to cloud or they're in cloud those three Ds, data assurance, which is our backup, data mobility, which is the automated migration, or disaster recovery readiness. That's the name of the game and that's how HYCU wants to help. >> All right, Simon Taylor. Always a pleasure to catch up with you thank you so much for the HYCU updates, >> Stu thanks so much for having us on. >> All right, be sure to check out www.thecube.net for all of our inventory of the shows that we've been at the videos we've done, you can even search on keywords in companies, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (Techno Music)

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of next here in Copenhagen. We are of course here at the Nutanix show. We are wrapping up a fantastic today show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Been Cosa hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Simon Taylor. He is the CEO of haiku, a good friend of the cube. Thank you so much for coming back on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. It's great to see you guys again. Final guest. Oh my gosh. It's a, it's a fare to stay interested in your energy. Yes. So for our viewers who are not as familiar with haiku, tell us a little bit about your business and how you are a strategic partner of Nutanix. >> Sure, sure. So haiku actually is a software company that focuses on data protection as a service. We actually started by spinning out of a much larger company called calm train that had about a thousand engineers and was doing all sorts of things, but they had an amazing talent for building backup and recovery software. >>Um, my vision was really that we can move up the value chain and we can establish ourselves as our own brand, as long as we could find a place in the market that was fast growing, building like a rocket ship and was really requiring a new kind of data protection and backup. And honestly, as soon as we fell, we saw Nutanix, we sort of fell in love. We realized that, you know, they had developed an entirely new category of business with hyperconverged and they were really a pioneer in that space. So we said is why don't we build the world's first purpose-built backup and recovery for Nutanix? And that's exactly what we did. And I think, you know, Stu was actually one of the first people to ever hear about it. Uh, we came on the cube and we talked about that. We've GA that in 2017 in July. I think@that.next, um, so just two and a half years later, we now have 1200 customers and we're in 62 countries around the world. So it's been absolutely astonishing. It's been wonderful growth. We're seeing 300% year over year growth. Uh, and really a lot of that is just based on our ability to protect the data of Nutanix customers around the world. >>Well and and Simon, right? That early question was, is new CanOx is going to be big enough to support ISV is that, you know, can run the, you know, grow their business underneath them before we get further and talk about mine and everything. Give us a little bit, you know, the state of the state for haiku because started with Nutanix, but that's not the only solution they are offering Dave. So just give us kind of the snapshot of the whole business. >>What we realized as we were building out high Q in this purpose build backup recovery for new TEDx. We said that's the on-prem, you know, but there's a lot of on prem that is still legacy three tier architecture. So we added a VMware product. But really the goal was to offer true multi-cloud data protection as a service. So what we did is we built the independent purpose-built backup and recovery service from Nutanix, one for VMware. Then we built the world's first purpose build backup as a service for Google cloud. And I'm really thrilled to announce the next month we're launching Azure backup as well. And the brilliant thing about our system and our solution is that we actually enabled customers to not only back up their data independently for that cloud, but that then migrate their data to whatever other cloud they want to use. So we actually becomes data protection as a service, data migration, and dr. >>So for, for customers, this is wonderful, but how is it to be strategic partners with all of these big players? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think you have to place your bets, right? So if you notice, I didn't say AWS and almost every company that I talked to says, why wouldn't you start with AWS? They're the biggest, you know, that's never been our philosophy. You know, I think the fact that we attach ourselves to Nutanix so early, not just because they were a rocket ship on fire, but also because we truly believed in their vision. We believe in the Nutanix products, we love Daraja entire philosophy around simplicity and customer delight and we felt like we could be students of Nutanix, we could actually build out our product with those same philosophies and principles in mind. You know? So I think really going deep with Nutanix is number one for us remains number one. I would also say though that you know, Google has been an excellent partner and Microsoft been an excellent partner. So with the large cloud providers you have to take a different approach. You cannot offer a downloadable product, right? All of our public cloud backup and recovery is a true managed service. You go into their app store, you turn it on rather than download it, you configure and you're able to perform all your backup and do all your recovery right from the console. >>All right, so Simon let, let's get into the kind of the, the, the guts of what's happening at Nutanix. Mine, of course is a partnership to extend for data protection, partnering with Veeam and haikus as a, as the first two partners. Uh, the other thing that everybody's pretty excited about is XY clusters. And that sounds like, and we've talked to Newtanics people, you know, as Nutanix brings their stack into the clouds, not just on the clouds, will that pull things like mine along with them. And so, so give us what you're seeing with mine first and maybe he's, I clusters along. >>Yeah. So maybe we start with mine, right? This whole concept that I think that these guys have pioneered and they've done a really terrific job of it. I think, you know, the, the vision there, and you know, I count marketing or Meyer in this group and Tim Isaacs and some wonderful folks on the product team in Nutanix. Their vision was, you know, there's rubric and there's Cohesity, there's these sort of large secondary storage platforms. Personally, when I look at them, what I see as Newtanics with a backup workload, right? And I think that, you know, Nutanix being the original is the best. It's the most complete solution. And it's very, very comprehensive. So I think the, the tannics folks understood this intuitively and their idea was instead of us building our own backup and going after that space, we've got amazing partners like haiku. Why don't we just natively integrate them into the mind platform and offer that sort of secondary storage workload, uh, as a key part of Nutanix is product proposition. >>So the really exciting thing for us is that we are skewed up with Nutanix. Nutanix, we'll be able to resell haiku as a part of mine. Uh, and I think that's gonna really complete their end tour tire story when it comes to being able to own the data center, uh, and really own the sort of cloud in general. You know. So I think your second question still was about clusters. And I think that the answer there is very simple. You know, multi Gloucester is, has become extremely important for Nutanix customers. They've done a great job of going after that. The simple fact is if you don't support XY clusters as a backup vendor, you really can't compete in this market. So I'm really thrilled to announce, of course, that haiku is the first backup recovery vendor that does support. Gluster. >>Okay. So interesting. We talked about how you hadn't done a solution for AWS. Sounds like this might be a path for you to get with Nutanix onto AWS. >>Absolutely, absolutely. And again, for us it's not about looking for some Trojan horse or backdoor into a go to market strategy. It's about making sure that the customers are truly delighted by the value that we provide. And I think that when we go after a specific market, we want to do it the best, you know, so we don't go shallow and just sort of check the box. We want to make sure, for example, when we build out Azure that we're not just dealing with, you know, the, the general principle of backing up and keeping things consistent. We want to make sure the applications people are running on Azure or supported by haiku. That's what we do with Nutanix. That's what we do with GCP. We want to always go as deep as possible so we can really compliment the platform in a really, really comprehensive way. >>One of the things you said earlier was that your philosophy is very much aligned with Nutanix, your your end goal to simplify and delight the customer, uh, this, this much more intuitive, uh, youth and user interface. So talk a little bit about how you, you said you wanted to become a student of Nutanix, yo, this, this cross company learning is very interesting to me. How, how, what have you learned? Yeah. What have you learned and how do you go about being tutored by your customers? >>No, I'm a very visual guy, right? And whenever I think about Nutanix, I always had this image in my head. All right. Whenever I thought about legacy, three-tier architecture and the move to hyperconverged, rather, I always pictured an 80 stereo system. Remember those big eighties boxes? And they have all the graphic equalizers and all the way down. And some kid would come and push them all down. You could never reset the darn things, you know? And then along comes, you know, automation and suddenly, you know, you press a button and you listen to jazz and it sounds like good jazz and the treble and the bass all fixed themselves. You know, I effectively think that Nutanix brought that same concept, funnily enough into the data center. They simplified so much that was impossible to handle for admins across the world. They made it so simple to use their product that actually the customers could start to enjoy their work more. >>And I really love that. That's a true, that's a really an intangible sort of value proposition that I think people don't talk about it enough. Yes, you want to save time. Yes, you want to save money, but if you could enjoy your job more as a result of getting a product, what's better than that? Um, so I think that philosophy is something we baked into haiku in the following ways. You know, the first is when we were designing the UI, we wanted it to look and feel like the platform it supports. So when you use haiku for Nutanix, it looks like prism, when you are using our console for GCP, you're gonna feel like you're using GCP. The idea is that backup and recovery should be an extension of that cloud expression, that platform, so that the customer who is an expert with that platform can easily manage this with no training at all. So again, driving that simplicity right there and in the platform. >>Yeah. So Simon, you know, one of the things we love to do is get hear from customers and what they're doing. Of course you've got 1200 customers that are Nutanix customers. So we'd love to hear, you know, any insights you have in a lot of discussion about AHV in the last 12 months has been about half of the deployment. Is there anything around HV or any of the, you know, new software features and products and experiences that Nutanix has been launching that you hear customers buzzing and talking to you about? >>I mean, I, I, the first thing I would say is it is truly a multicloud world now. Um, I think that legacy vendors are having a harder and harder time coping with the fact that cloud washing no longer works. You know, if you show up to the market and you say, Oh, this, now I can deploy an agent into this cloud, it's sort of stop, stop, don't say agent around me. You know? So I think, I think the ability to really natively integrate into any of these clouds and support all of these clouds equally is key. You know? So in the past a vendor would start with one thing and it would be great, right? And I won't use names here, but then they would do something else. They might move to another hypervisor and it was a little bit less great. Right. And I think that that notion has to change in a multicloud world, which brings me to the concept of HV. >>I think that HV has really grown. I mean, I would say that right now, you know, over half of our customers are HV customers. And I would say that that grows every single quarter and it not only grows in terms of net new logos, it also grows in terms of existing customers that we're finding SWAT to switch to HV and they want to switch fast. You know, they don't want to pay the V tax anymore, but more than that, I think they're seeing HV as a really robust enterprise hypervisor that really meets the complete need for the customer. And I think that's, that's been terrific to watch. So when you hear at.next, and this is not your first hot next, but what kinds of conversations are you having? What's been interesting to you? What are you going to take back to haiku? Yeah, head back to Brookline. Yeah. >>I mean obviously there's all the new stuff. I mean, Kubernetes, you know, containers. Um, I think these are all things we've been working on for some time. We'll have some surprises for you guys in Q4 at the end of Q four around that. Um, but you know, I think the big takeaway for me is we spent the first two years building our brand, getting the word out there, proving to companies and customers around the world that we were truly enterprise ready cause we were the new kid on the block. And you have to sort of start somewhere and show that. I think now we, you know, we added physical last year, we added tape support, we've really got all of the major applications covered at this point. I think that conversation, we've checked the box, right? So today's conversations are about what's next, how much more deeply will you integrate with Nutanix? >>How can I use Nutanix to then manage my data in the cloud and bring it back again? And can haikus support that or will it distract me? And you know, the simple answer is it will support that completely because it's so natively integrated. You know. And again, I think when you choose a platform at this stage, and this is something we've seen again and again and again, people do not want a second silo, right? In order to, you know, run their backup and recovery. You know, customers who are choosing Nutanix or choosing any platform want to run that platform and they want to make that one holistic experience. You know, they want to reduce the training required and they want to make sure they get the most out of their investment. So we're where I think two or three years ago, Stu, when we first met, everybody was trying new things, right? It was sort of, there were all these new platforms and it was all very exciting. I think now people are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the platforms they fundamentally believe in. And we're thrilled about that because we support those platforms and we'll continue to do so. >>Great. Excellent little. Simon, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a real pleasure talking to you and it's been great. Yes, no, absolutely. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. That wraps up two brilliant days in Copenhagen at the Bella center at Nutanix dot. Next. Thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix dot next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix dot next. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight co-hosting along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Christo du Raan, he is the COO IT Hardware and Infrastructure at Trustco Holdings. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> All right, thanks. And thanks for having me. >> Direct from Namibia. So we keep hearing there are customers from 50 countries. And you represent Namibia here. >> Yeah I come from far down in Africa. (laughs) >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Trustco, what you do down there? >> Trustco's a financial services company firstly, we look after all our Namibian customers in the insurance industry, as well as in the banking industry. We've been busy building our banking industry now for the last five years. And we're almost to that point where we can start serving people. Then we've got also educational services that we give to our customers and we've got roughly about 15,000 students, all doing distance learning, and of that 15,000 we've got about 80 to 90 percent of them that we also do finance, not just for the course material but also the technology, that we finance for them, so to give them the capabilities to do their studies through us. Then we've got also natural resources, it's quite a new business unit for us, where we dabble a little in diamond mining, we've got two mines currently, one in Namibia itself, where we produce probably one of the best diamonds in the world, clear cut diamonds, and then also in Sierra Leone we've recently acquired a mining license there as well. Then in Namibia, the other stuff that we do is in Shared Services, where we have our own radio station that we broadcast in Namibia, and then we do a little bit of in-house marketing and media and those type of things. >> Just a few things! >> Well luckily Christo, your IT staff, they have it easy, they don't have, you know, I walk through the Expo floor, it's like oh well how many verticals do you need to go to all of them, to be able to learn what you're doing. So give us if you can just, a little bit of a snapshot of your IT environment, what your team's responsible for, and if you can, kind of bring us even back before you began the journey onto Nutanix. >> So we're very centralized in Namibia, all our stuff gets run out of one data center, or one common area in our area offices, and then we expand to the six branches out in Namibia and in South Africa and now of late we'll be in Sierra Leone. IT team pretty much look after everything, we've got a saying at the office, "If it's got a plug on, it's IT's problem". (laughing) So yeah, so we do everything from the infrastructure, the networking, the servers, the storage, well, now it's Nutanix, everything is already built into one solution, so that the spurred systems have now fallen away, and we only look after it. >> Bring us back to that move to Nutanix, was there an upgrade that you were looking to do? Was there a pain point? What was the impetus to look at Nutanix? >> So our business has expanded quite quickly and the old way of doing things, with the separate SANs, separate switches, separate servers, those type of things became a little bit slumbersome, and difficult to manage because you had to have all these different kind of vendors that's got specific software solutions and specific training that you have to do and it just became a little bit too much for us and we decided that, let's step back a little bit, and see if there's any solutions out there that makes it firstly easier, that we can manage with less people and do more and at that stage hyperconvergence was just on the peak of becoming a thing, if you want to call it that, and we had done our research and found that Nutanix at that stage was the best fit for us and also the most mature in the hyperconverged space. So, that's basically where we got to the Nutanix solution, obviously like everyone else, we started with a Community Edition, dabbled our hand a little bit in there, and saw that's actually doable, it's easy and something that we can build on. >> So, you've been with them for about two years now, so still a relatively new relationship but talk about the beginning in particular and relationships are hard. Every relationship is hard. There are inevitable stumbling blocks. What were some of the challenges you faced and how did you work with Nutanix to overcome them? >> Challenges, I can say, luckily we haven't had a lot of them. Our business is not nearly as big as the Europeans and the Americans, so it is not that complex a system. We had our challenges in the beginning, hypervisor specifically, 'cause we made a huge move, we went totally 180 degrees from our Hyper-V environment, we said we going to go right over to AHV, don't want to do deal licensing, let's just jump in on AHV and go Nutanix fully. So, obviously we had a few challenges with a couple of our services and servers. But other than that, I must say, it was actually a pretty easy move for us. >> It's interesting that you say going from Hyper-V 'cause I've talked to the customers, oh there's a saving from moving from VMware, oh Microsoft, Hyper-V's all included, if you're doing Windows and you've got Hyper-V, I'm sure you've got a Windows application, so was there an application change or what was the driver to move? >> There were some of our applications that were very specific, especially on the network drivers side of things, moving from the normal Windows drivers, to the IO drivers in Linux. We had a couple of challenges with our in-house apps as well, but again, it was a reasonably painless move over to Nutanix. >> One of things we keep hearing about at this conference is how Nutanix is evolving as customer needs and demands are changing. You gave us the overview of your company, you are getting into new businesses and still continuing in established businesses, what are some of the needs that your IT is experiencing and how is Nutanix meeting those needs? >> Like I say, in the old infrastructure days, provisioning was probably the biggest hurdle, if the Dev guys wanted stuff, you first had to go and buy some more hardware, because you need to adapt to them. When we reversed over to Hyper-V eventually, it became easier, but it was still not the right fit. You still had to tweak it and play with it etc etc. So, the biggest challenge was to get our DevOp guys quicker access to what they need. And then also our customers as well. We've moved from where there's a person that needed to provision storage, needed to provision networking, needed to provision server and VMs, that's now all basically done by one person and most of those things we've already automized, so it is five, ten minutes, and then they've got what they need. I think it made us a little bit more agile because we pride ourselves on being quick thinkers, deploying stuff fast and that was always Trustco's main advantage in the Namibian market, we didn't go through all the other rigamarole that other companies have of tendering and doing things in a certain way and by the time that you get there it's not relevant anymore, now we need to do something else again. That brought us quick to market and made it so that we can deliver quicker solutions to our customers. >> So, Christo, was there any impact organizationally for rolling out Nutanix, you mentioned DevOps there, the goal of course is that they shouldn't have to worry about the infrastructure and hopefully Nutanix is delivering that, but there's some retraining or moving inside the organization, what's the impact been on your organization? >> On the customer side, none. They don't even know we've moved over. >> But from the IT side? >> From our customer side, they've not seen anything. From the IT side of things, we had a phased approach, so we started off with the Community Edition, where we basically just dabbled in it, saw what we could do on it and then also, let's call it training for the IT guys, so that they're comfortable in how the product works. So by the time that we got to deploying it in production, it was actually a very smooth transaction. We had all the kinks sorted out beforehand and made sure that everything will work, again, being in the finance industry, in the banking industry, downtime is an absolute no no, and we wanted to get to a point where we say we're not going to move over production sites, production environments, in the evenings from twelve to four in the morning because we've all got families so we'll either plan it properly ahead of time and yes we did it and actually, dare I say, in production time, we moved across almost seamlessly. We've got a lot of redundancies built in obviously so it gave us the opportunity to actually move in place if you want to call it that. >> So what does the future hold for this relationship? Where do you see your partnership with Nutanix evolving and where do you think you'll be, say, five years from now? >> So, we've got a roadmap set out with Nutanix and where we're now only in the baby phase, where we've done the infrastructure, we're happy everything is working, so now we're in the POC stage of exploring the software suite in its entirety. We've started now with Leap and Bolt ADR scenario and tested it extensively and we're now in that process, probably when I get back in Namibia, we'll have the licenses hopefully to start deploying it in our production environment. More closer to the future, in the next I would say, six to nine months, we're going to take on Frame, 'cause part of our business scenario, because we were Microsoft, was the Remote Desktop Service, and that was what kept us so lean. There are some challenges now with Remote Desktop Services where our Dev guys are moving into some Linux and there's different things coming up now where we move away from the traditional monolithic applications to more agile applications and then we'll start dabbling our hands in Frame. For us the holdback was when Frame came out, that it was only in the cloud and for us in Namibia, Africa, the internet is not as stable as we would like, so that was totally off the cards for us. Now that it moved back into on-prem and we can run Frame on-prem, that will probably be our biggest project going forward for the next year and year and a half. >> Excellent. Well thank you so much for coming on theCube Christo. It was a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCube's live coverage of dot next. [Urgent Music]

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dheeraj Pandey CEO and Founder of Nutanix. Great guest, been with us for 10 years. Was on the cube in 2010 when we first started doing theCUBE coverage of events was at VMworld, Dheeraj, great to see you. >> Pleasure. >> Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you. >> You've had such a great journey. I've been so impressed with you as an entrepreneur, the hustle, the early days when you were misunderstood to the growth and going public and continuing to compete. Congratulations to you and your team. It's been great. >> Thank you, no, it's been a journey and it's going to continue to be a journey. >> A lot of competitive pressure. A lot of cloud happening, a lot of server dynamics in the marketplace with On-Premise now getting validated as a part of this multi-cloud hybrid equation, certainly not going away, but still growth of the cloud has been huge. What's the big focus, 'cause you have your Nutanix Next conference coming up in May. I'll be there with theCUBE, what's the focus, what is the theme of the event? What's the big focus? >> Yeah, no, in fact we complete 10 years this September, so it's a decade since the beginning of time for Nutanix. And we are focusing on the things that we're good at. We are good at what I call the three D's. So it's a three D view of the company. The first D's data, we are really good at data. And we're doubling down on data. We're very good at design, we've done a very good job of simplification making elegant consumer grade and taking clicks away rather than things taking months, how can it be done in seconds and hours, and we're very good at delivery, you know, the third D being delivery, you know, it's not just delivery of our software through all different form factors and our appliance and software and subscription and other servers, but also customer support, customer success, which has really endeared us to our customers. So if you think about what this conference is all about, obviously it's about the customers and as the power of social proof, the fact that they learn from each other and we learn from them. But it's really about reinforcing the three D's. Data, design, and delivery. >> And the theme is invisible clouds. Period, visible IT, invisible cloud, so I'm assuming that's, make that, abstract that away, multi-cloud in there, probably a theme. Visible IT, that's supposed to be invisible too, but what does that mean? I get the invisible cloud 'cause you want to make it seamless, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. But what's visible IT, how do those words play? What's the play on words there? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, we, first of all the word invisible is really powerful and we use it a lot and it's very unique to Nutanix, you know, not everybody uses the word invisible as much as we do, but the idea is that machines should become invisible. Software and systems and tools and those things should become invisible. And then humans should become visible and by the way, there's this really good antithesis, sort of the polar opposites of machines versus humans that goes on in many other walks of life, I mean zero trust when it comes to security. Machines should not trust each other. But full trust, when people need to trust people. So when it's an organization of people you need to be the opposite of zero trust. Same thing is true for invisible machines invisible clouds with visible people visible careers and I think what's happening is that as the cloud hype cycle actually matures, CIOs are talking about cloud cloud cloud, but the grassroots is basically saying like do you even know the legacy apps of the last 20 years? Do you understand the challenges of what we call the laws of the land? Data compliance and regulations, laws of physics which is the gravity of data and the gravity of people and operations and laws of economics, owning and renting. So I think what's happening is that the cloud revolution is really being dug like a Eurotunnel, from two sides. Top down from C-level people are saying let's go transform ourselves to the cloud. And we are helping the grassroots really go and translate that, say look, this is only possible by doing these things because we have to be respectful of data sovereignty, data gravity, and applications and the economics of that. So, in really helping the CIOs build trust with the grassroots. As opposed to-- So essentially, you're operational as a cloud 'cause I can hear. We've interviewed a lot of CXOs on theCUBE as you know, take that hill, go to the cloud, move everything to the cloud. Wait a minute, we got, we're closing a pin. So to make sense of that vision, it's got to be operationalized, that's kind of what you're getting at. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And then finally there's a, I mean look what happens in computing, we make things smaller all the time, you know, we started with mainframes and we ended up with serverless. And along the way we had obviously Unix and x86 and container, VMs and containers and so on. Same thing with personal computing. We started with desktops and we ended up with wearables. So the fact that there's a billion dollar data center is the new mainframe. The fact that there's going to be a big cloud data center only two places in a big country is actually quite the antithesis of computing, we have to make cloud be everywhere and make it about software. To operationalizing the cloud and making it into a half a trillion dollar market will be about software. >> This whole mainframe is in the cloud or mainframe distributing computing. Software industry kind of come back in vogue. It doesn't go away, it's all the same game. It's just distributed out around in different formats, that's kind of what's going on here. >> Absolutely, I mean go back in time to distribution. Apple was a vertically integrated stack. So how does Microsoft come and really compete against Apple, they said look PC is about software, they said look PC's not about hardware, it's about software and the market becomes 10 times larger because they really bring in other partners who make money with the Windows Operating System. >> That's just more enabling. There's more demand, there's more growth. >> Absolutely, and the same thing happens again 15 years later with iOS versus Android. So Apple says smartphone is about vertically integrated stack, and Google comes and says no, to make the market 10 times larger, Android is about software. And then other handset manufacturers come and make money, so cloud is at this juncture where to take it beyond, 50, 60 billion dollars to half a trillion dollars, it has to be about software. >> Dheeraj, one of the things that I'm impressed with with you as an entrepreneur and your team is you fit the profile of the classic big idea. Be different, have good product leadership and pick a way that's going to have a big, totally adjustable market. You did that and you didn't waver, so I reviewed your analyst meeting from Wikibon and involved third party analysts. A hundred billion dollar addressable market. So big market, check, private cloud trend which you called early and Stu Miniman also called that on Wikibon is not going away, you have a stack for that. Large customer base, you have what 12 thousand customers plus and growing. Great revenue, strong revenue, and you got refreshes coming because the technology continues to shift in the wave that you're on. So, congratulations, that's good health meters. But there's now competitive pressure. The genie's out of the bottle. People know what you're doing. They figured it out and they're going to try to compete with you. This economy of scale that you have there's economy of scales others have specifically Dell, Dell EMC, VMware have been highly competitive with you. How are you responding to that and what's the landscape look like? >> Yeah, look, we've always been about disrupting ourselves, and that's the way we've actually grown our company. Very contrarian way of thinking about it but if we go back in time four, five years ago we're an appliance company, and we said we're going to do an OEM relationship with Dell and then Lenovo and others. All of a sudden people started competing with yourself, and for us it was like the more we compete with ourselves the better it is, today I think if you think about where the company's real response to any competition is to really compete with ourselves. I typically don't get wavered or changed by what's out there, we don't compete with anybody else, if we can keep competing with ourselves and get better in solving our customers and those three D's I talked about being even deeper in data, that VMware can't even touch us on simply because they have to compete with EMC on that and I don't know whether they actually have the gumption to do that, we do actually. We have to be better at design. Make the control plane even simpler. Understand what it means to virtualize the cloud. And get better at delivery, so if we can keep getting better in the three D's and we can keep competing with ourselves. We just did a really good announcement at HPE where we're going to compete with ourselves one more time because-- >> Talk about that announcement 'cause I think this is different. So HPE bought Nimble Storage so they already got the storage piece. They've got tons of servers, they also compete with Dell, what's your position with HPE, what's the announcement? What's the partnership? >> Yeah, so we're going to do a two-way relationship where we're going to be able to our sellers can quote HP servers and their sellers can actually quote our operating system. We have this rainbow which we call core essentials enterprise, Nutanix Core which is about hyper-convergence. Modernize your infrastructure. Nutanix Essential which is how we build a private cloud, and then Nutanix Enterprise which is really about navigating and simplifying the multi-cloud journey of the customer. And HP's going to take this stack to its customers. Again, we started to compete with ourselves because our appliance business was not based on HP, but now it will. Similarly, they will compete with themselves. And that's how companies transform themselves. When they compete with themselves rather than somebody else. >> And it's always the old expression, eat your own before your competition does. That's a cannibalization, kind of MBA concept. You guys are aggressive on that. You don't mind doing that and taking that risk. >> No, in fact if you don't do it, someone else will. It's better to do it in the controlled way ourselves. >> Got great, great management styles. So let's talk about, you mentioned control plane earlier, you have a quote on your deck that says, that I reviewed, it says control plane matters, this speaks to some of the product leadership. What does that actually mean, the control plane message, 'cause we hear this a lot come up in multi-cloud hybrid, and certainly within the data conversation around data control planes, control planes. For you guys, what does that mean? Control plane matters? >> Well if you take back like 10 years ago. We were very bold and audacious. We were the only company to say look we will not be building a tab in vCenter. Contrarian, highly contrarian. Most people said you'll lose a lot of deals because you are not adjunct to vCenter. You're not a tab in vCenter, every hardware renderer was really bending over backwards to please VMware because that was the only way to the heart of the virtualization administrator. We took a very different stance. Prism was the control plane, they said if you do a really good job at Prism make it a distributed scale out platform. Make it consumer grade one click delight. Then customers will actually look at this as a very powerful thing, and then we virtualized the hypervisor. So Prism was a multi hypervisor platform. It worked for Vmware, it worked for Hyper-V and it worked for Nutanix AHV. So over time, we just kept doing more of it. So now we have a control plane for multi-cloud. We were saying look, the world does need an automation orchestration engine. That is multi-cloud come is that thing for us. We've taken Prism to the next level with Prism Pro which is about ML and AI and what does it mean to really do operations management and capacity planning and security and analytics. So, we've doubled down on design which is the second D that I talked about with these control planes and going forward and as you see us getting to multi-cloud desktop delivery, we acquired a company almost a year ago, which is really about a cloud native desktop delivery solution where, now the control plane of desktops could belong in the cloud but the desktop itself could be running on prem. And that's a very powerful concept that you can have these cloud enabled cloud holstered cloud serviced control planes but the data place could actually be anywhere. It could be running-- This is the invisible cloud concept you're talking about. Absolutely, yeah. In fact the fact that the controller could be running anywhere, and the thing it controls could be running someplace else. >> The question, that's great stuff and that's great product leadership and again, invisible cloud, people don't want to deal with multiple code bases They want to have seamless operations. So with that I got to ask you your cloud positioning because every enterprise now because it's from the top end. Now it's top comparative, what's the cloud positioning because we now see on premise, super important a-du-is-ca outpost. The data's going to reside on premise in the cloud, it's all going to move around. What is the cloud positioning that you talk to your customers about when they say hey, we like Nutanix but we got to go to cloud, what's the positioning? >> Well our positioning is that cloud has to be about software. It has to seep everywhere, it has to be injected everywhere, our software should run no just on prim but in an AWS bare metal. There's a bare metal service and our software should run there. There will be an Azure bare metal. We already run in GCP metal so our software can run on top of GCP as well. Of course it is on prem and we are already working on our own disaster recovery as a service, desktop as a service where we become the service provider for many of these hybrid services that customers actually need from us. So cloud is about ubiquity, it's about portability, I mean the strength of any software company is portability. If we can make ourselves available in every server, every hypervisor, and every cloud, I think we've done a very good job. >> My final question I want to ask you is when you go to your event coming up invisible clouds, visible IT, you got to give the customer the 20 mile stare. You got to show 'em the 20 mile vision and the bridge to the future that they want to cross with you, that's the main value every company has to do as CEO. What is that story, what's the pitch to the customer saying we've got you covered today as you're organically building that operational cloud path, but I really want to know that I have a partner for the next generation, what's that story that you tell them? >> Yeah, I mean, even as I said before. Any big project, whether it's Panama Canal Suez Canal, Eurotunnel, you have to dig it from both sides and then you eventually shake hands and it becomes a historic picture, which is what we've known about the way the English side and the French side met. I think the way CIOs are talking about the cloud, the way grassroots is perceiving more of the cloud as you called it operationalizing. I think we really have to do it from both sides. And we really don't talk about the three D's. Data, we've done so well in data. We've done so well in design, we've done so well in delivery, and then at times we've actually screwed up like in the last two, three, four years, we might have gotten more complicated, we might have gotten more complex, so we go and even ask for forgiveness and open ourselves up, talk about the evaluability of the company and people like that, they didn't want to connect to an auto machine, but they wanted to connect to humans on this other side. As a business, we are not machines. We're actually humans, and that's what resonates in the conference. >> Dheeraj, thanks for coming in and sharing your insight, great to see you again, congratulations on the business performance, we'll see you at Nutanix Next in May, May 7th, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (jazz music)

Live from London England, it's the CUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome Back to the CUBE here from London. Our reporting of Nutanix NEXT 2018 in Europe. With me here is Frans Coppus. You are an ICT manager at  Driessen? I'm very curious. Driessen is a customer of Nutanix? I understand that you develop HRM software among other things? >> Tell me about Driessen.  How does this work? >> Yes, well Driessen is a family business. We are a business service provider for the public sector in the Netherlands and the Driessen Group is actually a group of companies that make employment possible. We do that through the offering  of several different services. You should think of connecting people to work, so a staffing function, but next to this , we also develop software and services to take over processes for other companies or to make processes easier. >> That sounds a bit like on one hand you are a Employment Placement company, helping people get work, but on the other hand, you also seem to do something with software and the delivery of your services as a software product. How does that work? >> Yes, that's right. We deliver services to make other companies' processes easier.  You should think of payroll and things like that, but also all other kinds of processes for which we mainly use the digital services that we develop ourselves. For example, think of  a package like AFAS profit , where AFAS profit falls short on some functionality that customers would want to make use of. We can  help those customers to provide that extra functionality to improve processes. >> Yeah, that sounds like you are software development shop. You develop the software in-house? >> Tell me more about that.  Do you do this on-premise? Do you use the cloud? What tools do your developers use? How does that work? >> Well, have a team of about 25 in-house software developers.  They are spread across a number of our different companies , and the software we develop runs  partially on prem  and partially also in the cloud. >> Yes, and I understand that you have been doing this with Nutanix for a year, year and a half to provide a foundation for your infrastructure. Can you explain how this works?  What Nutanix products and services you use? What are some of the benefits? >> Well, we started looking into modernization  of our data center at the beginning of last year. That was how it started. Then we looked further into things. We already had some interest in Nutanix. We did some more research and  ultimately we  decided to choose Nutanix and basically slowly replace our entire data center  with Nutanix. So we installed some hardware  but subsequently we also selected AHV as the hypervisor layer. We came from VMWare so we basically migrated everything. I must say that the implementation itself went very quickly. The implementation of the Nutanix environment  was really a piece of cake and then we started to migrate our VMs to the platform one-by-one.  And this year we completed this process. Currently, our entire data center is running on Nutanix.  What were the problems you were hoping to solve? Well, you should mainly think about scalability.  We liked the fact  that we could start small with Nutanix  but when needed we could scale easily. Performance was an issue in the previous environment, which we also completely resolved. I think the biggest challenge we had was to make things easier. We had created a pretty complex landscape over the years. That was actually the main reason why we ultimately chose for Nutanix. Simplification of the whole landscape. Easy to manage, especially also  since we are using a mixed solution. Partially on- prem and partially in the cloud. With Nutanix this is easy to manage. >> Yeah, exactly.  Since you are an ICT manager. I can imagine that your role also changes? I assume that at first, the main  focus was on infrastructure, as it was difficult and where attention was needed. How has your role changed over the course of time? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. That role is changing.  Initially, you are very focused on the operation to keep all the "balls in the air." All sorts of things you actually don't want to have to deal with.  And this is what we are now seeing. We are able to manage the environment with fewer people.  That means you free up more time and together with the management team,  you can use this this to look into how we can improve our services How can we improve our availability?  And all of this at equal or lower cost and with less effort. >> Yeah, and I assume, to use the word " digital transformation", is also a challenge for you? You want to move closer to your customer.  How do you do that as an IT department? How how move closer to the business internally at Driessen, but also external customers? How does that work? >>Well, the needs of the customer is often translated by the Business to the software developers. What is important for us is the time-to-market. The development life cycle is pretty rapid. We work a lot on the basis of orders and as such it often goes paired with requirements that we need to adhere to. So, time to market is very important in such cases. With Nutanix we are actually able to deploy software faster and offer new features to our software engineers  who in turn can use this. >> Yes, so you are saying that your software developers can thus get closer to the business. They require less time to lay the groundwork, as it were.  We are here at .NEXT, we have watched the  keynotes, heard a lot announcements. Nutanix started as an infrastructure. A so-called modernization of what you had. Meanwhile, there are 15 products. It has become much more gigantic. When you look at the growth of the amount of people walking around here, 3,500 people.  I am curious, how are you looking at this? You will be walking around here for a few more days. You've watched the keynotes. You see the crowds. What is your impression of the event? >> Well I must say, "very cool!" Last year I went to Nice, That was a very good conference. That was also the reason that made me think "I coming back this year for sure". During the first keynote, it was really cool to see, how much bigger the entire  event has become but also the success of Nutanix. Last year, in Nice, I spoke with  some of my peers who were still 't doubt whether they would transition to Nutanix. Well, I told him about our experiences and told them I would recommend it for sure including the use of AHV as hypervisor.   You are starting to feel how everything has matured. So much more has been added. I was impressed with what products  I have seen over the last two days along with the simplicity and maturity of the products  Really super cool to see.  What really stuck with me.   What really impressed me was Frame. Frame is really super cool. It's also something we are for sure looking at to use. In addition, Beam looks very appealing. I must honestly say, we now have our entire data center on prem. Also our DR environment is on prem, because when we made the decision, there was no Beam. If I would have to make the decision again, I would absolutely choose Beam to help solve DR. There too, the simplicity with which you can manage it is really cool to see. Well, in the future we continue  to monitor such developments and I am sure that we will work with  products such as Beam and Frame in the future. >> The made the announcement of the core product. The core products to essentials, which is a bit of the uplift. Those are the next small steps you can take. And then you get enterprise. Thats where you are especially finding the new product offerings such  SaaS products , the Xi Cloud , and what I am curious about is the following. I also know from Nutanix from the perspective of infrastructure? I have seen them grow. And looking at all the announcements they have made. All those products they have developed  What was for you the lightbulb moment?  The moment where you thought "when I get home after the weekend,  I am going to use this?" I want to learn more about this!"  What is that one product from which you say  I want to get started with that!" >> I think , if I had to choose it, then I would say, "I will definitely get started with Frame"   to look at how we can provide our colleagues with a workplace when they work remote or things like that. >> Yes, >> Is also one of the issues that you are trying to solve using Nutanix? Traditionally, Nutanix did lots of VDI. Still does a lot of VDI. Is that something that the Driessen Group is moving towards? >> Yeah, well at least for a part of our colleaguesI, I see ways to implement Frame as a substitute for a VDI environment. >> Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Exactly. Yes. Exactly right.  >> Also, I was really...  and I did not realize that  they were working on this, but Nutanix  is building its own Cloud I am very curious what this will bring.  Especially if this will seamlessly integrate with your on prem environment. At the moment, I find that to be the strength of Nutanix?  The fact that you can  you can easily switch between on your own prem Nutanix environment or a cloud environment. Well, if there is also another Nutanix in the Cloud option, that would be cool. Exactly. >> All right, last question. You employ developers  Today, we also saw some announcements  during the keynote around cloud-native as it is called so nicely So Karbon, databases in the Cloud with Era with Buckets, S3, S3 storage. Are these things from which you think,  "my developers will make use of this?" Yes. Yes. My developers are all knocking on the door.  They want to  get started with containers and other stuff. So that's very good to hear that Nutanix is also diligently working on that and how it will integrate within Nutanix.  So my software developers will be very happy with that. >> Yeah, great!  Well congratulations! That really sounds like a top store!. A very nice story about Driessen. how you are using Nutanix. Well, I wish you success with your next steps that you will undoubtedly take. That was it for now.  Thanks for watching the Cube together with Frans here in London Til next time.

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 here in London, England. We're gonna be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, Bala Kuchibhotla is the General Manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella who recently joined Nutanix, is Vice President of Products at Nutanix. Both of you been up on stage, Greg was talking about Carbon and cloud native, and of course Era is the databases of service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Alright, so look, developers. You know, we were thinking back, you know, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers! Balmer had it right, and style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. You know, my background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is, you know, developers really work from the application down. It's like that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because you know I look at Nutanix, you know, at it's core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from like really the hyper-scale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Bala, you want to start? >> Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We cannot simply its storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as service. Obviously if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so they can present the cloud to developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for quite some time, we're not expanding the services to other things, the platform, the platform as service. Now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption. That these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud for you. US developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption. They lack ability, that the ability you are trying to do, easy tools, (mumbling), and S3s, that kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APS for our Nutanix that you can spin up a VM, spin up a database, spin up a storage and then do what you want to do kind of stuff. So that's the natural journey for that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, Greg? >> Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers, and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up what would be a pretty complex environment from a three tier application with a robust database, an app tier, anything else you might have on the storage side, spin it up, break it down, and with your CICD pipeline you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So we look at doing is, you know, recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed, you know, on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. >> So looking at, you know, one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really, you know, need to go through a purchasing process, other than credit card maybe paid for themselves in the beginning. So you know, low friction is really the key word here. So I'm wondering, you know, looking at the Nutanix, the IT ops perspective, how are you kinda bring that low friction into the developer world? >> Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I am seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People doing silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their compute kind of stuff. There's a pressure on the IT ops to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public a lot. As simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the IT ops, the DB ops, the traditional DB ops inner ring, they are understanding the need that, hey well, we gotta be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming that kinda stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kinda stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators, now we're exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers. Essentially the developers. >> Greg, up on stage you talked about cloud native, and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit, and you know, we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so, you know, why isn't this just saying, "No, no, no, we can be cloud native, too." >> Fair point, and I think we're not alone in that as well, in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, our cloud native architecture within the private data center Say look, really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right, and that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless, ephemeral infrastructure. You're not upgrading things, you know, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that, that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right, 'cause that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators are really going through, right, so everything's pets, not much cattle. We're really trying to change that quite a bit, and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're seeing is, it's not so much us trying to sell this it's more like hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on prem in our private data center where we have all of our data, and the other services that we need to interact with, like, that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that mass of data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. >> So one other thing, you mentioned pets versus cattle. One of the things I've been seeing from, you know, an IT ops perspective is you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're gonna do manual interaction, and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering, you know, in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience, and you know, towards management or monitoring, or backup stuff like that? >> So, you know, a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes, right, as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add onto that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there, or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that, so I mentioned Epoch on stage, right, so it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus. So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes, like auto-scaling. I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, you know, we look at doing things like, again it's early in Kubernetes, but snapshotting from within Kubernetes. Right, so if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot. Underneath our storage layer will take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. >> I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This pets versus cattle is standardization, right, like we're talking about it. In typical, old legacy enterprises there are let's take the example of databases. Like, every application team has their own databases they are trying to pass, they're all trying to do management around it kind of stuff. When we do a couple of servers, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. And so like this is one of the biggest companies that we talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the Era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize these database environments for on premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 pull the node to PSE5, you can only create databases with whatever the software the public cloud guys are doing it. But on premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix, Era, and this products will come into. We allow to people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. So that is what I call standardization at their customer terms, that's what we're trying. >> And let me add to that, though. It also brings in this convenience, 'cause not only is it coming up with standardize, but we've made it even more convenient, right, because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're gonna get a standard configuration for what that is, and so you made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. >> Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary, you know. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jassy was sparing back with Larry Ellison, you know, at re:Invent this week, but you know, we've been watching the growth of things like Postgres, and lot of these changes, you know, Era sits clearly in that space. So what do you seeing from customers, you know, the modernization of applications is, you know, what I call the long pole in the tent. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I said we usually want to first, you know, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, public cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. You know, database tends to be, it's the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so there are two class of applications that we see. This space is completely green field We are starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud native databases that's where the public cloud can kind of try to help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud native stack that we talk about, the cloud native database, is not going to the game. Like you really need to think about how do you kind of take these big, giant databases that are there with Oracles, and DBTools, that kind of stuff but give the cloud-like experience, right? So the actually very difficult game for any public cloud, that's why you don't see rack provisioning and a dot list is still not there, or even if JCP natively. Oracle does that but little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on premise, that's my humble take on this, right. But how do you build, how do you make this gray area I call it a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centered kind of stuff? That's where Era actually tries to play. It has two roles that, if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you, or if you have a green field then we can get you directly onto the cloud native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help. These are the three things that we try to do through Era kinda of stuff, yeah. >> So looking forward, you know, we're starting out with databases, you know, making that simple, making that small so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg, so what's the future for Nutanix in, you know, enabling other services, other cloud-like services on a Nutanix platform going forward? >> In addition to databases. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right, so we have that in storage for a long time, that makes things easy with databases. We have a standard client talking to standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're gonna want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a defacto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You'll get Pub/Sub with Kafka APIs, Druid. There's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of defacto standards, so really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and how do we really work the the community to establish those as open standards. 'Cause we really want, you know, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack, it's like hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard, open APIs, and then developers get what they need which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. >> Into some-I-tab we have easy to equal end, which is AHV, we have EBS equal end, we have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equal end, which is called Buckets, we have database RDS equal end, we have Era, and now we are going with content as which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers, to say that man, it's all ecosystem, it's not like one piece, single piece It's not this compute, it's not this storage, but it is an ecosystem of services that we need to kind of predict. >> Want to just come back to what we were talking beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers, and how much direct developer engagement is it? Like, you know, is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows. But maybe if you could give us some commentary on that. >> Yeah, I can start that, it's a path, right? So currently we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are gonna be on the IT operations side, and so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit, and I think that you'll that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with you know, through the APIs like they have Era. So for instance, if IT has deployed Era internally, then if I want a database I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. And you'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. >> Just to give you an example, right, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champaign, right. So we are operating a private cloud and we are exposing our APIs to all our developers. Today, if someone wants a database in Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say I want a database. Right, that's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right. That's where we are going with our customers, too, hey, here is how you build your private cloud, here is how you expose all your service end points for different services, and your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a building aspect of it, that's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers, how do they charge meter, that kind of stuff that people will talk about today. >> You know, I definitely heard when I talked to all the product teams, especially everything in Zai cloud, you know, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're gonna be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the Cube-Con show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us. Bala, pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're gonna be back with more coverage here. From Nutanix .Next 2018 in London, I'm Stu Miniman and Joep Piscaer is my cohost. Going to be do a Dutch session in a second, so be sure to stay with that. First foreign language interview on theCUBE, and thank you for watching. (electronic music)

Live from London England, it's the CUBE covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome Back to the CUBE here from London. Our reporting Nutanix NEXT 2018 in Europe. Next to me is Frans Coppus. You are a manager at ICT Driessen? I'm very curious. Driessen, customer Nutanix? I understand you among other software make HRM? >> Tell me about Driessen. How does that work? How does that work? >> Yeah, uh well Driessen is a family business. We are a business service provider for the public sector in the Netherlands The Driessen Group is actually a group of companies that make work possible. We do that through the offering  of several different services. You should think of connecting people to work, so a staffing function, but next to this , we also develop software and services to take over processes for other companies or to make processes easier. >> That sounds a bit like you're on the edge. On the one hand you are a Employment Placement company, helping people get work, but on the other hand, you seem to do something with software and delivering your services as a software product. How does that work? >> Yeah, and do We indeed. That's right. We deliver services to other processes make companies easier. Think of payroll and things like that, but also all kinds of other processes and that's what  we mainly use the digital services and we develop these ourselves. For example, you should think of  a package like AFAS profit , where AFAS profit falls short in some functionality , but which customers  would like to make use of. We can we who help these customers  to provide that extra functionality to improve processes. >> Yeah, that sounds like you are software development house. you develops yes the software. >> That's right. >> How about that? Do your on-premises? If you do in the cloud? Where working with your developers? How does that work? How does that work? >> Well, we do it with a club of about 25 software developers we in private service to have. Spread across a number of different companies we have, and the software we Developing running Indeed, partly on prem and partly also in the cloud. >> Yes I understand that you do for a year or half do with Nutanix such as underlay for your infrastructure. Can you explain how how together is how the services which Nutanix products you use? What advantages do you have it? >> Well, we indeed the beginning of last year we look at our data center to actually modernize. That was the rise. When we have oriented ourselves. We already had some interest in Nutanix. Are there going deeper into deepen and finally we indeed decided to limit to Nutanix choose that. To actually the entire data center, we had slowly going to replace by Nutanix. Um, so we are there put down a piece of hardware, but then also chosen as the AHV hypervisor layer. We came from VMWare. We have it all petted or migrated to the implementation itself completely very quickly should say importing t soup boiler and was really a piece of cake and Then we started to one for our VMs to migrate to the platform. Uh, and that we have this year we found rounded. Currently running our entire data center running on actually uh uh on Nutanix indeed. Yes, because what were the problems you hoping to solve? of And, then you should think about a particular piece Scalability is not it? So for example we fine with Nutanix in any case, could reasonably small start, but if necessary, uh easy to be scales. Performance was an issue on the old surroundings. We actually have completely resolved. I think the biggest uh what we the biggest challenge we had was to make it easier. We had Yes quite a complex landscape been built up over the years. Uh and um, well that was actually the main why we express sible for Nutanix have chosen. Yes, simplification of the whole landscape. Easy to manage, especially since we thus actually have a mixed environment. Deel where I click ofthe cloud? Uh, well that's fine with Nutanix to manage, so eh. >> Yeah, exactly. I imagine when he hey you are IT manager. I can imagine your role uh too changed huh? First it was take I to really focus on infrastructure, What was difficult was that many friction. Um, what's your role in the course of changing time? >> Yeah, no, that's exactly right. That role is changing. uh in Initially at very busy to focus after the operation. To put it all in keep air. Uh sorts of things you actually yes it sounds I think you would not actually working with it wants to keep. Uhm, uhm, and we now see. We see Now just that with fewer people and a much more simple way that environment can manage. That means you some more time for free, and the time, even trying especially uh to stop uh along with the business see how we can provide our services improve? How can we availability improve? And say to equal or less cost and with less effort. >> Yeah, because I assume that you have to code word to use some digital transformation that I take for you are also an issue. Yes. You can also just wants to more to move the client. How do you do that if like, hey if IT department? How how you slide closer against the business and Driessen itself but also to the customer? How does that work with you? >> Uh well, uh, let's say, the customer needs to of course translated into the business Go to frequent the software developers. So what really us is very important is the time-to-market. Development course is very fast. We work a lot on the basis of Procurement and tendering often various demands we put than we meet to come. Yes. So, time to market is very important that, uh, that's why we uh um with Nutanix able to actually faster to deploy new features to provide direction our software developers then with them to get started. >> Yeah, yeah, because you say your software developers can thus closer So sit closer to that business. That requiring less time to UH to lay the groundwork, as it were. Um, I'm looking for, they not here .NEXT, uh we have the keynotes seen a lot announcements. Nutanix started as if modernization of infrastructure of What you had here. Meanwhile, are 15 products. It has become much more gigantic. If you people around here are looking grown. 3500 people, so therefore I am a bit like it? How do you doing that? Do you walk here too a few days around. You've seen the keynotes. You see the crowds. What is your impression of the event? >> Well I must say, very cool eh, I'm I last year in Nice, eh it was a very good conference. That was the reason I was thinking of now, I'm going this year definitely return. It was really cool to see the first keynote, how much greater it has now become, the whole event, but also the success of Nutanix. I uh, I spoke last year in Nice yet some of my peers still 't doubt was whether they would over Steps to Nutanix. Well I told him what our experiences were with it. And uh, and said, I it can definitely recommend. Also say the Using the AHV as Hypervisor. In the meantime brand just, it's so much matured. Uh uh, there's so much more added. I was really what really impressed me over the last two days have seen all new products and adulthood and the simplicity of such products. Yes. Really super cool to see, uh, what I was really stuck, I really of was impressed, was particularly Frame. Frame is uh uh uh uh really super cool. That is also something we definitely presently to look for to use it. In addition, Beam is something that very appealing. I must say, we have now uh uh uh uh all say data center on prem. So Also my DR environment we have on prem, because when we made the decision, there was no Beam. Yes, if I would again to choose, I would absolutely sure choose the DR uh using to solve beam. There too, the simplicity with which you can manage. Uh that's really cool to see. Well, we will in the future ensure that species continue to follow developments and uh I know sure that in the future to work uh continue with products such as a beam and a frame for example. >> Yeah, because what you see uh huh, they the announcement made by the core product. Heh, the core of the core products to essentials, which is a bit of the uplift heh? Those are the following small steps you can convert, yes, and then you get enterprise. Yes. There are now especially the really new projects uh Xi SaaS products de Xi Cloud and uh, and I am very curious to now is look I also know from Nutanix heh from that perspective? Infrastructure, and I have seen them grow. And watching all the announcements they done. All those products they ge done. What would really be for you the, you know, What was with you the light that went so you say yes I'll go you know when I uh home After the weekend, here I'm going to stroke. Here I would like to know more. What is the one product that you now say, I really want to get to work? >> I think if I had to choose it, then I would say, then I'm going to frame me definitely started to look at how we can put that to say uh uh uh uh our employees easier by a work to provide when they for instance remote work or things like that. >> Yes, is also one of the uh the issues which you who wants you solve by Nutanix Heh? Traditionally, did Nutanix many VDI. Still does much VDI. Is that something that uh, where you go when Driessen? >> Yeah, well at least for a part of our I'm sure a staff uh uh ways to deal deploy Frame say as a substitute for a VDI environment yes. >> Yes. Yes. Absolutely. Exactly. Yes. Exactly right. Uhm. >> And also I was really huh, and I did not think they were doing, but I understood so which uh Nutanix now we actually their own cloud is building. Yes. Yes that I am very curious what that is going to bring. Surely as say, seamlessly integrates with your back on prem omgeving. I actually find that to be the strength of this time of Nutanix heh? The that you you can switch easily between on your own prem Nutanix environment or a cloud environment. Yes. Well, if there is still a uh a Nutanix variation in the Cloud comes in, yes it is uh totally cool. Exactly. Yes. Exactly. Yes. >> Last >> though demand. You have of course developers in dienst. We have today also in the keynote various announcements seen around cloud-native as nice hot. Heh? So Karbon, databases in the Cloud with Era with Buckets, S3, S3 storage. Uh, these are also things that you think of, hey, that my developers will also get to work? Yes. Yes. mac we stand on all to knock on the door. Who want to containers to work and that kind Affairs , Uh uh uh so that's very good to hear that Also there say Nutanix fully is doing, and how it integrates within uh Nutanix, so uh, yes, there will my Software developers will be very happy with it. Yes. >> Yeah, great! but congratulations. That sounds like really a top story. A very nice story about Driessen. how you Using Nutanix. Well, I wish you success with the following to step. Thank you. Which undoubtedly UH will come. uhm. And that was it for UH for now. Thanks for look at the Cube Together with Frans herein in London uh, and until next time.

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, Eup Piscar, and we're going to dig into one of the partnerships that Nutanix have. Joining me, two CUBE alums, Michael Cade, who's a technologist with Veeam. Had you on the program last year in Nice, and welcome back a little closer to home for you, here in London. >> Yeah cheers Stu, Hidey-ho. >> And welcome, six months with Nutanix, someone I've known. CUBE alumni. So, wherever you go, you know, there are CUBE alumnis always. So Jay Chitnis, who's the head of Global Strategic Alliances with Nutanix. Jay, thanks for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having me. It's great to be here, guys. >> Alright, first of all You know, Michael, what's it mean having the show here in London, and would love your opinion, having kind of, how Nutanix's doing with Europe adoption. >> Yeah, so, obviously being in London means I don't have to go on a plane and travel anywhere, right? So, that's one benefit, but one thing, I was there last year, obviously, we spoke. I think one of the things I can see here is how many people are here. Feel's like its doubled in numbers, doubled in size. Doubled the conversations, obviously with us, with our product coming out in July/August of this year. Only a version one but we're seeing good feedback, good strong feedback and lots of questions around that. >> Yeah absolutely, 3500 is the number I heard here. Jay, we're going to talk about with Veeam, so set the stage for us, data protection, what's going, Nutanix positioning, and what you look to that. >> Yeah, its a vibrant landscape, right? So, just to kind of pick up a little bit on the thread around the European side. We've got over 50 partners here. Over 50 technology partners and a number of channel partners. There's just a vibrant buzz and one of the first things that people always talk about is we're in the the nation of GDPR. If you start to think about just where's this nation, this notion of data and where does it reside, data mobility and that sort of thing. That's one of the first things that we get hit with all the time; we get asked a lot. And so, it's really core to what we do. That's where the relationship really comes in. >> I love the little commentary there at that GDPR. Cause I remember last year, like most of last year, every show that had data protection, everything, we talked about GDPR a lot. To be honest, once we got past May, we didn't talk about it a lot. I mean, we said we knew it's real when there were some lawsuits and that happened rather fast to some of the really large companies, but is this still a major conversation with costumers, where are we and? >> Yeah, yeah, massively so that sovereignty of data, where is resides is something that, speaking to enterprise and mid-market customers over in Europe, there absolutely still top of mind is, why are we keeping that data? Where are we keeping that data? How do we leverage our tool set to understand where that data is? And then actually provide some insight into where it is, and report against things like violations between different locations. And just, We obviously had to go through that process of becoming GDPR compliant ourselves, and obviously as a global company, you have to kind of eat your own dog food. And understand, you have to know your own data, understand what that's doing, why we're keeping that? How it's being stored, and the message we just relay back into content and let our customers then use that. >> So what does that look? Maybe from a technology perspective, if you had to deal with GDPR, from an Nutanix standpoint, from a Veeam standpoint. What does it change, right? What does it change in terms of backing up? What does it change in terms of storing it? In a cloud or on print? Have you seen any majors changes in how that works for customers? >> Yeah, so the good the is that thinking about what that data is and where it's being stored. They know that in Germany that data may not be able to leave Germany or that data may not be able to leave the UK or Ireland and they might have offices in remote locations in various different countries. So, a simple thing that we put in was the ability to put tagging on repositories, on our physical constructs so that we knew the data path and the workflow. And then be able to use then Veeam one to be able to report against that so you understood where that data was going but also flag up any of those violations that may be where a backup job has pushed it to a different location. We need to know about that and we need to fix it as fast as possible. So that's one of the areas that we're talking >> So, I can imagine that this is not only has had an impact from a technology perspective from a vendor's side, but also in the service provider market. I guess a lot of service providers have gone into that phase to be able to help customers with their GDPR issues. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely, so we were already aligned with our VCSP program. 20,000 VCSP partners out there and their model is as a service, so being able to provide, as a service and help them understand what that data is and know where that data is residing, is key to, that those customers that can't necessarily put their workloads into the public cloud but they can put it into a trusted service provider of VCSP. >> Or a trusted, like an enterprise private cloud. Or, one of the things that we're seeing is, when you start to think about data and where it resides, it's not just the cloud. It's not a discussion of is it on prem, is it in the cloud. There's this notion about this distributed cloud, some of this stuff that we talked about earlier this morning around what does that mean when you start to think about where, first of all, the amount of data that's sitting in everything other than what we would consider an enterprise cloud. That's one. The second thing is, how do you protect it? How do you back it up? What do you do at things that at the edge, right? That requires a fundamentally different way of looking at things. Just the size and the volume of the data. >> Yeah, one of the key things that we're seeing is that sprawl of data. Not necessarily, it doesn't really matter where that data resides. Whether it is on premises or whether it's in the public cloud. It's the data and that sprawl of data that can sit on many different platforms. >> Alright, Want to pivot the conversation a little bit lets talk about AHV. So, in the earnings announcement earlier this week, the number I heard was 38% looking at the last four quarters trailing, so strong growth. I actually, when I had asked Dheeraj about two years ago and said, "okay well what's the goal?" He said "Look, we're going to keep building and do it, and customers will have choice." You know, if we get to 50%, that felt about right to him then, when I talked to him he said "This seems right." It's not like we're going to eradicate everybody's other virtualization. That's not the goal. It's to do what makes sense. I remember one of the .NEXT's when Veeam said "We're going to go down the path to adopt AHV". There are actually tears in the audience. So, we know that ecosystem is super important to AHV. So Jim, maybe set the table for us with the guideline as to where we are with the partner eco system. Obviously Veeam's got some good, exciting stuff recently. But overall? >> Look, at the end of the day, the 38% number that you mentioned is critical, right? One of the things that we look at is, this is it's, our philosophy has always been about freedom and, so, some semblance of choice. And it doesn't matter whether you have a preference for a private cloud, a public cloud, a hypervisor. What we really are focused on is, how do we enhance incremental value add, especially in a management staff, right? So it's not necessarily a, we absolutely want to become a Hypervisor company. That's not the goal here. In order to, when you look at our partner landscape, and our partner ecosystem, it kind of fits into a few things. First and foremost, it's about customers who want, when they buy Nutanix, it's because they're buying Nutanix to fit in to a certain environment. Data protection, management, management and orchestration, networking and security. And then there's obviously customers who buy Nutanix for running something on top us, right? An, ISV, and enterprise ISV, big data applications, cloud native applications and things of that nature. One of the cornerstones for that ecosystem is to support AHV and we're starting to see a significant amount of our partners, not only looking at supporting AHV but actually going further and deeper. So, we look at things in terms of the breadth of the ecosystem, which is great, we want to grow that, but we also look as the depth. And someone like Veeam, who said, "Hey look, we were partnering with you on the breadth, where we were doing some stuff around supporting ESX." But really, the game changer was AHV. AHV support which was what, August? >> Yeah, yeah, beginning of August. I think the same premise as to what you were just saying Jay, so bring that simplicity model, we don't really care about what that is sitting on top. With a management layer, we're offering this hardware up as a service, or this layer of abstraction. From a Veeam, obviously, form a Veeam perspective, it's all about the ease of use, the reliability, but also the flexibility. And that's something that we kind of have that synergistic approach. >> I think that's a very shared common vision, right? It's making sure that you provide a seamless experience. One click sort of experience. But, being able to do so in a more cohesive manner. >> Michael, I want you to bring us inside. I remember back when Veeam supported Microsoft Hyper-V. It was a big deal. There's a lot of engineering work that goes into it. And a move, Veeam was more than just a virtualization company. Today Veeam is multi-cloud, they can play in lots of environment. Give us a little insight as to what happened and what's special has been done for the interface and the technology to fully support AHV with Veeam. >> Yeah, I think, so 12 years ago, Veeam started out protecting those virtual workloads. Virtualization first, Vmware first, then Hyper-V. And then the physical agents came and really that platform started to get broadened. What then happened is the AHV adoption rate from you guys was obviously rising so saw that and went in, and, but we took a different approach in terms of, okay, just because of what we've done in a Vmware and Hyper_V world, doesn't necessarily mean that that will fit our Nutanix AHV customers. So we went out, we seeded the market, understood what that looked like, how it looked from both a Nutanix point of view and also existing AHV customers. And then built the new AHV platform that we have to be able to protect them. But we still wanted to keep that agentless approach. But from a management perspective, we offer out a web interface that allows us to look very similar to the prism interface, the management layout. So that, an admin doesn't have to shift his command stature, his knowledge of working in management into that mind set. So, version one, and again, there's a considerable amount of effort gone into that has a pretty, pretty full-on feature list of features in that version one and that's going to continue to roll out over 2019 and beyond. >> So looking at this from a customers perspective, you know, back when I built an IS platform based on Nutanix, based on VH, one of the things that was high on my list was a AVH support. Simply because AVH over hypervisor, it became a commodity. I, even as a service provider, even as an IS provider, I didn't really care what hypervisor I ran. And so, support from VM to actually be able to back up VM's on AHV, and that was top priority for me. And seeing you guys use that different UI, even though it was a little bit over shot, because you know, we've been using VM for maybe a decade already. We're used to it. A little bit of a culture shock to start using it, but when you do, it becomes a totally different experience because it is aligned with Nutanix. So maybe tell us about why you've taken that approach of using the way of integrating with the Nutanix UI instead of staying at your old UI? >> Yeah, and so exactly, so mostly around Nutanix admins and their feedback around, if we could just have another tab that looks and feels exactly how our management plane looks like. Then that would be of more of a benefit. Now, obviously we didn't feedback on replication. There's still visibility of those jobs, there's no configuration, lettered out, that's one of the biggest asks that we're getting in the forums, in the public forums, is when can we have exactly what you're asking for there. Is it around how can we bring that central management back into VBR because they may have Nutanix clusters running different hypervisors and that's all supported from us but then, but, then, now we've got to go outside of that single management interface into the prism-like management for that, so, I kind of see that from that perspective. But, so that was really the main key for version one is, get something out that's the same as what our Nutanix administrators are used to. >> So, if we're talking about future, right, so what's next for VM and Nutanix? Real short question, short answer maybe. >> Yeah, without being fired, I'm but... (Jay laughs) So, version two, update one, so 1.1. That will be out in the next few, let's say weeks, months. And that really doesn't bring any major features or changes. That's the generic bug fixes, there's a few things that needed to be ironed out in the interface but also as the process. So that will be relatively soon. Then, the good thing around the ability to develop against what we're doing with AHV, is that because it's so separate from the VBR piece. It allows us to hopefully keep that much more frequent cadence of release. So we'll be starting to see more news about version two as we get into early 2019. >> Just a last thing, wondering what you could say about adoption so far? How much pent up demand was there? You know, I'd like to hear first from the Veeam standpoint. How many customers, if you can share anything about that? And then, Jay, what this means for AHV adoption? >> So, I don't know specific numbers, up to date numbers, but I have seen the sales force numbers grow from an opportunity perspective, and that's specifically where Veeam availability and Nutanix AHV is included in that sales force opportunity. So one of the things, though, is that we're seeing, if you're familiar with the Veeam forums, that, in particular, forum thread is growing and growing because people are understanding that we can help shape what we do here, we want those customers that are using it on a daily business to give us that feedback. >> Do you expect there to be new Veeam customers due to this offering? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Yeah, I think we absolutely expect new Veeam customers. I think at the end of the day, going back your question around AVH, having a healthy ecosystem is really what's going to drive AHV adoption. So partners like Veeam who've done that is really what is providing some choice back. So you're question around what do we expect in the next few months, quarters, what we're seeing is a lot demand on, what's the right way, We're seeing a lot more demand on additional functionality that people customers would like to add into their grate. So AHV is just the beginning of the platform. It's not the end state and then, we're starting to see is a lot of customers, partners who are taking on things like, "Oh, well that's interesting, now I can do something with files, or buckets, or add on top of it where now all of a sudden, I can derive even more value. So AHV is just step one if you will, right? >> Yeah, I think that's important as well. So we've got update four coming out early next year that's going to bring the ability to leverage the Nutanix buckets that we've heard about this week. There's also other cloud mobility, but for the option of being able to convert those machines and send the up into Azure or AWS to be able to run tests and development up there. But, that whole cloud mobility about movement of data and making it seamless using the same tool set. One of the key differentiators is the VBK format. So those who know Veeam, they use the VBK format and that's exactly the same format that the Nutanix AHV product uses as well. >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, congratulations. Really looked at, as I said, this is really opening the door to start the journey as to where your customers are going. I've been hearing feedback from customers that have been waiting for this for a while and excited to see how this matures as things go forward. So, Jay, Michael, thanks so much for joining us and stay with us, full day of coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London. Thanks of watching theCUBE. (electronic beat)

(groovy music) >> Live from London, England. It's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. You're watching two days of wall-to-wall coverage from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 Europe. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer and happy to welcome to the program Tim Isaacs, who's the general manager of data services, which really is the core products of Nutanix underneath the Hypervisor, if I understand correct. >> That's right. >> With Nutanix. Tim, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely, thank you for having me. Very nice to be here. >> Alright, so, Tim. This is my 7th .NEXT and for a lot of 'em, it's like, okay, where are we with that HCI marketplace? A couple years ago, Nutanix expanded the marketing to enterprise cloud and now has, if I've got right, from two years it was about two products and today it's more like 14 products. >> Right. >> Some organically, some through M&A. As it was put out, there was Core, which is AOS, and to the HCI, AHV, Prism Management, and your stuff is what all of these customers that are attending here are using. I'd love to get a number sometime, as to how many Nutanix customers aren't running that in the future. We were hearing how many are doing more than that. But give us the state of your business. >> Sure. >> At the, no pun intended, core of what Nutanix does. >> Absolutely. Yeah, so I think you are referring to our most recent segmentation. You're talking about Core, then Core is basically AOS, which is synonymous with HCI, and then obviously that includes AHV built in and then Prism for management and then Essentials is a, several other things relating to operations management, automation, file storage, so on and so forth. So, I'll talk about Core and I'll talk about maybe a few things in the Essentials bucket. So, Core, obviously, is all of our customers today, right? It's a layered kick, clearly, so people start with Core, then they move up the stack, if you will, right? Into Essentials and then many into Enterprise as well. And Core, at its base, is softly defined storage technologies, right? Powering HCI. So what we realize quite early on is, look, you know, HCI is all about virtualization. Virtualized workload. So, you got virtual machines, they can be desktops, they can be servers, they can be databases. But then there's also the notion of unstructured data, right? So, what about all this file storage that I have? What about all this object storage that I have? And what we realized was, well, we have a platform, we have the infrastructure, softly defined storage, and it was simply a matter of expanding that. And if you think about files, it's just another use case on this infrastructure. So, we started on our files journey about two years ago and I think you might have seen some announcements, today as well as about six months ago, where we're getting ready to release our object storage solution. So, now, if I take stock of the portfolio. >> Buckets, I believe it's called. >> Buckets, it's called Buckets, exactly. What do you think of the name? >> I don't hate it. >> Okay, okay. (laughing) >> As an analyst, that's probably the most you're gonna get out of me. >> Got you, got you. Yeah, so if I take stock of the portfolios today, you got Core, right, which is hyperconvergence, virtual machines, multiple workloads. And then you got unstructured data. Real files as well as, soon it will be objects. And then we also provide just generic block storage for anybody who wants to, "Hey, I got a database, it's running on a bare metal server, "can you give me block storage? "I wanna consume it and I'm gonna run Oracle on it "in a RAC setting." Yeah, sure, go for it, right? So, even though most of our customers are indeed hyperconverged, there are some customers who use us as storage only, and that's okay. If that works for them, great. But the power of the whole thing is, now you can consolidate all of your workloads on a single platform. >> Yeah, one of the things we talked about with Dheeraj yesterday is, when Nutanix launched, there were certain waves that it kinda hit. It seemed to be the right time for things, so, you know, software defined before we called it software defined. What was there, flashes of technology, was really coming from a little niche project to broad adoption. A lot has changed in the about nine years since the solution went on and you had a major file system rewrite in 5.10. I've heard some people think of it almost as AOS 2.0. >> Right. >> To get ready for some of the modern things happening from a technology standpoint as well as the modern applications that will sit on top of it. >> Right. >> Dheeraj said it's like the plane flying at 35,000 feet, running at full speed, and we're gonna change the engine out. Gives a little bit of insight as to what goes into that, to what that took and what that prepares Nutanix and your customers for. >> Absolutely. So, there comes a time in every technologies lifespan where you have to re-architect significantly. And that's because things are changing. Applications are changing, the world is changing. There are a bunch of emerging technologies that come about, and we are sort of in an interesting time, where things like memory glass storage, NVMe, RDMA, all of these things are starting to get mainstream, and for good reason, right? They actually deliver a lot of value. So the file system that have developed nine years ago, yes, you can make incremental changes, but there comes a time where you have to say, "Look, I gotta make these big changes. "I have to rethink my data, metadata structure." And that's what you're seeing. And obviously, this will be in phases. Phase one was more about optimizing metadata. Phase two will be about rewriting the file system in a major way. What we're calling block store, to basically take advantage of things like memory glass storage. And then, result is two things. One is we'll be able to take better advantage of all of these new technologies. And by doing so, now you are delivering a very different kind of a, if you will, not just an experience, but value to your customers. So, somebody could be running a database today and there's certain expectations of performance and reliability and latency. In this new world, AOS 2.0, those expectations will be entirely different, right? >> So, looking at the adoption of it, so, AOS 2.0, basically, everyone's gonna run it at some point. You know, everybody is running it already, upgrading it is gonna be, in Nutanix style, pretty easy. But I'm wondering, the other storage products, you don't see adoption there. How many people are using it, what are they using it for? >> Sure, sure. And by the other storage products, you're referring to file storage and things like that, right? >> Yes. >> So, for all of them, files is the most mature. We released SSG about two years ago and we have close to 1,000 customers using files today. So not just purchased, but using. So 1,000 users as customers, so you know, pretty decent. Good adoption. And there's also been a bit of a journey here. You know, we started with files being a SMB protocol product. So, it had a bias towards Windows environments, user data. About a year ago, we released NFS support. So now, the game changes a little bit. You're talking machine data, machine generated data, right? So it's very different. And that's also forced us to rethink how we go about scalability, how we go about automation. You know, if there's a hot spot, the system should take care of itself. Does it go off and scale up? Does it go off and scale out? Does this happen automatically? So, a lot of those things started to get weaved into the fold of the product. So, that's files. I would say, the most mature outside of HCI. Objects is new. Just ready to get it ready to go GA. We've done a bunch of early access with a few customers, things are looking good, alright? So, looking forward to what we have there. Block storage, we also offer generic iSCSI-based block storage. That's also been in market for a while, and this has been use cases where somebody wants to run a bare metal database outside. Reasons of licensing or what have you. Maybe it's legacy databases. And I just want storage from the Nutanix cluster. So, what we said is, "You know what we'll do? "We'll carve off a portion of the Nutanix cluster, "logically speaking, serve it out as volumes, right? "Generic volumes, and you can use it for your databases." Performance and everything is very similar to what you would get if you were hyperconverged. So, you're not giving up anything by doing so, other than the fact that, obviously, you're not in a true hyperconverged form factor. >> Alright, since we're talking about storage, I wonder if you could drill a little deeper on some of the new stuff. So, in 5.10, you're ready for memory glass storage, things like NVMe. Where are we today? What is further down the road map? You know, the storage industry, NVMe, and NVMe over Fabrics is a pretty hot discussion. Everybody's getting ready for it. Is there anything that Nutanix is doing unique there? And give us what the customer expectations should be. >> Sure, sure, it makes sense. So, I think, at the more fundamental level, I think we all agree that, if you're in a hyperconverged form factor, because you have storage right with compute, that gives you an inherent advantage to begin with, versus three-tier storage that goes over the network. So, what we're trying to do is, hey, let's continue to milk that, so to speak. And you know, in 5.10, we released, I would say, one portion of what we call AOS 2.0. And here, what we did was we optimized heavily for metadata. So, our metadata versus data model changes with AOS 2.0. And then what we'll do, we'll follow this up with major changes to the data model itself. So, for example, now, when you're dealing with memory glass storage, you gotta be able to address it slightly differently. You have to be using low-level APIs. Things like SPDK to circumvent the kernel, for example, and go directly into storage. So, all those things are in the works, and the net result is going to be, well, I see higher performance, I see more consistent performance, I see lower latencies, right? And obviously more through-put as well. Now, you talked about NVMe over Fabrics. Now, the idea there is, look, you got the NVMe protocol Fabrics now, so what sort of a fabric are you building? Because we deal, essentially, with ethernet, ours will be an ethernet fabric, right? So, now we'll start to leverage RDMA more. We already do so in our systems today, but I would like to see end-to-end RDMA, where you start at the application, and then right through the pipeline, the data path, it's RDMA all the way down to storage. And even for your replicas, it's RDMA. And now you're talking a very different kind of latency, right? You're not talking, forget about a millisecond. We're talking about less than a hundred microseconds of latency end to end. >> So, that kind of sounds like the perfect use case for IoT, you know, heavy data processing. What are some of the efforts you're undertaking to optimize for Zi IoT? >> Right, so, IoT. You know, there's obviously two pieces to IoT, right? There's the computing I do on the Edge and then the computing I do after the fact, somewhere else, machine-building models that I can feed back to the Edge, right? So, this new technology would apply in both places. Now, when you're on the Edge itself, there's certain situations where your real-time processing needs to be real-time. It better be quick, right? So, the faster my storage, the faster my decision-making. And then, so let's say you're able to make decisions faster, inferencing decisions faster in real time. Now you go to the cloud, shall we say, where you're doing the long-time processing, and there, too, it's a matter of, okay, I'm doing all this machine learning. I have a bunch of, say, AI OML packages running here. There, too, there's an angle of time. If I do this in two weeks and feed it back versus two days, there's a big difference in business value that's being delivered, right? So, I think the applicability of all of these changes is across any use case. >> Alright, Tim, wanna give you the final word. You know, you've got the Core products there, but what are you hoping that customers walk away from as they leave the show this week? >> So, I mean, I would say, dear customers, we are ready for all use cases, all workloads. We are getting better and better. You will see us be on the bleeding edge when it comes to Core technologies. I think we are a first mover. All the things we talked about, we have been investing in. This is not the first time. It's released for the first time, but it's been around, we've been developing it for multiple years. So, you can think of Nutanix as someone who's on the forefront of all of these new technologies and, at the end of the day, it's all about your applications being ready for all of those applications, traditional as well as new, and in your choice of form factor. You wanna go hyperconverged? Great, you wanna go as storage only? It's up to you. >> Alright, well, Tim, really appreciate the updates. Congrats on all the progress and look forward to watching where things go in the future. >> Awesome, thank you guys. >> Alright, be sure to stay with us, got a couple more interviews left here from Nutanix. .NEXT 2018 in London, England. Thanks for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music) (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite here at the Orange County Civic Center in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by Brian Cox, he is the director of product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Well thanks for having me, Rebecca, and Stu, it's good to see you again, so-- >> Yes, you're a CUBE alum, an esteemed CUBE alum. >> I've been here before and it's a great experience. >> Great, well, before the cameras were rolling we were talking about how Nutanix really pioneered hyper-converged infrastructure. But, the vision is bigger, Nutanix is about more than hyper-converged. >> Yeah, and we're very, actually, glad to see here at Microsoft Ignite that Microsoft, in the next version of Windows, is touting the whole hyper-converged concept. So, we are seeing validation from one of the most established computing companies in the world. The thing is, when Nutanix got started, we didn't even know what to call it. We never used the term hyper-converged infrastructure. It was one of your colleagues in the analyst community, they coined that term. We were really thinking of something, I think, bigger and beyond, which is, how can we simplify IT, because at the end of the day, all the business cares about are the services that IT delivers. Those get delivered through applications. Everything below that, frankly, the business doesn't care, right? If you're a donut company, you want to make donuts. If you're a shipping company, you want to have trucks and all that logistics to be optimal. IT, and finance, and marketing, and HR, they're all just means to an end. And so, when we looked at this we said, What can we do to just deliver those services and apps, and simplify everything else? Anything that we can do to save time, that we can save money, we get to return that back to the business to help be a better trucking company or a better donut company, right? So with that in mind, we said we need to simplify. >> Brian, great point, I mean, your background, my background, we're on the infrastructure side of things. You know, I got reminded many times in my career, Look, the whole goal of infrastructure is to make those apps run. You know, it's my data and my applications, those are the important things of the business. That doesn't mean that we've, you know, made y'know, IT is not yet a utility, it's not completely commoditized, there's differentiation, so, maybe help explain a little bit, Nutanix in the Microsoft ecosystem and how that fits in the overall view of Nutanix's value in the marketplace. >> Sure, so, the larger vision that Nutanix had is just, Let's simplify everything below the app layer. We did start at one place, which is just to fundamentally clean up and simplify the physical infrastructure, so you have storage arrays over here, servers over here, a sand-fabric in-between, virtualization layered on top of that, all coming from different vendors, not necessarily all tested together. I know because I used to work at the vendors, right? All different management consoles. It's really hard to become a mastermind of all of that, to have it optimized, and not to have points of failure. So we said, The first thing we need to do is eliminate that complexity. So we brought that down into like a single building block appliance, which ultimately got termed hyper-converged infrastructure, but that wasn't our destination. That was just, we needed common building blocks like LEGO pieces, right, that can snap together without any fuss and allow the companies to build that up. Then, from there, we can then raise the level of simplification all the way between the physical infrastructure to the app. So, one of the things that we get an immediate benefit from, when we consolidate storage and servers, the virtualization, is that we improve performance for things like Microsoft SQL or Exchange. So, no longer do you have that long hop from the compute with the servers all the way out to the external storage arrays. It all collapses, performance gets better, we eliminate points of failure, and, in fact, even when you have multiple of these LEGO blocks, this cluster, we try to always associate the data and the compute onto the same node, so there's very little latency at all. So, Microsoft SQL, Exchange performance goes up, the up-time goes up, and then to manage it, is also simpler. >> Alright, so Microsoft business productivity apps live on the Nutanix infrastructure-- >> Yeah, they benefit immediately by going to the simpler infrastructure versus this complex distributed architecture, where there's different pieces from different vendors. >> Alright, so, we hear from Microsoft, and we know customers hear, it's a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud world, so, how does the Microsoft pieces of that fit in with the Nutanix Story? >> Well, we realize that customers want to have choice. So, if you look at really the three pillars, that come from our founding, is we want to be able to make it simple, we want to make it scalable, and we do want to give you choice. So, when we look at that last one, we're going to give you a choice of, let's say, whatever hyper-visor you wish to use. It could be Hyper-V, it could be DSXI, it could be the Nutanix AHV, it could be XenServer from Citrix. All of those are supported, we support this on multiple different hardware platforms. So, you have Adelium C, Lenovo, IBM, Fujitsu in Europe, we just added Hitachi last week as a partner, we run on Cisco, we run on HPE servers, and that list continues to grow. So, whatever is your standard, we'll go ahead and work with that. We'll give you choices, different clouds, as well. So, the software to manage and optimize is not only just for your on-prem environment, you can use this if you're in a distributed environment, whether it's Robo or Edge sites, like oil rigs and other IOT, we can give the same interface, and then the same interface out to the public cloud as well. So we give you the choice of different clouds, different platforms, different hyper-visors, and then different operating systems. We support everything from a Windows server environment to Linux and even IBM's AIS. All are supported on the platform, so you get to have it fit the way you want to work, versus the other way around. >> How closely do you work with customers in making theses decisions? Because, as you said, your goal is simplification, making it easy for them to choose and deploy, so how do you walk them through the process, and is it ever analysis paralysis, because there are simply so many options? >> Well for some customers who are struggling with that choice, we do offer our own branded appliance. So, it's very simple, you have the computing framework, the Nutanix software's there, it's one single support line to call, and that's a very simple model. Other customers, though, have chosen who their platform of choice is, whether that's on-prem, like a physical server, or it's a public cloud. That choice, oftentimes, has already been made, right? We're just working with that, so, for those who already have an opinion in the customers sight, we'll work with that. If for some reason they don't have an opinion, or they want it even simpler, they can go with the Nutanix branded offering, but we'll work either way. >> Great, Brian, you go to a number of different shows. Tell us, what are you hearing from customers, what are some of the challenges, what are they looking for, and maybe what's different about the customers who are here at the Microsoft show, versus some of the others we might hear. >> Well, it depends on who you're talking to right? So, if you're talking to C-suite, at the end of the day, these are the guys or gals running the donut company, they're running the trucking company, and they view IT just like they view HR, or finance, or whatever. It's like, yes, that's absolutely critical, we need that function, but the goal is to make it more efficient, more effective so I can deliver more shipments, make more donuts, right? So, for the C-suite, they want to see, On my capital that I'm investing, what is the return on this, and do I have to over-commit capital now, because I can only buy it in big chunks?. So we address that by having what we call fractional consumption. Basically, you're buying one LEGO block at a time, so you're not consuming capital that could elsewhere be used in the business. So, C-suite, they have a different, y'know, one set of needs. Then you look at the sys admins, and they are overwhelmed with all of this complexity of infrastructure, it burns all of their time. They're spending all their nights, all their weekends, they're not very happy, they make mistakes. If we can give them back hours in their day, they're going to be more productive. They can actually do higher level tasks. And even for the folks on the dev team, if we can simplify the infrastructure and spin up new instances, whether it's containers, or VMs, and they can even do it through self-service, that makes them more productive. So, we try to address the needs of all those audiences. >> The customers you are referring to, they are different groups of customers, but they're all essentially the same company, so, are they talking to each other? I mean, are the tech people talking to the business people in terms of what are over-arching goals here. >> Yeah, they do talk to each other. Granted, probably the audience we talk to them most frequently are the sys admins, y'know, because we're very operationally tied, and we'll then arm them with arguments to talk to the C-suite, right? So I was just presenting yesterday here, told them, You're going to get your nights and weekends back., but when you got to go talk to the CFO, here are the things that that person's going to care about, right? When you go talk to the dev team, here's the things that you need to share with them. So, we do arm the sys admins, but we do have a growing presence, at the C-suite, for example. We've also started attending a number of developer conferences, saying, Hey, this actually makes sense to you, to get your job done, it's not just the sys admins, it's you as a developer, it's you as a leader of the company. This is transforming the power of IT to help fulfill the organization's mission. >> I'm curious about your perceptions of Microsoft. Right now we have Satya Nadella, who really portrays this company as a company that is open, inclusive, with a growth mindset, Don't be a know-it-all, be a learn-it-all. I mean, is that your... Do you feel that as someone who works closely with Microsoft, who rubs up against its colleagues-- >> I think it's an embrace, like what you can't exact in regards to, the reality is customers want choice, and it's not one size fits all, not one cookie-cutter approach. So Satya is saying, Hey, what can we do to integrate with Linux? That never would've been heard, maybe, under the previous regimes, right? What can you do to work more closely in the app development environments that the app developers want to work in? So, there's a lot of affinity, I think, between Nutanix and where Satya's going, and in providing that choice, providing best-in-class wherever you can then let the customer choose, but provide them the pros and cons, so they make an informed decision. >> Brian, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Well, thank you Rebecca, and thank you Stu, it's always great to be here. >> We will have more from theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)