>> Narrator: Live, from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in Nice, France, with Nutanix.Next. Happy to welcome back to the program two return guests, Binny Gill and Aaditya Sood, both with Nutanix. As I said, Binny is the Chief Architect. Aaditya is Senior Director of Engineering. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. My pleasure. All right, so, for about the last year, we've been looking at Nutanix, you talk about enterprise cloud. What does that really mean? How do you, as Dheera said, the goal was to become an iconic software company. Audacious goal. Started with a couple of acquisitions. Really, this week it feels like we're kind of expanding a little bit on what kind of the Nutanix Cloud portfolio if you will, is going to look like. So first, Aaditya, pretty busy, since you came into the Nutanix fold. Bring us up to speed on what you've been up to since the last time we talked. Sure, thank you Stu. The last year or so we have spent integrating Calm into the Nutanix platform. And also just enhancing it so that the true multi-cloud capability of the current platforms come together. And I think this is one of the fundamental building blocks for the modern next generation enterprise clouds. On services, as well as on a service-centric life cycle approach and that is what we have been up to. Yeah, so to dig in for one second here. Because Calm, absolutely seems central, kind of cloud and (mumble), the two things we have been talking about. I've talked to a couple of customers that have had kind of that early, limited access really happy. A lot of customers I've talked to they're like, ah, I've seen the slides. I'm hoping to see some demos. But, you know, they can't wait to get their hands on it 'cause as Nutanix has done in the past, you know, some bold claims, but will the product deliver? So were are we? When does everyone get their hands on it and, you know, get beating on it? Sure, we have been running some early access betas with customers for the last two or three months and the response for us has been phenomenal. Our partners are very excited, our customers are excited. And well as all of Nutanix is very excited. And I think that sometime later this month is when we will push this thing out there to see how it works out, but so far, looking pretty good. All right, excellent. All right, Binny, lot of new announcements. I mean we had Sunil on. We went through, there's all the five-five stuff. But you know, we bring you on stage to talk about some of the future things as I said, expanding out kind of the cloud's stack. Give us a little bit, kind of the architect's view as to how you're deciding, you know, what to build and then you give us the thumbnails as to what's coming. Yeah, so, essentially what we're trying to build is, as you talked about earlier, an enterprise cloud OS, let me put some more meat to that statement. Essentially, an operating system is something where we run applications, right? Back in the old days, operating systems were run on my desktop, like it could be a Linux operating system or Windows operating system and my app would just run on one host. Today, apps run on clouds, right? So the cloud is the new operating system. Now there are multiple operating systems out there. There's AWS, there's Azure, there's GCP. What does the enterprise have, right? Enterprise doesn't have a good operating system and that's our goal. So what were are saying is we need to build all the aspects of an operating system that means starting from a marketplace, you know, from where you download an application to Calm which can deploy an application to a run time like AHV where the application runs to the networking, the storage and security, all these aspects is what we are building and if you can see how we are progressing over the last two, three, years on this, we have made tremendous progress on a lot of these fronts. And if you look at the announcements that we are making, these are very strategic in that direction, how can we make the right components fit into the picture at the right time. All right and speak a little bit to some of the announcements made-- Yeah, so, if you look at so far what we have done, we have had a (mumble) block services and file services and services that allow you to run your mobile apps better, right? Now you're looking at the next generation cloud native applications. One of the first, key things to have is an objects store. If you look at how the public cloud evolved. It started with an object store for multiple applications. We announced that the objects store service. And again, in true Nutanix fashion, it's going to be highly scalable, elastic. We are looking at global scale and how can you build an object store, not only to reside in one cloud and sort of be lock a lock-in, but rather, have it inter-distributed dispersed cloud fashion with the odd capabilities, back-up snap shot. The old constructs of mobility are still needed in this next generation disperse cloud. So that is one of the things. The other announcement we made was on the compute cloud, right. So you've seen Nutanix bring in hyperconvergence first, then we said you can add storage-only Nords. Now we are saying you compute only, storage-less Nords. And the whole idea is that now you can run AHV on a lot more servers. Even the servers you had earlier invested in, you can bring them into the Nutanix fabric and manage from Prism, the one place to manage all your compute farm, all your hyerconvergence farm, and all your storage farm. So that's pretty exciting right now. Yeah, and it's interesting, those people are like, oh well, Nutanix is a hyperconvergence structure player. Well, that service you describe AC2? There's no storage. It's not not hyperconverged, right? So, is HCI just a piece of the portfolio? How would you look at that from an engineering standpoint? HCI was sort of the hammer we needed to use to get rid of the legacy, if you think about it. But, that essentially got rid of the complexity of three-tier architecture, three-tier mindset. Once that's gone and we now say that okay, this is one compute fabric, and the storage fabric could be married to it, or in some cases, it could be separate, that's completely fine, as long as there's one stack that you're dealing with, you know a single place where you can go and upgrade your files from there, this from there, that from there, hypervisor, you know the storage controller, that makes it an operating system in some sense. OS is the one place where, you know it's still wholistic, it doesn't have, I don't buy parts of an OS from different companies. It's one OS. And that's what we are building, so, HCI was an means to an end, I think. Now building an OS for the cloud is the next goal. All right, so, Aaditya, We hear the message of a one OS. But if I look at any IT environment, they have and, because they have something new and they have their old stuff. And the they accept something new and it's always heterogeneous, well I've got vSphere and AHV. I've got AWS and, you know, GCP. Management has to kind of deal with that. And it's been something we have been struggling with in this industry for longer than I've been in the industry. (laughter) So, how are you looking at this? Where do you feel that Nutanix and Calm is going to help, you know to try to, not silver bullet, hopefully single pane of glass get discussed too much. But, what realistically, what do you solve and what advice do you give customers to try to help them get through this? Sure. So the way we look at it, that's the reality to it, the fractured reality of infrastructure, of the enterprise and the different kinds of Window stacks running together. And to riff off Binny's example, an operating system, forever, had different devices, different hardware devices from different Windows. But, by using things like device drivers or file abstractions, build a consistent, layered platform on top of them, so each application did not need to be return off or I'm running this network card or that network card and so on. So that's how we're looking at this layered approach in Calms as well from Nutanix. And yes, there is going to be AWS, there is going to be GCP. But on top of this a single layer can be built which can go ahead and allow the applications to abstract those parts out. That being said, there is no silver bullet for any of this. There are trade-offs involved, but we like to think of based-off on the feedback we have seen over the last year or so of running betas and getting customer interactions and partnerships that remains is, it takes I'd would say 80, 90% of the complexity over. Now I will specifically not use a single pane of glass. Why, because you said so. Yes. Very rightly so, but I think that as close as coming and not just as a single scream but as a single abstraction across multiple pieces of infrastructure is what we are going and building now. And, I've talked to a number of the Nutanix partners and RESTful APIs come up all the time. It's easy for them to integrate with the services. It's kind of the core fundamental of what we look at today, yes? Yeah, Binny. When I think about the channel and I think about your customers, sell an appliance, it's relatively easy. Selling software and services and these pieces, it's a little bit different mindset for them. How do you help with the customers, the go-to-market for what you're building today, how do you get them ready for that? How do you listen to them? How is the feedback you're getting from people impact the kind of what and how you're building it? Yes, we see all sorts of requirements actually coming in. There are some large customers who still love our appliance model. They can just buy Nutanix appliances and forget about managing them or who do they need to call, it's one number to call, one throat to choke, quote unquote, and then there are some others who want to picky in terms of hey, this is the hardware I need to get, because I have great contacts with Taiwan or China and I'll the hardware from there. I also have been using that in my other server farms. They are using just software from us, so we sell them software only. So, there are many different ways in which we are solving for what customers want. And there's no one-size-fits-all. And that's the beauty of this, I mean, just like, I can take Linux and package it as an appliance and say, hey, this is a router or something else, or maybe a custom, super computer or I could just have it independent, right. So, the beauty of an OS is that it's very flexible in how you package it, right. And that packaging will be very diverse and the partner ecosystem will build around that operating system, as Aaditya was saying. As you see in this expo, there are a lot of partners excited working with our OS and adding their value-add on top of it. All right so, Binny, we heard of there's a lot of features you're rolling out through community edition, CE, first. When I saw the announcements of the object and the compute, there's this disclaimer, it's like well, this is future stuff that we're working on but we're not giving you a date. For a software company, how do you give guidance on this, it gets announced, when should we expect to see it in beta, community edition and kind of generally available? You're a public company, you can't give too much, but general guidance, philosophy, engineering standpoint, how do we look? 'Cause we've gone away from the 18 month major release cycles, so how do you look at release cycles and the way to get them out? So yeah, a couple of things, One is that we are going towards an agile modeling in terms of how releases will be done. Like how Aaditya's team will be releasing Calm at a different cadence compared to, for example, a storage fabric. This is still one OS. But you can upgrade pieces in it, separately. And they can come faster. Basically, the new services that come in, they need more quicker reiteration and that's how they will be iterated on and the older services where you care about, hey, I don't want to cut up my data and all that. You'd be more concerned by nature. And that's essentially, you'll see that's the transition that's going to happen and how we do stuff. One of the core principles, like philosophies, that we have is in mind is that we want to make sure that the experience that our customers have today with Nutanix on trim is maintained. Say, if they want the five nine, six nine is a liability. If they want the NPS of 90 plus, that's what you need. The reason we started with our own appliance was precisely that. We want to control the experience. Then when we went with Onyems and Partners, we were very strict in what we allow, what we don't allow so that experience is maintained. You will see the same thing going forward. So, we're not about, hey, just throwing in a bunch of features because so many people are waiting for it but the quality goes with that. We want to make sure that when we, even when we talk about hybrid cloud and (mumble), and we're talking about DR as a service, what would you DR, your business critical, mission critical apps. So you expect the same quality, right? So, that's what you should expect from Nutanix that if it is GA, it holds up to the bar and net promote a score. It will be maintained very high. All right, Aaditya, one last question I have for you is in an event like this, you get to talk to a lot of customers. I'm sure there's huge requests, talk to a lot of customers, they're excited about what you're doing and they want to know not only GA but kind of roadmap. What can you share with us as some of the big pieces, what should we be looking for beyond the availability itself when it comes to your activities. Sure, I think, I of course, can't go into too much amount of details because I'll unveil it at the right time. Some of the things what we are, what core things we are specifically looking at is how to bridge the chasm between the old school of more than one application and move to container-based modern entirely cloud-based native applications like all the majority of a lot of the enterprise today is stuck on this side of the divide. And it's very simplistic and naive to say just rewrite all your applications to fit into containers, or the modern cloud and everything. So we are building a bunch of technologies which you are here and creatively and incrementally get you over to the other side without doing rewrites, maintaining uptime and hopefully minimizing your spending. Yeah, that's great, Binny, in the keynote today, we heard more about the edge computing, Satyam talked about it. There's certain parts of the market I talk to, it's like containers are pretty much a given at this point. Server list is something that we're talking about a lot. Now, how is engineering and architecture keep up with this change? how do you look at some of these dynamics, how to make sure you don't kind of over-rotate too fast? You want to be with your customers, not too far ahead of them. Well, yeah, so, even in the keynote today, you might have noticed that the way we look at the problem of how our customers will move to the next level. And every customer is at a different phase in this journey towards building their true enterprise hybrid cloud, right. Some are still virtualizing, to be frank. And some are them are moving from three tier to hyperconvergence, some of them from hyperconvergence to hey, I need a better hypervisor with the HV, and then I need Calm and then I need Zi and so on. So they're on a journey. The way we look at this entire transition, even when you talk about IODs, like have it as another phase in the evolution, don't force it on everybody. So IODs being built as a layer after you're standardized on Calm, for example, then you can use Calm as a way of saying now I need to enable some services that I need to create the foundation for building my IOD apps, so functions as a service and all that would be managed by the cloud admin using Calm. So we're building things in layers and IODs is yet another layer that will come out in some time. Binny Gill, Aaditya Sood, thank you so much for giving us all the updates. We look forward to the releases and the future announcements. We'll be back with more coverage here. Nutanix next, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference. Bought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT everybody inside the district kind of. This is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're with theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of NEXTConf. Aaditya Sood is here, he's the director of, Senior Director of Engineering and Products at Nutanix and Binny Gill who is the Chief Architect at the company. Gentlemen welcome to theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you. >> Good to see you again. >> Nice to be here. >> So you guys had the great keynote I love how, Dheerraj interacts with you on the stage. Asks you these Columbo questions even though he has deep knowledge of what's goin' on it's really quite good. But Binny let me start with you, first of all what's the show like this year we've been now this is our third year doing. >> Yeah. >> NEXT, we've seen quite an evolution. From your standpoint from the hardcore product side what are you seeing? >> I think it's exciting to be here, this year we are seeing almost every year doubling of the attendance in the conference and also the excitement that we hear from our Nutanix technical champions and our customers is a lot more visceral. In terms of how much we are doing in terms of vision and mission and as we are executing on our vision that has always been are we sure you can do it kind of thing, but as we deliver every year there's more conviction that we are seeing from all these people here so it's really exciting. >> Aaditya I wonder if you could talk about Calm a little bit it is your baby. People say Calm I'm calm, is the joke goin' around today what is Calm? >> Well Calm is many things at once, but most of all it's a control plane at the application layer. How do you build this multi-cloud hybrid cloud technology together? And manage the entire life cycle, compliance, governance, provisioning, costing, visibility all of these things together? >> And Aaditya there's many companies that have tried to attack this challenge why did you when you help co-found Calm think that you could address this and bring us up to speed as to the acquisition last year what is being part of Nutanix what did that do to the product itself to lead us to today? >> I think addressing the first part of your question why we think this is different many people have tried to do this, blueprints and these things over the many decades automation has been around. But I think this is fundamentally 10X to a 100X better because of the logical approach we are taking, the data model we have built which models applications and tries to keep the logical layer separate from the physical layer or the virtual layer. Thinking about the Nutanix integration was homecoming. This was, practically nothing changed from our point of view except that we got, became part of a much bigger family, a lot of warmth there a lot of technical goodness, a lot of I would say systems level and platform goodness that got leveraged in. So it's been all pretty great the last say what nine months or so. >> Alright Binny we want to get your view point of course Nutanix has been growing its ecosystem. We've got a big expo hall with a lot of partners there, what were the goals that you wanted to make sure you hit? By the time we came to this show with Calm to meet your customers and this growing ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think what we're looking at is explaining how we are building an operating system. An operating system is a platform for running applications and now the platform for running applications in fact changing earlier it used to be Linux and Windows now it's Clouds. Cloud is an OS, and when you talk about building OSs it's about ecosystem, it's about the drivers, it's about the partners that build stuff for you. Calm is a way of inviting them to a marketplace. A repository for where you put your stuff. Calm is also your YUM in app kit tool, one click deployment of any application the more simple you make it the more a person will be attracted to your operating system so the message here is look we are developing a marketplace bringing Calm to the picture, giving an operating system that can run on any hardware. Hardware meaning any cloud, any hypervice and so on. >> How much can I ask Stu, how much that one click if you think about the the lifecycle of what has to occur in that one click and then by the way everything else that you don't do how much time do you think you're saving people? I mean take database as a service, yes one click but then you got to do regression testing, you got to do some recovery testing but you're taking away a lot of the planning presumably. >> Yeah absolutely. >> Do you have any sense as to if it takes 100 how much you just shaved off with one click? >> Yeah, I mean I think there's the best person to answer that question his team has been working on this for seven years. >> And this is something that again touching back on what Calm does differently that it understands that provisioning your application is only the beginning of your problems. You have an application now you have to grow it, scale it, it's going to blow up, you need to upgrade it, test it, certify it and all that stuff. And that's where the application lifecycle management part comes in. As a rough estimate I would say at least 70 to 80% of the complexity has gone away. There is still some complexity because there is an essential complexity in every problem cannot reduce it beyond that. But I'd say off the ballpark 70, 80. >> I like that number so I kind of baited you, the practitioner that we had on today said at least, he's being conservative because that's what IT guys do he said at least 50% so we can fairly say let's say 50 to 70% you've just taken off the table so they can now focus on higher quality, testing, recovery and even in the fun stuff as Stu likes to say. (laughs) >> Absolutely, and Aadiyta there was the joke in the keynote that this is not an app store so what do you see the one click is obviously is a critical piece but how's this different from think of the Amazon Marketplace or other we've talked about do we need an enterprise app store, how is this different, how do customers perceive this? What early feedback have you been getting? >> I think one of the problems that we are trying to solve and how we are looking at it is every platform let's say every public cloud, every private cloud they have some amount of tooling and automation already built in. But from a customer point of view these are all just different independent silos. So if you go look at any marketplace it's on EWS only. And what we are trying to do is this is means to an end. I'm running five different kind of infrastructure stacks I want a single app store for my consumers internally. My business user doesn't care where the application is provisioned as long as we can write them the right SLAs and cost ROI for their internal application. >> What's important about this, I wonder if we can riff on it for a bit so we weren't the first to say this I think it was probably Benioff that more non-tech companies will be SaaS companies than tech companies. So that says that they need a stack to build their SaaS. So that marketplace that you showed you had Cassandra, Mongo, MySQL and Redes and TensorFlow and all of these tools. That'll allow a SaaS provider to build their own stack. So I wonder if we could talk about this a little bit in terms of the vision of the next generation company, not just tech company. And how you see yourselves fitting into that as an enabler. Comments. >> I think as an analogy I'd like to take how they the electronics industry evolved. Back in the 70's and 80's the semi-conductor explosion happened. And any kind of functionality that I wanted I looked at the catalog, I looked at the cost, the yield rates, the functionality that chip provided. I just went and bought those chips and I plugged them in, and I built my (mumbles) out of it. And this is how I think this is going to evolve. That we are just going to move the level of abstraction one higher level. Have usable fundamental components, compose them together and have a faster time to market. Do as an application developer do I really need to understand how Bongo scales and how it's provisioned and how it's backed up and everything? I want a single EPI or a one click experience equal in my view to just plug it into my application and then go on from there. And then take this my application and deliver it as a unit to my user which can then go ahead and just like Lego blocks keep building higher and higher layers of functionality. >> Yeah Aaditya brought up a key point there with APIs right. Anytime an OS is developed after some point you talk about what is the standardization of APIs on top of this OS? Like Posix was a standard of APIs in an operating system. This new cloud operating system is actually asking for a standardization of API so that the applications built on top of it can enjoy a guaranteed stable API that'll be portable across various hardwares and clouds. We are seeing the beginning of the that kind of API with the work that Aaditya's team is doing around our blueprints, our lifecycle that's coming to the floor right now. >> Aaditya one of the things I usually hear after a company gets acquired by a bigger company is the amount of feedback they get from the customers. Nutanix is a little bit self-selecting customers that are usually looking to try something different. What's been your experience with the Nutanix customer base? Has that impacted or shifted where you were looking to drive the product? >> It has certainly, informed the product roadmap but I wouldn't say it has fundamentally changed it. Because one of the key things and one of the great things about Nutanix is that we are building open systems. Which is why even in the keynote that you saw when we are going and provisioning an application we are not saying this is Nutanix only, we are treating each of the computer platform an independent equivalent level. And that was our vision right from the start to bring the goodness at the top layer and then leverage some deep platform stuff like we can obviously work best on Nutanix because we get underlying data from the storage systems, the virtualization systems and we'll run on that. But, yeah fundamentally it has not really changed anything. >> Ambitious. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Binny the question I have for you is if I look at the public cloud they all want to own the applications in one way or another. Google's pretty a little bit more open but Microsoft lots of business apps, Amazon have dealt with next generation apps, how does Nutanix look at that app ownership? Obviously you come from the infrastructure side but how does your view point differ say from some other clouds? >> Our viewpoint is more like how players like Apple look at owning the app. I mean you have an app store or a marketplace but that is sort of democratic I do have my own apps I could have my mail app, my camera app but I am neutral in the sense that I enable others to create a better app if they can because it only helps my platform. So we are in the business of creating the best in class operating system we're calling it Enterprise Cloud Operating System and then enabling that cloud operating system to run on any farm factor any hypervice and or hardware or going all the way to the edge as you might have talked to others in this conference our cloud operating system can run on a single node now down from three nodes, to two nodes to one node to a intel node in a drone. That is where we're going, enable everybody. And on these various farm factors different applications would run. I would say a small fraction of the applications that are key to most customers to get to 80% of the simple use cases might come from us but the majority of the use cases would come from outside. And eventually we look at this as we primarily building the OS and the world building an app, app store or marketplace on top of us. >> Alright gents we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> It was really a pleasure seeing you again. >> As always take care. >> Okay keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE we're live from NEXTConf in D.C.. We'll be right back. (exciting music)