>>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)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> In the words of my colleague CTO David Nicholson, Broadcom buys old cars, not to restore them to their original luster and beauty. Nope. They buy classic cars to extract the platinum that's inside the catalytic converter and monetize that. Broadcom's planned 61 billion acquisition of VMware will mark yet another new era and chapter for the virtualization pioneer, a mere seven months after finally getting spun out as an independent company by Dell. For VMware, this means a dramatically different operating model with financial performance and shareholder value creation as the dominant and perhaps the sole agenda item. For customers, it will mean a more focused portfolio, less aspirational vision pitches, and most certainly higher prices. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis, we'll share data, opinions and customer insights about this blockbuster deal and forecast the future of VMware, Broadcom and the broader ecosystem. Let's first look at the key deal points, it's been well covered in the press. But just for the record, $61 billion in a 50/50 cash and stock deal, resulting in a blended price of $138 per share, which is a 44% premium to the unaffected price, i.e. prior to the news breaking. Broadcom will assume 8 billion of VMware debt and promises that the acquisition will be immediately accretive and will generate 8.5 billion in EBITDA by year three. That's more than 4 billion in EBITDA relative to VMware's current performance today. In a classic Broadcom M&A approach, the company promises to dilever debt and maintain investment grade ratings. They will rebrand their software business as VMware, which will now comprise about 50% of revenues. There's a 40 day go shop and importantly, Broadcom promises to continue to return 60% of its free cash flow to shareholders in the form of dividends and buybacks. Okay, with that out of the way, we're going to get to the money slide literally in a moment that Broadcom shared on its investor call. Broadcom has more than 20 business units. It's CEO Hock Tan makes it really easy for his business unit managers to understand. Rule number one, you agreed to an operating plan with targets for revenue, growth, EBITDA, et cetera, hit your numbers consistently and we're good. You'll be very well compensated and life will be wonderful for you and your family. Miss the number, and we're going to have a frank and uncomfortable bottom line discussion. You'll four, perhaps five quarters to turn your business around, if you don't, we'll kill it or sell it if we can. Rule number two, refer to rule number one. Hello, VMware, here's the money slide. I'll interpret the bullet points on the left for clarity. Your fiscal year 2022 EBITDA was 4.7 billion. By year three, it will be 8.5 billion. And we Broadcom have four knobs to turn with you, VMware to help you get there. First knob, if it ain't recurring revenue with rubber stamp renewals, we're going to convert that revenue or kill it. Knob number two, we're going to focus R&D in the most profitable areas of the business. AKA expect the R&D budget to be cut. Number three, we're going to spend less on sales and marketing by focusing on existing customers. We're not going to lose money today and try to make it up many years down the road. And number four, we run Broadcom with 1% GNA. You will too. Any questions? Good. Now, just to give you a little sense of how Broadcom runs its business and how well run a company it is, let's do a little simple comparison with this financial snapshot. All we're doing here is taking the most recent quarterly earnings reports from Broadcom and VMware respectively. We take the quarterly revenue and multiply by four X to get the revenue run rate and then we calculate the ratios off of the most recent quarters revenue. It's worth spending some time on this to get a sense of how profitable the Broadcom business actually is and what the spreadsheet gurus at Broadcom are seeing with respect to the possibilities for VMware. So combined, we're talking about a 40 plus billion dollar company. Broadcom is growing at more than 20% per year. Whereas VMware's latest quarter showed a very disappointing 3% growth. Broadcom is mostly a hardware company, but its gross margin is in the high seventies. As a software company of course VMware has higher gross margins, but FYI, Broadcom's software business, the remains of Symantec and what they purchased as CA has 90% gross margin. But the I popper is operating margin. This is all non gap. So it excludes things like stock based compensation, but Broadcom had 61% operating margin last quarter. This is insanely off the charts compared to VMware's 25%. Oracle's non gap operating margin is 47% and Oracle is an incredibly profitable company. Now the red box is where the cuts are going to take place. Broadcom doesn't spend much on marketing. It doesn't have to. It's SG&A is 3% of revenue versus 18% for VMware and R&D spend is almost certainly going to get cut. The other eye popper is free cash flow as a percentage of revenue at 51% for Broadcom and 29% for VMware. 51%. That's incredible. And that my dear friends is why Broadcom a company with just under 30 billion in revenue has a market cap of 230 billion. Let's dig into the VMware portfolio a bit more and identify the possible areas that will be placed under the microscope by Hock Tan and his managers. The data from ETR's latest survey shows the net score or spending momentum across VMware's portfolio in this chart, net score essentially measures the net percent of customers that are spending more on a specific product or vendor. The yellow bar is the most recent survey and compares the April 22 survey data to April 21 and January of 22. Everything is down in the yellow from January, not surprising given the economic outlook and the change in spending patterns that we've reported. VMware Cloud on AWS remains the product in the ETR survey with the most momentum. It's the only offering in the portfolio with spending momentum above the 40% line, a level that we consider highly elevated. Unified Endpoint Management looks more than respectable, but that business is a rock fight with Microsoft. VMware Cloud is things like VMware Cloud foundation, VCF and VMware's cross cloud offerings. NSX came from the Nicira acquisition. Tanzu is not yet pervasive and one wonders if VMware is making any money there. Server is ESX and vSphere and is the bread and butter. That is where Broadcom is going to focus. It's going to look at VSAN and NSX, which is software probably profitable. And of course the other products and see if the investments are paying off, if they are Broadcom will keep, if they are not, you can bet your socks, they will be sold off or killed. Carbon Black is at the far right. VMware paid $2.1 billion for Carbon Black. And it's the lowest performer on this list in terms of net score or spending momentum. And that doesn't mean it's not profitable. It just doesn't have the momentum you'd like to see, so you can bet that is going to get scrutiny. Remember VMware's growth has been under pressure for the last several years. So it's been buying companies, dozens of them. It bought AirWatch, bought Heptio, Carbon Black, Nicira, SaltStack, Datrium, Versedo, Bitnami, and on and on and on. Many of these were to pick up engineering teams. Some of them were to drive new revenue. Now this is definitely going to be scrutinized by Broadcom. So that helps explain why Michael Dell would sell VMware. And where does VMware go from here? It's got great core product. It's an iconic name. It's got an awesome ecosystem, fantastic distribution channel, but its growth is slowing. It's got limited developer chops in a world that developers and cloud native is all the rage. It's got a far flung R&D agenda going at war with a lot of different places. And it's increasingly fighting this multi front war with cloud companies, companies like Cisco, IBM Red Hat, et cetera. VMware's kind of becoming a heavy lift. It's a perfect acquisition target for Broadcom and why the street loves this deal. And we titled this Breaking Analysis taming the VMware beast because VMware is a beast. It's ubiquitous. It's an epic software platform. EMC couldn't control it. Dell used it as a piggy bank, but really didn't change its operating model. Broadcom 100% will. Now one of the things that we get excited about is the future of systems architectures. We published a breaking analysis about a year ago, talking about AWS's secret weapon with Nitro and it's Annapurna custom Silicon efforts. Remember it acquired Annapurna for a measly $350 million. And we talked about how there's a new architecture and a new price performance curve emerging in the enterprise, driven by AWS and being followed by Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, a trend toward custom Silicon with the arm based Nitro and which is AWS's hypervisor and Nick strategy, enabling processor diversity with things like Graviton and Trainium and other diverse processors, really diversifying away from x86 and how this leads to much faster product cycles, faster tape out, lower costs. And our premise was that everyone in the data center is going to competes, is going to need a Nitro to be competitive long term. And customers are going to gravitate toward the most economically favorable platform. And as we describe the landscape with this chart, we've updated this for this Breaking Analysis and we'll come back to nitro in a moment. This is a two dimensional graphic with net score or spending momentum on the vertical axis and overlap formally known as market share or presence within the survey, pervasiveness that's on the horizontal axis. And we plot various companies and products and we've inserted VMware's net score breakdown. The granularity in those colored bars on the bottom right. Net score is essentially the green minus the red and a couple points on that. VMware in the latest survey has 6% new adoption. That's that lime green. It's interesting. The question Broadcom is going to ask is, how much does it cost you to acquire that 6% new. 32% of VMware customers in the survey are increasing spending, meaning they're increasing spending by 6% or more. That's the forest green. And the question Broadcom will dig into is what percent of that increased spend (chuckles) you're capturing is profitable spend? Whatever isn't profitable is going to be cut. Now that 52% gray area flat spending that is ripe for the Broadcom picking, that is the fat middle, and those customers are locked and loaded for future rent extraction via perpetual renewals and price increases. Only 8% of customers are spending less, that's the pinkish color and only 3% are defecting, that's the bright red. So very, very sticky profile. Perfect for Broadcom. Now the rest of the chart lays out some of the other competitor names and we've plotted many of the VMware products so you can see where they fit. They're all pretty respectable on the vertical axis, that's spending momentum. But what Broadcom wants is that core ESX vSphere base where we've superimposed the Broadcom logo. Broadcom doesn't care so much about spending momentum. It cares about profitability potential and then momentum. AWS and Azure, they're setting the pace in this business, in the upper right corner. Cisco very huge presence in the data center, as does Intel, they're not in the ETR survey, but we've superimposed them. Now, Intel of course, is in a dog fight within Nvidia, the Arm ecosystem, AMD, don't forget China. You see a Google cloud platform is in there. Oracle is also on the chart as well, somewhat lower on the vertical axis, but it doesn't have that spending momentum, but it has a big presence. And it owns a cloud as we've talked about many times and it's highly differentiated. It's got a strategy that allows it to differentiate from the pack. It's very financially driven. It knows how to extract lifetime value. Safra Catz operates in many ways, similar to what we're seeing from Hock Tan and company, different from a portfolio standpoint. Oracle's got the full stack, et cetera. So it's a different strategy. But very, very financially savvy. You could see IBM and IBM Red Hat in the mix and then Dell and HP. I want to come back to that momentarily to talk about where value is flowing. And then we plotted Nutanix, which with Acropolis could suck up some V tax avoidance business. Now notice Symantec and CA, relatively speaking in the ETR survey, they have horrible spending momentum. As we said, Broadcom doesn't care. Hock Tan is not going for growth at the expense of profitability. So we fully expect VMware to come down on the vertical axis over time and go up on the profit scale. Of course, ETR doesn't measure the profitability here. Now back to Nitro, VMware has this thing called Project Monterey. It's essentially their version of Nitro and will serve as their future architecture diversifying off x86 and accommodating alternative processors. And a much more efficient performance, price in energy consumption curve. Now, one of the things that we've advocated for, we said this about Dell and others, including VMware to take a page out of AWS and start developing custom Silicon to better integrate hardware and software and accelerate multi-cloud or what we call supercloud. That layer above the cloud, not just running on individual clouds. So this is all about efficiency and simplicity to own this space. And we've challenged organizations to do that because otherwise we feel like the cloud guys are just going to have consistently better costs, not necessarily price, but better cost structures, but it begs the question. What happens to Project Monterey? Hock Tan and Broadcom, they don't invest in something that is unproven and doesn't throw off free cash flow. If it's not going to pay off for years to come, they're probably not going to invest in it. And yet Project Monterey could help secure VMware's future in not only the data center, but at the edge and compete more effectively with cloud economics. So we think either Project Monterey is toast or the VMware team will knock on the door of one of Broadcom's 20 plus business units and say, guys, what if we work together with you to develop a version of Monterey that we can use and sell to everyone, it'd be the arms dealer to everyone and be competitive with the cloud and other players out there and create the de facto standard for data center performance and supercloud. I mean, it's not outrageously expensive to develop custom Silicon. Tesla is doing it for example. And Broadcom obviously is capable of doing it. It's got good relationships with semiconductor fabs. But I think this is going to be a tough sell to Broadcom, unless VMware can hide this in plain site and make it profitable fast, like AWS most likely has with Nitro and Graviton. Then Project Monterey and our pipe dream of alternatives to Nitro in the data center could happen but if it can't, it's going to be toast. Or maybe Intel or Nvidia will take it over or maybe the Monterey team will spin out a VMware and do a Pensando like deal and demonstrate the viability of this concept and then Broadcom will buy it back in 10 years. Here's a double click on that previous data that we put in tabular form. It's how the data on that previous slide was plotted. I just want to give you the background data here. So net score spending momentum is the sorted on the left. So it's sorted by net score in the left hand chart, that was the y-axis in the previous data set and then shared and or presence in the data set is the right hand chart. In other words, it's sorted on the right hand chart, right hand table. That right most column is shared and you can see it's sorted top to bottom, and that was the x-axis on the previous chart. The point is not many on the left hand side are above the 40% line. VMware Cloud on AWS is, it's expensive, so it's probably profitable and it's probably a keeper. We'll see about the rest of VMware's portfolio. Like what happens to Tanzu for example. On the right, we drew a red line, just arbitrarily at those companies and products with more than a hundred mentions in the survey, everything but Tanzu from VMware makes that cut. Again, this is no indication of profitability here, and that's what's going to matter to Broadcom. Now let's take a moment to address the question of Broadcom as a software company. What the heck do they know about software, right. Well, they're not dumb over there and they know how to run a business, but there is a strategic rationale to this move beyond just doing portfolios and extracting rents and cutting R&D, et cetera, et cetera. Why, for example, isn't Broadcom going after coming back to Dell or HPE, it could pick up for a lot less than VMware, and they got way more revenue than VMware. Well, it's obvious, software's more profitable of course, and Broadcom wants to move up the stack, but there's a trend going on, which Broadcom is very much in touch with. First, it sells to Dell and HPE and Cisco and all the OEM. so it's not going to disrupt that. But this chart shows that the value is flowing away from traditional servers and storage and networking to two places, merchant Silicon, which itself is morphing. Broadcom... We focus on the left hand side of this chart. Broadcom correctly believes that the world is shifting from a CPU centric center of gravity to a connectivity centric world. We've talked about this on theCUBE a lot. You should listen to Broadcom COO Charlie Kawwas speak about this. It's all that supporting infrastructure around the CPU where value is flowing, including of course, alternative GPUs and XPUs, and NPUs et cetera, that are sucking the value out of the traditional x86 architecture, offloading some of the security and networking and storage functions that traditionally have been done in x86 which are part of the waste right now in the data center. This is that shifting dynamic of Moore's law. Moore's law, not keeping pace. It's slowing down. It's slower relative to some of the combinatorial factors. When you add up in all the CPU and GPU and NPU and accelerators, et cetera. So we've talked about this a lot in Breaking Analysis episodes. So the value is shifting left within that middle circle. And it's shifting left within that left circle toward components, other than CPU, many of which Broadcom supplies. And then you go back to the middle, value is shifting from that middle section, that traditional data center up into hyperscale clouds, and then to the right toward infrastructure software to manage all that equipment in the data center and across clouds. And look Broadcom is an arms dealer. They simply sell to everyone, locking up key vectors of the value chain, cutting costs and raising prices. It's a pretty straightforward strategy, but not for the fate of heart. And Broadcom has become pretty good at it. Let's close with the customer feedback. I spoke with ETRs Eric Bradley this morning. He and I both reached out to VMware customers that we know and got their input. And here's a little snapshot of what they said. I'll just read this. Broadcom will be looking to invest in the core and divest of any underperforming assets, right on. It's just what we were saying. This doesn't bode well for future innovation, this is a CTO at a large travel company. Next comment, we're a Carbon Black customer. VMware didn't seem to interfere with Carbon Black, but now that we're concerned about short term disruption to their tech roadmap and long term, are they going to split and be sold off like Symantec was, this is a CISO at a large hospitality organization. Third comment, I got directly from a VMware practitioner, an IT director at a manufacturing firm. This individual said, moving off VMware would be very difficult for us. We have over 500 applications running on VMware, and it's really easy to manage. We're not going to move those into the cloud and we're worried Broadcom will raise prices and just extract rents. Last comment, we'll share as, Broadcom sees the cloud data center and IoT is their next revenue source. The VMware acquisition provides them immediate virtualization capabilities to support a lightweight IoT offering. Big concern for customers is what technology they will invest in and innovate, and which will be stripped off and sold. Interesting. I asked David Floyer to give me a back of napkin estimate for the following question. I said, David, if you're running mission critical applications on VMware, how much would it increase your operating cost moving those applications into the cloud? Or how much would it save? And he said, Dave, VMware's really easy to run. It can run any application pretty much anywhere, and you don't need an army of people to manage it. All your processes are tied to VMware, you're locked and loaded. Move that into the cloud and your operating cost would double by his estimates. Well, there you have it. Broadcom will pinpoint the optimal profit maximization strategy and raise prices to the point where customers say, you know what, we're still better off staying with VMware. And sadly, for many practitioners there aren't a lot of choices. You could move to the cloud and increase your cost for a lot of your applications. You could do it yourself with say Zen or OpenStack. Good luck with that. You could tap Nutanix. That will definitely work for some applications, but are you going to move your entire estate, your application portfolio to Nutanix? It's not likely. So you're going to pay more for VMware and that's the price you're going to pay for two decades of better IT. So our advice is get out ahead of this, do an application portfolio assessment. If you can move apps to the cloud for less, and you haven't yet, do it, start immediately. Definitely give Nutanix a call, but going to have to be selective as to what you actually can move, forget porting to OpenStack, or do it yourself Hypervisor, don't even go there. And start building new cloud native apps where it makes sense and let the VMware stuff go into manage decline. Let certain apps just die through attrition, shift your development resources to innovation in the cloud and build a brick wall around the stable apps with VMware. As Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware said, "We are building the software mainframe". Now marketing guys got a hold of that and said, Paul, stop saying that, but it's true. And with Broadcom's help that day we'll soon be here. That's it for today. Thanks to Stephanie Chan who helps research our topics for Breaking Analysis. Alex Myerson does the production and he also manages the Breaking Analysis podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and thanks to Rob Hof, who was our editor in chief at siliconangle.com. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcast, wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. Check out ETRs website at etr.ai for all the survey action. We publish a full report every week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com. You can DM me at DVellante or comment on our LinkedIn posts. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Have a great week, stay safe, be well. And we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to Vienna on 2021 you're watching the Cube and my name is Dave Volonte. You know, the last 10 years of cloud, they were largely about spinning up virtualized compute infrastructure and accessing cheap and simple object storage and some other things like networking. The cloud was largely though a set of remote resources that simplify deployment and supported the whole spate of native applications that have emerged to power the activity of individuals and businesses the next decade, however, promises to build on the troves of data that live in the cloud, make connections to on premises applications and support new application innovations that are agile, iterative, portable and span resources in all in all the clouds, public clouds, private clouds, cross cloud connections all the way out to the near and far edge. In a linchpin of this new application development model is container platforms and container orchestration, which brings immense scale and capability to technology driven organizations, especially as they have evolved from supporting stateless applications to underpinning mission critical workloads as such containers bring complexities and risks that need to be addressed, not the least of which is protecting the massive amounts of data that are flowing through these systems. And with me to discuss these exciting and challenging trends or Danny Allen, who's the ceo of in and Niraj Tolia, the president at Kasten Bivins gentlemen welcome to the cube. >>Thank you delighted to be here with you Dave. >>Likewise, very excited to be a Dave. >>Okay, so Danny big M and a move. Great little acquisition. You're now seeing others try to make similar moves. Why what did you see in cast in? What was the fit? Why'd you make that move? >>Well, I think you nailed it. Dave's. We've seen an evolution in the infrastructure that's being used over the last two decades. So if you go back 20 years, there was a massive digital transformation to enable users to be self service with digital applications. About 2000 or so, 2010, everything started being virtualized. I know virtualization came along before that but virtualization really started to take off because it gave return on investment and gave flexibility all kinds of benefits. But now we're in a third wave which is built on containers. And the amazing thing about containers is that as you said, it allows you to connect multi cloud, hybrid cloud the edge to the core. And they're designed for the consumption world. If you think about the cloud, you can provision things deep provisions things. That's the way that containers are designed the applications and so because they're designed for a consumption based world because they are designed for portability across all of these different infrastructures, it only made sense for us to invest in the industry's leading provider of data protection for kubernetes. And that of course is costume, >>there's some garage, I mean take us back. I mean, you know, container has been around forever. But then, you know, they started to, you know, hit go mainstream and and and and at first, you know, they were obviously ephemeral, stateless apps, kind of lightweight stuff. But but you at the time you and the team said, okay, these are gonna become more complex microservices. Maybe so micro, but you had to have the vision and you made a bet uh maybe take us back to sort of how you saw that and where where's containers have have come from? >>Sure. So let's rewind the clock right. As you said, containers, old technology in the same way virtualization started with IBM mainframes, right, containers in different forms have been around for a while. But I think when the light bulb went off for me was very early days in 2015 when my engineering team, a previous company started complaining. And the reason they were complaining about different other engineering groups and the reason they were complaining was because the right things, things were coming together sooner. We're identifying things sooner. And that's when I said, this is going to be the next wave of infrastructure. The same way watch a light virtualization revolutionized how people built deployed apps. We saw that with containers and in particular in those days we made that bet on commodities. Right? So we said from first Principles and that's where you know, you had other things like Docker, swarm esos, etcetera and we said community, that's going to be the way to go because it is just so powerful and it is, you know, at the end of the day, what we all do is infrastructure. But what we saw was that containers optimizing for the developer, they were optimizing for the people that really build applications, deliver value to all of their and customers. And that is what made us see that even though the initially we only saw stateless applications state will was going to happen because there's just so much momentum behind it And the writing for us at least was on the wall. And that's how we started off on this journey in 2017. >>What are the unique nuances and differences really in terms of protecting containers from a, from a technical standpoint, what what's different? >>So there are a couple of subtle things. Right again, the jokers, you know, I say, is that I'm a recovering infrastructure person have always worked in infrastructure systems in the past and recovering them. But in this case we really had to flip things around right. I've come at it from the cloud disks volumes. VMS perspective, in this case to do the right thing by the customer needed a clean slate approach of coming out from the application down. So what we look at is what does the application look like? And that means protecting, not just the stuff that sits on disk, what your secrets in networking information, all those hundreds of pieces that make up a cloud native application and that involves scale challenges, work, visualisation challenges for admins, KPI So all of that shifts in a very dramatic way. >>So Danny, I mean typically VM you guys haven't done a ton of acquisitions, uh, you've grown organically. So now you, you, you poppin cast in, what does that mean for you from a platform perspective? You know, IBM has this term blue washing when they buy a company did you green wash cast and how did that all work? And again, what does what does it mean from the, from the platform perspective? >>Well, so our platform is designed for this type of integration and the first type of integration we do with any of our technologies because we do have native technologies, if you think about what we do being back up for AWS for Azure, for G C p, we have backup for Acropolis Hyper Visor. These are all native purpose built solutions for those environments and we integrate with what we call being platform services. And one of the first steps that we do of course is we take the data from those native solutions and send it into the repository and the benefit that you get from that is that you have this portable, self describing format that you can move around the vein platform. And so the platform was already designed for this Now. We already showed this at demon. You saw this on the main stage where we have this integration at a data level but it goes beyond that beam platform services allows us to do not just day one operations, but day two operations. Think about um updating the components of those infrastructures or those software components that also allows reporting. So for example you can report on what is protected, what's not protected. So the platform was already designed for this integration model. But the one thing I want to stress is we will always have that stand alone product for kubernetes for uh you know, for the container world. And the reason for that is the administrator for Kubernetes wants their own purpose build solution. They want it running on kubernetes. They want to protect the uniqueness of their infrastructure. If you think about a lot of the container based systems there, They're using structured data. Non structured data. Sure. But they're also using object based storage. They're using message queues. And so they have their nuances. And we want to maintain that in a stand alone product but integrated back into the Corvin platform. >>So we do these we have a data partner called GTR Enterprise Technology Research. They do these quarterly surveys and and they have this metric called net score is a measure of spending momentum and for the last, I don't know, 8, 10, 12 quarters the big four have been robotic process automation. That's hot space. Cloud obviously is hot and then A I of course. And but containers and container orchestration right up there. Those are the Big four that outshine everything else, even things like security and other infrastructure etcetera. So that's good. I mean you guys skating to the puck back in 2015 rush, you've made some announcements and I'm and I'm wondering sort of how they fit into the trends in the industry. Uh, what what's, what's significant about those announcements and you know, what's new that we need to know about. >>Sure. So let me take that one day. So we've made a couple of big interesting announcement. The most recent one of those was four dot release after casting by women platform, right? We call it kitten and right. We've known rate since a couple of weeks colonial pipeline ransom. Where has been in the news in the US gas prices are being driven up because of that. And that's really what we're seeing from customers where we are >>seeing this >>increase in communities adoption today. We have customers from the world's largest banks all the way to weakly connected cruise ships that one could burn. It is on them. People's data is precious. People are running a large fleet of notes for communities, large number of clusters. So what we said is how do you protect against these malicious attacks that want to lock people out? How do you bring in mutability so that even someone with keys to the kingdom can't go compromise your backups and restores, right? So this echoes a lot of what we hear from customers and what we hear about in the news so well protected that. But we still help through to some of the original vision behind cast. And that is, it's not just saying, hey, I give you ransomware protection. We'll do it in such an easy way. The admin barely notices. This new feature has been turned on if they wanted Do it in a way that gives them choice right. If you're running in a public cloud, if you're running at the edge you have choice of infrastructure available to you and do it in a way that you have 100% automation when you have 100 clusters when you deploy on ships, right, you're not going to be able to have we spoke things. So how do you hook into CHED pipelines and make the job of the admin easier? Is what we focused on in that last >>night. And and that's because you're basically doing this at the point of writing code and it's essentially infrastructure as code. We always talk about, you know, you want to you don't want to bolt on data protection as an afterthought, but that's what we've done forever. Uh This you can't >>so in fact I would say step before that day, right are the most leading customers we work with. Right to light up one of the U. S. Government's largest contractors. Um Hey do this before the first line of code is written right there on the scalp cloud as an example. But with the whole shift left that we all hear the cube talks a lot about. We see at this point where as you bring up infrastructure, you bring up a complete development environment, a complete test environment. And within that you want to deploy security, you want to deploy backup your to deploy protection at day zero before the developer in so it's the first line of cordon. So you protected every step of the journey while trying to bolt it on the sound. Seemingly yes, I stitched together a few pieces of technology but it fundamentally impacts how we're going to build the next generation of secure applications >>Danny, I think I heard you say or announced that this is going to be integrated into Wien backup and replication. Um can you explain what that took? Why? That's important. >>Yeah. So the the timeline on this and when we do integrations from these native solutions into the core platform, typically it begins with the data integration, in other words, the data being collected by the backup tool is sent to a repository and that gives us all the benefits of course of things like instant recovery and leveraging, de doop storage appliances and all of that step to typically is around day to operations, things like pushing out updates to that native solutions. So if you look at what we're doing with the backup for AWS and Azure, we can deploy the components, we can deploy the data proxies and data movers. And then lastly there's also a reporting aspect to this because we want to centralize the visibility for the organization across everywhere. So if your policy says hey I need two weeks of backups and after two weeks and I need weekly backups for X amount of time. This gives you the ability to see and manage across the organization. So what we've demonstrated already is this data level integration between the two platforms and we expect this to continue to go deeper and deeper as we move forward. The interesting thing right now is that the containers team often is different than the standard data center I. T. Team but we are quickly seeing the merge and I think the speed of that merging will also impact how quickly we integrate them within our platform. >>Well I mean obviously you see this for cloud developers and now you're bringing this to any developers and you know, if I'm a developer and I'm living in an insurance company, I've been, you know, writing COBOL code for a while, I want to be signed me up. I want to get trained on this, right? Because it's gonna I'm gonna become more valuable. So this is this is where the industry is headed. You guys talk about modern data protection. I wondered if you could you could paint a picture for us of sort of what what this new world of application development and deployment and and data protection looks like and how it's different from the old world. >>Mhm. So I think that if you mentioned the most important word, which is developer, they come first, they are the decision makers in this environment, the other people that have the most bull and rightly so. Oh, so I think that's the biggest thing at the cultural level that is, developers are saying this is what we want and this is what we need to get the job done, we want to move quickly. So some of the things are let's not slow them down. Let's enable them, let's give them any P I to work with. Right? No. Where in bulk of production, use will be api based versus EY base. Let's transparently integrate into the environment. So therefore protection for security, they need zero lines have changed code. Mm So those are some of the ways we approach things. Now when you go look at the requirements of the developers, they said I have a Ci cd pipeline to integrate into that. I have a development pipeline to integrate into that. I deploy across multiple clouds sometimes. Can you integrate into that and work seamlessly across all those environments? And we see those category of us coming up over and over again from people. >>So the developer rights once and it doesn't have to worry about where it's running. Uh it's got the right security, there are a protection and those policies go with it, so that's that's definitely a different world. Um Okay, last question. Uh maybe you guys could each give your opinion on sort of where we're headed, uh what we can expect from the the acquisition, the the integration, what should we look forward to and what should we pay attention to? >>Well, the one obvious thing that you're going to see is tremendous growth on the company's side and that's because Kubernetes is taking off cloud is taking off um SaAS is taking off and so there's obvious growth there. And one of the things that were clearly doing is um we're leveraging the power of of, you know, a few 1000 sales people to bring this out to market. Um, and so there is emerging of of sales and marketing activities and leveraging that scale. But what you shouldn't expect to see anything different on is this obsessive focus on the product, on quality, on making sure that we're highly differentiated that we have a product that the company that our customers and companies actually need no garage. >>Yeah. So I'll agree with everything down, he said. But a couple of things. Excite me a lot. Dave we've been roughly eight months or so since acquisition and I particularly love how last what in this quarter have gone in terms of how we focuses on solving customer problems. All right. So we'll always have that independent support for a cloud date of customers, but I'm excited about not just working with the broadest side of customers and as we scale the team that's going to happen, but providing a bridge to all the folks that grew up in the virtualization world, right? Grew up in the physical wall of physical service, etcetera and saying, how do we make it easy for you to come over to this new container Ization world? What is the on ramps bridging that gap serving as the on ramp? And we're doing a lot of work there from the product integration and independent product features that just make it easy. Right? And we're already seeing feel very good feedback for that from the field right now. >>I really like your position. I just dropped my quarterly cloud update. I focused, I look at the Big Four, the Big Four last year, spent $100 billion on Capex. And I always say that is a gift to companies like yours because you can be that connection point between the virtualization crowd, the on prem cloud, any cloud. Eventually we'll be, we'll be more than just talking about the Edge will actually be out there, you know, doing real work. Uh, and I just see great times ahead for you guys. So thanks so much for coming on the cube explaining this really exciting new area. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you everybody for watching this day. Volonte for the Cube and our continuous coverage of the mon 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there. >>Mm mm mm

>> 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 next 2019 bought to you by Nutanix gut morgen cube inators we are here in Copenhagen Nutanix dot next I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-hosts to minimun what what I what a what a beautiful day in Copenhagen it's such a pleasure to be co-hosting dot next with you this is a company that you have really what been watching for a long time we're here celebrating ten years of this company I'd love to just get your first uh flick off the cuff thoughts what do you think about this company how has it changed since its inception ten years ago Chuck Rebecca unfortunately is the only Danish that I know so so hopefully you'll bring that but super excited it's the ninth dot NEX that we've had the qubit which is all of them that's the eighth one I've had the pleasure attending and Rebecca as you said uh you know I've watched this company since early early days first time I went to Newt annexes office that the paint was drying on the wall there and D arrives actually the CEO founder of the company showed me here's actually from a real estate standpoint we're going to expand here and move here and if things go well like we think we will move across the street and we can really build out a corporate headquarters and actually all of that has happened so ten years of celebration here over 5,000 employees there are some things that have not changed at all from the very first interview that John Ferrara and I had with dirige it was talking about the complexity of building distributed architectures and software what what Nutanix has learned from the hyper scale players absolutely impacts what they're doing but this landscape has changed so greatly you know you know this was originally everybody thought about it was you know that that term hyper-converged infrastructure came out it was about appliances and how many boxes you have but at the core it always was software and today we're hear them talking about how you live in that hybrid and multi cloud world all of these software pieces many of which you know seem to have it they're loosely coupled with the the core a OS software which itself has gone through complete revision to be ready for cloud native the latest databases all the new things so we know there is so much change going on in our industry um but but I saw what was built here is a culture and a company not just a product and so it is a celebration I love do they started with some of their early customers and partners especially here in Europe so very international flavor of course over 50 companies countries represented at this show we can see the the energy behind us with the expo hall here and yeah you know Nutanix have been public now for about three years going through a lot of transitions and lots of stuff for us to dig into over the next absolutely we're gonna we're gonna get into all that one at one of your tweets from this morning words where you were watching the mainstage and you said Nutanix is finally starting to answer that question what is the value of Nutanix in the data center you have a devoted Twitter followings do so we're all dying to hear what it was how do you see them answering that question it isn't enough well it's actually how they fit into the hyper scale data center because we know where Nutanix fits in the on-premises data center that's where they've lived but as customers are figuring out and you know the you know the thing that gets talked about a bunch here is you know the technologies that you know most of the customers use here is virtualization in VMware of courses that still has a dominant position in this environment while almost half of all new tannic snows that shipped in the last year use ahv the Acropolis hypervisor which is free it's by Nutanix it's based off of the KVM open source the rest of them are using pregnant predominantly VMware it's a little bit of hyper-v in there but when you go to that cloud environment I want some of the same software stack I want to be able to be able to put there so right there's one of the Nuggets that they showed towards the end of the keynote today and they've teased it out a little bit over the last year it's what they calls AI clusters so that is their stack or what they call X in some of those clouds the first one interestingly enough is is AWS and I say interesting because Google has been a solution that Nutanix has been working on but AWS is actually opening up bare-metal instances so it doesn't mean you know we take our stack and we put it on the side and we have specialized hardware it's the ec2 bare-metal instances that we're going to be able to run the new Tannis software and we've seen a number of companies out there pure storages one-day Volante and Lisa Martin were at that show not that long ago talking about you know if I am truly software and I'm independent of location how can i integrate into some of these environments so that's where we see Nutanix looking to go it's in tech preview with AWS GCP something they can do for demo environments but it's not yet open to be able to put in production environments you know the hope from Nutanix and others is that Google will open that up Google is position themselves in the open cloud and then azure will be there too so other clouds so when customers choose their environments and their own data centers they're hosted environment the public clouds we know there's going to be a lot of moves and changes and it's not going to be a one-way or a one-time thing so I want to get this as solutions that give flexibility and allow me to place where I want to and then move things as my strategy needs to adjust so the really interesting stuff definitely something what will geek out with talking about the competitive landscape this is a company that is that is a solid number two of you you've talked about this a lot in your analysts reports and at these various shows too VMware if this is a this is a two horse race there's a lot of money to be made in this market where do you see this is a company somewhat under pressure but where do you see Nutanix strengths and where do you see its biggest obstacles to overcome especially as it as it goes head-to-head with VMware yes so from the early discussion about hyper-converged infrastructure it is down to two companies and it doesn't get talked as as much as it might have a couple of years ago um there were some of my peers in the industry you know three four years ago there were like 30 companies out there there were a few acquisitions Cisco made an acquisition HPE made an acquisition you know VMware has their offerings out there but really it is to you know lead horses out there if you talk from a revenue and a dollar standpoint it is VMware and their partner ships their Dell of course has did the leading offering from VMware and then Nutanix is strong and Nutanix is growing customers they've got over 14,000 customers they added over 3,500 in the last 12 months so growing strong good growth the transition from being both you know soft soft rose at the core but really kind of ridding themselves of the hard we're going to full subscription and software model has been increasing their gross margin they're up to about 80 points of gross margin up if I remember right about three three and a half from from a year ago it has moderated their revenue because if you look traditionally and say okay what's their bookings and what's their Billings it is flat even down a little bit but that is because you're shifting from well I'm pulling along a whole bunch of stuff that I'm really not taking margin on to pure software so they believe they're past the toughest piece of that transition and I'm sure Dee Ridge will be talking about that they've done the faster transition of any company that's done this he sits on the board of Adobe Adobe went to that subscription model from this software subscription so they're doing that on but the big change is really if you talk about okay you know Nutanix is number two well that's the hyper-converged market that's what we were talking about a couple years ago when we're talking the multi cloud market you're talking about companies like Microsoft in Google and Cisco and of course VMware competing there and Nutanix would not be one of the first ones that I would mention but they do have their well positioned to help their customers and what we need in cloud is the simplicity that hyper-converged solutions like Nutanix brought to the data center so Nutanix has that opportunity to reach a much broader audience and a much broader market to go from the 14,000 customers they have to literally hundreds of thousands of companies out there that need these types of solutions and if they are to be 10 years from now at they're 20 years looking back and saying where do they fit in cloud where are they as you know a true you know technology software company for businesses that is the mark that they will need to make you're what you're saying about the simplicity that is what that is the message that we are given here today is that this is all about simplicity choice and delight make computing invisible and do you think I mean that that's so that's their message that's that's the that's the marketing gambit here altogether now do you think that is it is it going to work I mean this it is it is clearly what you say that the market needs but is does Nutanix have the staying power so Rebecca I I think you'll agree what's nice is when you hear the customers out on stage you know they actually give you the reality and it is you know in the early days of these shows it was I loved Nutanix it gave me my weekends back the quote that I had from a customer that I spoke to getting ready for this show is what I loved about this they actually had a customer that the main IT staff was not really in favor of going Nutanix they were certified and knew how to use the existing hardware and software and it spent years working on that um and they followed the rules and he said I don't want IT to follow the rules I want them to try things I want them to break things um you know I want them to be able to get ahead of the business and not just meet the requirements so he said we're spending we're ramping up our spending on training and education than sending them to events like this and Nutanix is an enabler because it doesn't just work it exceeds their expectations it is better performance they have Headroom to be able to try things and throw things at it and that is exciting so it's not just as I said oh this interesting box that I stick in a corner and I don't worry about it it is changing that that culture something I've been looking at you know can some of these technologies actually drive some of that cultural changes because traditionally it's you know executive mandate you put something new in and everybody fights against it so some of this can actually be from the ground level up is I get into these tools and solutions and it changes my workflow it changes how I work between groups how do I get the developers involved there was a lot of talk about the applications the messaging that they unveiled here all together now that that resonates with I can't just have my database my apps and my data itself in siloed as to who can access it and who can use it and have to worry about oh I need nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anything I want to be able to you know IT needs to be not no or slow but go I shout out you know Cuba Lum Alan Cohen who actually interviewed at the first dot next so he was you know early supporter of Nutanix and you know that that's what the kind of the developer driven mantra is you know IT very much working with the business and if it can drive innovation I mean Rebecca we've been talking important female leader at the moment but exactly talking about how technology can drive cultural change within a large organization because Nutanix is a large organization now it's it's only ten years old but it is it is not a start-up it is it as large complex exceedingly complicated organization and so how do you drive innovation creativity change collaboration communication between different silos these are all these are all topics that we were going to delve into today another word we keep hearing a sort of a cultural buzzword at this conference is resilience and we're going to on the main stage we're going to hear from Caroline Wozniacki who is a very famous tennis player we're gonna hear from the CEO of Noma who was of course Copenhagen's famous kuelen Airy delight and of course Kit Harington yeah so anybody that watch Game of Thrones um you know Jon Snow was definitely resilient to be able to last the eight seasons and everything that happened across it so Andy rich you know one thing we really respect you know we've watched him since the early days he is very thoughtful as to how he goes and when he actually said to me yesterday's it's do you know we are you're going to hear some of the same words that some of the other vendors but the you know the why and the how underneath that for us is different and that's very important and especially in the technology space that that nuance and the you know really how's that work in how does that put together and not just that we can do it but is this the right way it doesn't make sense so they are thoughtful about how they do it and and they're moving forward so you know they definitely believe they're positioned well for the next phase of their journey and always it's been a pleasure to you know watch this and you know to talk to all the the builders the dreamers and yeah dreamers believers and builders is what they came out this morning so well we're gonna be we have a lot of great guests on the show today I'm so excited to be hosting here with you in Copenhagen at this next dot dot next so we have dirige Pandey coming up next i'm rebecca night force two minimun please keep tuned to the cube you're watching the cube

>> 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 here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Ferrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer, she is the Director, Cloud Product Management at TierPoint. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I'm very excited. >> Rebecca: And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at TierPoint. Thanks, David. >> Yes, thank you. >> So, for our viewers that maybe unfamiliar with TierPoint, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do, give us an introduction. >> Oh, absolutely. So, TierPoint is a managed services, data services, and colocation provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States, and we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers where they are in their digital transfortation, or transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they needed solutions, and we can offer them those solutions, right. So we manage all of that. >> So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything. >> Absolutely. >> And where does Nutanix come into play here? >> So, Nutanix is a part of that cloud services really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance, so that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, TierPoint, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components, so again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward, and taking that burden off of IT and Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers, at the end of the day. >> Talk about the technical challenges you guys had before Nutanix, after Nutanix. What changed, what was the journey like, how did the door open up for them? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think overall, we as technologists, work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions, to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume, but that is challenging, right, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies, and I think one of the things that we see as a huge value for Nutanix, is they've got a very complete platform, across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that, and so for us, that's very exciting, it's very intriguing, and something that really helps us be efficient, and also our customers, be efficient. >> So, digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much, on theCUBE in general, here at this show. What are you hearing from customers and what is sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? >> So, we recently had a customer who, their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right. They have a great amount of comfort, but over time they can see, there could be some cost savings in Nutanix, with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? Said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we are consulting through their transformation and they are starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition, we're gonna help them get there, right. We're gonna help them change, if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right. We're gonna help them do that. >> Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean obviously, you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like, operating this? 'Cause you got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you got latency challenges around. We went to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still gotta store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge, the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company, in terms of how you operate? >> So, that's a great question. So, it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about TierPoint, is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value adds, and so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on-ramp into the hyperscale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, colocate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyperscale environments. And then there's the middle, the middle where we provide a layer, like Nutanix, that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them, it's in our data center, it's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyperscale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. >> On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting, we hear people saying, I got Hyper-Vi, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I wanna just use, Nutanix' got their own hypervisor. AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers, but you guys probably have a lot of customers who wanna parole their own, or bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that, does that fit in to the value proposition? >> Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor, maybe being irrelevant, like it's obsolete, it's not something to be concerned about, and I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that-- >> John: You could be nice when you say that, by the way. >> I'm sorry, what? >> John: A lot of people are saying that. >> Well, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right, because TierPoint helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome, what are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right, than it is necessarily, not important. >> It's more commodity now. >> Yeah. >> It is, and we don't want the customers to have to focus on that, because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business and so the less that they have to focus, as an IT organization, on the maintenance and management of infrastructure, and even up the stack towards operating systems, where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. >> Okay, what's the playbook for doing that, not being a drag on the business? Because that's what everyone wants to do but they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? >> The playbook, is being a part of that business discussion and when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table, and again, is thinking about, how can we drive savings or cost cutting, how can we enable transactions, how can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated, am I dealing with the old boxes that I have to replace, and do I have power and cooling problems in a data center. They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. >> What you're talking about, really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about, they obviously, can think about more than just the maintenance, and do I have the storage, and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role, to really help the business transform. >> David: Yeah. >> So, I think that often times I see people feel like they are just technology, oh, I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this, but what their exposure and their natural interests, lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, and how do these things operate, what have I had experience with, and when they have a seat at the table and they're making, with the business decisions, they have value to add there. Right. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion, that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. >> But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists and so that's part of, we've gone through this at TierPoint, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate, so that they're helping us move the business forward and not sitting behind a keyboard, isolated from the business itself. >> I was gonna ask you about the skill gap 'cause one of the things that comes up as the shift at DevOps is happening, with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable so it's not a drag on the business, changing roles are a huge thing 'cause Nutanix essentially, the values, they enable new things to happen, the result is consolidation, so it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do. So people be like, whoa, what do I do now? But the benefit is people shift. So the IT Ops role has changed, it's best probably to get it before the operations. Where do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of Siloed Technologists, right, so this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away and again, we've done this at TierPoint. We've kind of mixed those roles, right, educate the staff, but from additional education programmability, somebody'd be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role verses having a separate development team working on that. It's gonna be really important as companies evolve their groups. >> I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Pearl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting, but we all know, in IT, it's always change and it's always learning, I mean, you got into this, right. So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers, over time, are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. >> So, talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's it like, partnering with them? They got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Hewlett Packard enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner centric, they're partner friendly. What's it like, working with them? >> Fantastic, I mean absolutely fantastic, from go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly, they came up. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right, you've seen some of those, and so our customers brought Nutanix to us, and as we began to see this trend, and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources, they've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners so that has made it easy. We are another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa, so it's almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. >> So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in, 'cause I agree with you, they're very hardcore loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits, so they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, you put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there and their promoter score is 90. But what about new people, are like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there, or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities, when is Nutanix a good fit? 'Cause you gotta balance it all for all your customers. >> Yeah. >> Depending on what they wanna do. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, for us it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers, so I don't know, unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation. It's really like, look, this is a solution that's gonna provide you the capabilities, and again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship, and as PJ mentioned, Nutanix has invested very heavily, not only in the partnership but also developing this platform and solution for us so it's been-- >> So you guys could provide it, if no one asks, just provide the best solution. >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And that's the key, right? >> I want to ask you a question about geographics. So, I'm based in Boston, John's based in the Valley, you're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, we may just come to this with our east coast, west coast biases and I'm just, what's it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the heartland, do you feel part of the community? >> Oh absolutely, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right, so from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to-- >> Rebecca: And great barbecue too. >> Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. You also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoor, I mean, it's kinda surprising, honestly. We have a main technology center also, in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we are split between the two. >> David: Yeah. >> We do a lot of flights back and forth. >> WWT is out there too. >> RTP, yeah, the research truck will park in North Carolina, as a very big tech hub, so that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaborational partnerships there from the business side, but also that Raleigh Tech Hub on the east coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there, >> PJ: And like a lot of-- >> Nutanix actually, is right there, down the street. >> We'll have to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's going to UNC >> Oh, okay. >> So I gotta find some excuses to get down there. >> That'd be great. >> Anytime. >> Maybe see your business. >> Some TierPoint shows. >> Oh, that's right. >> Exactly. >> And do a little, couple interviews. >> Anytime. >> Anytime. >> Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Yeah, we really enjoyed it. >> Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Ferrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this next segment. We have Stephanie Scare Aldi. She is the director of operations and support for Electra. Thank you so much for coming on the cues. And we have James Ellery, director innovation and governance at Electra. Thank you, James. >> Thanks for having us. >> So I want to start with you, James. Tell our viewers a little bit about electorates. Ontario, based for our viewers who are not familiar. What do what do you do? What do you about? >> So we are a energy solutions provider in Ontario, Canada. Basically, we are an ldc a local distribution company, but we're trying to transition from the poles and wires into really energy solutions provider. We We're about a million customers are approaching a million customers right now and wear actually four utility companies that came together to form Electra. And we just recently emerged with a fifth now, so We're rapidly growing in the in Ontario, and we have very much more growth to come. >> It's all those mergers. How does I t all fit together? Different systems, all kind of legacy. Mishmash. What's what's What's the environment like? >> So the environment Right now there is a tremendous amount of data center Stephanie's actually leading our data center consolidation project. There are tremendous amount of data centers across a fast geographical location, and we're using NUTANIX actually to consolidate everything onto a single platform right now. So there's a lot of work to be done. Definitely a lot of integration to be done, but we're confident that we'LL get it all done and we want to move to new tanks by phone. >> So right now we have about, I think, eleven data centers and we've been mandated to get down to two. So we're use up utilizing technology like nutanix too kind of, you know, get down and scale ability. So wait >> here for a lot of customs from nutanix around, how it's been a great system for manageability and also getting rid of some older gear, whether it's old GMC Cem Dale stuff. So we're seeing a lot of, you know, go from twenty four racks to six. This is kind of the ratios pushing stuff from eight weeks. Tow two hours, new operational benefits. How close are you guys up to that now? Because you get all this stuff you consolidating down the merger's makes a lot of sense. What's some of the operational benefits you seeing with nutanix That you could share, >> I think, is a per example that you just gave. We're working on a front office consolidation project and we're moving. We're doubling our VD i environment, and we actually just got three new nodes in a few weeks ago and it took a matter of two hours to get everything spun up and ready. So traditionally, it would take us weeks of planning and getting someone in and specialized technicians and now make a phone call a few hours and it's done. So you see, like already the benefits of you know growing are our infrastructure, and it's enabling us to merge faster with different utilities. >> I want to actually back up now and talk about the journey to Nutanix and talk about life before nutanix and now life after it. What was that what were sort of the problems that you were trying to solve? And why was Nutanix the answer >> So I could speak to that way back in twenty fifteen? We're looking at video, and we're implementing it across organization. And we're running its issues on three tier architecture where whenever there was a performance issue, we would talk to the sand guy and we'LL talk to the server guy and we talked to the networking guy. And although everyone's trying to help everyone sort of looking at each other, saying, Okay, where is this problem? Really, really land? And the issue with that is, as you guys know what VD I I mean, user performance and user experience is key, right? That's King. So you know, when you're trying to take away someone's physical desktop and give him a virtual desktop, they want the same or better performance. And anytime we had an issue, we had to resolve it rapidly. So when we look at everything we said, Okay, this is okay, but it's not sustainable for the scale, ability in the growth that we had, especially because with, you know, ah media environment, its scales very rapidly and If the application scares wrapped scales rapidly, you need the infrastructure to scale as rapidly as your application and perform just as good. So what happened was we looked at nutanix. We said, You know what? If we can look at a single pane of glass to figure out where any performance issues lie, that makes operations much more operations, that management administration much easier for us. And that's really where we started our journey with nutanix. We went from a three note cluster to start and we're up to fourteen nodes now, just in our VD I cluster alone. >> And what about about the future? What? What is the future hold in terms of this partnership, >> I think for us were really hoping to go to fully H V in the next six or twelve months. Uh, I know, James. We're really pushing it and trying to get that in because, you know, way want to simplify our technologies. And I think by moving to a Chevy, I think, you know, we'LL save some money. >> So what we're looking to do with Nutanix isn't you know, there's been a lot of wins for us moving to NUTANIX, especially with regards to support Support's been fantastic. I mean, you know, although we don't like to call support because I mean something's probably wrong way love calling you guys because every time we call support, it's, you know, everyone's always there to help. And I'm not only the support from the support team, but also through our venders or a vendor are counts, you know, I've or who we love way love the whole team because they're there for you to help me. We run into some pretty significant issues. One of the things that happened to us was we had some changing workloads in our media environment. Through no fault of nutanix is you know when when we introduce some additional workloads, we didn't anticipate some of the challenges that would come along with introducing those workloads. And what happened was we filled up our hot storage rather rapidly. Nutanix came in right away because we call them up and said, You know, we're having big performance issues. We need some help and they brought in P E O. C notes to help us get over the hump. They were there for us. I mean, within a week, they got us right back up and running and fully operational and even better performance than we had before. So until we could get our own notes procured and in house, which was fantastic, I've never seen that levels from another organization. So we love the support from Nutanix on DH. Since then, we've grown. So we've actually looked at nutanix for General server computer platform as well. And we're doing Christ Cross hyper visor Support across high provides a replication Sorry from production to D. R. So we're actually running Acropolis. Indy are running GM. Where in production. But has Stephanie alluded to? We're trying to get off of'Em were completely, you know, everyone talks about the attacks. We don't like the V attacks with Phil on a baby anywhere for something that's commodity. And we're looking to repurpose that money so we can look at other things such as you ten exciting way very much. Want to move to the cloud for D R. And that's sort of our direction. >> OK, so you guys have the m we're now, not you Not yet off the anywhere, but you plan to be >> playing to be Yes. >> Okay, So what's it going to look like How long is that gonna take or what is that? We're >> really hoping at the next six to twelve months. So I think we're really gonna push hard at. We've been talking to some people and it seems like it's gonna be a pretty smooth transition, So looking forward to it. And I think our team is really looking for true as well. That's >> one of the challenges right. That the team is really is one of the challenges because we've merged and there's a lot of change going on organization. It's difficult to throw more change at people, right? There's a whole human component, Teo everything that we do. So you know Well, that's why we moved GHB into d. R. To start because we said, You know what, give the operations folks time to look at it, timeto play with it, time to get familiar with it. And then we'LL make the change in production. But like we said, you know, moving over age, he's going to save us a ton of money like a ton of money that we can repurpose elsewhere to really start moving the business forward >> about operations for second. Because one of the things you told earlier is that consolidation? You're leading the project at the VD. I think we're new workloads. There's always gonna be problems. Always speed bumps and hot spots, as they say. But what has changed with the advent of software and Dev ops and automation starts to come into it. How do you see that playing out? Because you tell this is a software company. So you guys knew them when they were five years ago Now, But this is the trend in I t. Operations have clean program ability for the infrastructure. What's your view on that? What's your reaction to that? And you guys getting theirs at the goal >> that is >> like part of our road map. And we're gonna be working with our NUTANIX partners t build a roll map, actually, the next coming few weeks. So because we are emerging all these utilities, we'd love to get automation and orchestration, and we actually have another budget in three years. So it is on our road map. We want to get there right, because we want to have her staff work on business strategy. We don't want their fingers to keyboards. We want them actually working with the business and solution ing and not, you know, changing tapes or working on supporting a system when we don't have to do that anymore. Because now there's so it's so much simpler running any tennis environment. I know James is saying a lot of change for employees. There used to be M where Nutanix is new to a lot of them. I think they're quickly seeing the benefit of managing it because now they get to do things that are a little bit more fun than just managing an environment. >> And this is point cost to repurpose what you're paying for a commodity for free. And if you can repurpose and automata way the manual labor that's boring and repetitive, moving people to a higher value activity. >> Exactly. And we love the message we heard today about being invisible. >> Yeah, I love that >> way, Lovett. I mean, that's essentially we wanted. The business doesn't really care what you're doing behind the scenes, right? They just want their applications to work. They want everything to work seamlessly. So that's what we want to get, too. We want to get to that invisibility where we're moving the business, Ford. We're enabling them through technology, but they don't need to worry about the back end of what's actually going on. >> Stephanie, I want to ask you about both a personal and professional passion of yours, and that is about bringing more women into technology. You are a senior woman in technology, and we know we know the numbers. There is a dearth of female leaders. There is a dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in in high level management roles. So I want to hear from you both from a personal standpoint in terms of what your thoughts are on this problem and why, why we have this problem and then also what you, an elector are doing to remedy it. >> Yeah, I think you know, I'm really lucky to work at Electra because we actually have a diversion inclusion committee that I'm part of with a lot of stem organizations. But I think you know, there's all these great programs going on, and but I still don't see enough women in this in this industry, and I think a lot of it stems from you walk into a room, and if you're the only one of you it's really intimidating. So I think we really need to work on making people feel more welcome. You know, getting more women in cedar senior leadership positions and kind of bring them to events like this, gaming them on the Internet. Going to the university is going to the schools and talking to education and talking to, you know, CEOs and seals that don't have sea level women executives and saying, You know, there's a business benefit toe having diversity of all kinds in an organization, you know, you know, strength lies in differences, not in similarities. And I think we can really grow businesses and have that value if we have different types of opinions. And I think there's, you know, statistic shows when you have more diversity, your business is more successful. So I think senior leaders should pay attention and, you know, purposely try to hire more a more diverse workforce >> and what do you have anything to add to that? I mean, I know that it that it's maybe tougher for a man to weigh in on this issue, but at the same time it is one that affects all of us. >> Absolutely. And I think seventy, said it best right when you bring in, you know, multiple bill from different ethnicities from different genders. I mean, it's it's that wealth of knowledge and everyone brings from the different experiences they have in life, and I think that's what you need. You don't want to know the collective all thinking the same way you want the collective that bring the diversity into your organization. And I think you know, when I was in school, we had one woman in my entire computer engineering class, and you know that you wanted to see that change, right? I love to see more of that disease. More women being in the work force, especially within technology. >> I >> think that's Ah, it's fantastic for technology. >> Stephanie, What's your advice for young girls out there? Maybe in high school college, who are having gravitating towards either it's computer science or some sort of stem related field that might be intimidated? >> I think the one important thing you can do is like really rely on your family and friends for encouragement, cause I think sometimes it is gonna be intimidating, you know, For me I'd walk into a course and I was the only female my computer networking class. But I had, like my father, always encouraged me to push me to say, like, Don't ever be intimately. Don't ever be scared and you need a little bit of a fix. Came because for a little bit it is going to be just you in a room. But I think the more you speak up and the more you just kind of push yourself, I think it is going to get better. And I think it's almost kind of cool when you're the only female. Because you feel that pride. I want to do better. I want to do better for all of us to say like we can be. Not just a good, even better. >> Great. So great advice. Yeah. Stephanie James. Thank you both. So much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Pleasure talking, Teo. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more of nutanix dot Next coming up in just a little bit

>> 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)

(electronic music) >> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at WTG Transform 2018, happy to be welcoming one of the users at this show, Jerry Flick, who's with Belmond. He's the Divisional Director of I.T. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, and welcome to the Boston area. You're from Charleston, South Carolina. >> I live in Charleston now, yeah. But I'm familiar with the area. I'm from the Northeast, but I love being here. Boston's a great town. >> Yeah, we had a lovely weather. It's in the low '70s, you know, the Sox should have a nice game here, so. Have you been to this event before? >> I have, this is my third year. >> Okay, excellent. You've been to more of 'em than me. >> Okay. >> So, let's start with Belmond. Tell us a little bit about the organization, for those that don't know. >> Absolutely, so Belmond is a worldwide luxury hotel experience, hospitality industry. So we have hotels, we have restaurants, there's train excursions, river cruises, and really, the focus on Belmond is providing a superior level of service to the guests that take part in our experiences. >> Well Jerry, the great thing I love talking about users is, their lives are pretty stable. There's not these things like Airbnb, and you know, other technologies left that are just saying oh yeah, we'll spin up an app and just put your company that's been around for decades out of business, right? It's nice and stable. >> Yeah, that sounds like a little sarcasm, but. (laughs) >> I've been known to be a little sarcastic. So yeah, Jerry, tell us how long has Belmond been in business? You said it's worldwide, how many employees, and how does Belmond deal with the digital transformation? >> Oh, absolutely. >> That's, you know, coming down? >> Well, they took the name five years ago. They used to be Orient Express prior to that, and many people know the Orient Express from the Agatha Christie novels. >> My wife loved the new movie, so. >> Yes, so did mine actually. But what they do is, we have over 50 properties worldwide. I joined about seven months ago, and one of the initiatives they have now is to double the amount of properties and experiences they have by 2020. So, as part of what I do in the division I manage, I have North America, Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean, and I have about eight properties under my belt, and we have to make sure that we coordinate with corporate for our company policies, our I.T. structure, which is kind of complicated because you're dealing with multiple countries, and different technologies that people like, different flavors, so it certainly presents its own challenges. >> All right, so Jerry, when you say you've got those properties, and really the I.T., what does that mean? What's under your purview from an I.T. perspective? >> Sure, so each property has either an I.T. director or a manager, and then depending on the size of the property they have different I.T. personnel that handle everything from the infrastructure, the servers, as well as through user support and even interfacing with the clients. Guest wifi is a big thing, so people want to come to our properties and make sure that they can get on the internet well, they can watch T.V., and they can do that, and that all comes down to what we have to provide them. >> Yeah, I love that. Yeah, help connect us a little bit, you know, the role of I.T. and the pressures put on you, versus wow, we've got lots of challenges from the business side these days. I'm sure cost pressure are there, you need to able to know when things are available, know that the client is getting great service when they're at your facilities. >> Yeah, actually they like to use the term, we need to be cost neutral. >> Okay. >> So everything that we do, of course I.T. is a cost within itself, but when the clients come in, and again, they expect that high quality of service, that internet connectivity, and really just whatever it is that the technology can drive to make their experience better, they look to us. But from a standpoint of support, we're 24/7. We have to keep the systems running, we have to make sure that everything from property management is going, and that we keep them moving, we keep business running. >> Yeah, so in my career in I.T., I've gotten to get under the covers sometimes in hospitality. When you've got hundreds or thousands of rooms, just even the basic phone system, let alone the internet and everything, there's a lot that goes into it. There's a lot of gear, maintaining. People talk about their data centers, but boy, you've got so many properties to deal with. What are some of the challenges there, and you know, bring us inside that infrastructure as to, how you have to build and architect it to fit that cost neutral mandate that you have. >> Yeah, we definitely want to be innovative, so for example with our Charleston facility, we recently deployed a Nutanix cluster on a Dell XC series, and we did that through Winslow Technology. And some of the things that we look to that for is, we don't have a lot of data, we don't have big data. And recently, we had to implement a GDPR policy, because we are worldwide, so that really kind of limits, you know, we're going to have even less data within our system. So having an implementation of Nutanix is really a great way to provision the service we need. We do have a mix of Cloud systems, as well as on-prem, so definitely a hybrid Cloud model would be something that I would like to see moving forward, as well as within the division, try to synchronize everything. Make everybody synergized, so that we can try to be like a flagship to the brand, and really set the standard for what is the best in technology. >> Yeah, so a lot of conversation in the keynote this morning about hybrid cloud. Want to get your reaction as to what you heard, as well as, you know, the big question is, how do you figure out what to put where? >> Yeah, that's a good question, and I've had a lot of sessions with Rick. I think he's really in tune with what's going on, so, pretty much the whole Winslow staff. You can reach out to them, and if you don't specialize in something, you know, you're not going to know everything in I.T., especially when you're dealing with as you mentioned, what's underneath. But to be able to reach out to a partner like that and say hey, do you have a subject matter expert in this? It really gives you a good idea of where the industry's going, and that's my goal is to make sure we stay ahead of that, so that we can provide the business what's a cost neutral way to make it better, and continue to provide that superior service. >> Okay. You said that you've deployed the OEM Nutanix solution with Dell. Can you give us a little bit of insight, you know, what applications sit there? What kind of scale do you go to with that? Is it something that mostly just runs, and you don't need to touch it, or is it something that's growing over time? >> Yeah, I mean, we recently did it within the last month. So what we did, fortunately we were able to just build it, and not initially have to migrate anything over. But for our use, property management, we have an Opera property management system, and that's going to be key to keeping that running, and we are looking to keep that on-prem. Everything else, like our point of sale service, they do need a cached systems within the infrastructure. And then we're looking to upgrade our phone system which depending on if we do that Cloud based or not, having a Nutanix cluster in play like that, and really just the reactions I'm getting from my team that's working with it, they've used other systems. They've used the huge SAN systems of the past, and to be able to spin up a Windows server in less than six minutes, you know, they really love it. We're using the Acropolis Hypervisor, and the simplivity of it, it's easy to use. The buttons, it's real, it's just very simple. It's not as layered as a lot of the systems, so I think as we move forward the performance of it, we're really going to see a quick turnaround, and it's going to make the employees happy working with it, as well. >> Awesome, Jerry. Last thing I want to ask you, you've been to this show for three years. What bring you up besides, you know, the beautiful Boston weather. You mentioned talking to Rick and the team, maybe checking out the Red Sox. What's the value of coming to events like this? >> Well, you know, and again, Winslow's a unique company. They're smaller, and they have a certain niche in an area, but you know, I've worked with several of the account reps, I've worked with the engineers, and they really have a good foothold on technology, but their process of getting to know the customers, and being able to really anticipate what they need, as well as they're not going to oversell you. They're not going to sell you something you don't need, and even if they present something and you're not interested, there's no pressure there. So, they really make it easy to work with them. And so, aside from being here in Boston and loving it, I do enjoy being with the Winslow team, and being treated so nicely by them. >> All right. Jerry, pleasure meeting you. Thanks so much, and congrats on the progress with Belmond. >> Awesome, thank you. >> All right, always love talking to the users, and we'll be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(uptempo techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Chicago, Illinois. It's theCube, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back, here in the windy city. This is theCube's coverage of VeeamOn 2018. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and they're breaking down the show, but we always have room for bringing some diversity to the show. Both, we've got Charu Madan, who is the director of strategic alliances with Nutanix. Always want more women in technology on our program. >> Thank you. >> And also, we can't go without getting in to talk to more users. So also happy to welcome to the program Chris Hippensteel, who's network and system administrator with New Resources Consulting. Right over the border in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So Charu, I saw you last week. You're following me around at all these shows. Of course I was at your show Nutanix. NEXT in New Orleans. Just give our audience your role at Nutanix. What brings you to the Veeam show? >> Absolutely Stu, thank you for having us here, and it looks like we'll be forklifted out of here as being the last Cube event of the day. But yes we had an amazing event last weekend in New Orleans and as you saw the customers were stoked, they were pumped. I just got a chance to talk to so many customers about our direction, about what they heard at the keynote, and I think they were absolutely excited. Our direction in software being a cloud company. All those things resonated so well. And I think the fact that we launched our freedom campaign, you probably heard that freedom to build, freedom to run any application, freedom to invent, freedom to really focus on multi-cloud, and not be bogged down by which cloud. And hybrid cloud is a complex journey, and finally freedom to play. And I think that would resonate very well with Chris out here. So I think that was a very powerful message we sent out that we are giving our customers choice, and ability to run Nutanix anywhere and any workload. >> Yeah absolutely, I had a great conversation with your new CMO, Ben at the show as a customer. So Chris is this your first VeeamOn? >> Yes, this is my first VeeamOn Conference. >> All right, tell us a little bit about your role and your organization. >> Yes, so I'm the network and systems engineer and administrator at New Resources Consulting. And so I pretty much take care of the whole show. Anywhere from simple help desk questions to rebuilding an SAN environment. I came into the company, and there's a lot of legacy equipment, and things were breaking. It wasn't good so-- >> So Chris before we get into the tech, and the company itself. Give us a thumbnail what the operation is. >> Yeah, so New Resources Consulting is a consulting firm out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We have users based all over the U.S. and in Canada. We focus a lot on managed services, Oracle solutions, PeopleSoft. We do a lot with the water and waste management out in L.A., in Boston and Denver. We focus on that part of IT. >> It sounds very much as changing dynamic happening there. What are some of the stresses on the organization? What's your role in connection with the business? >> Some of the stresses that I was having was we're sitting there trying to get development servers spun up and with the legacy equipment. It going down a lot. I just wasn't able to do that. So now I'm happy that with Nutanix, I'm able to keep everything running smoothly. It's almost like the company doesn't even know I'm there sometimes. >> It's interesting. Last week, we've been talking a lot about invisible. This week, it's about availability. So maybe you could speak to what that means for your operation. Give us the before and journey that you went through. >> Yes, so before as I mentioned, I had a lot of legacy equipment. I was bidding on things on eBay. They didn't even have the option to buy some things that I needed to replace, and my availability wasn't really there. Both at work and in my home life. I was constantly putting out fires instead of working on growing the company, getting new equipment in, doing new processes. That was before, now after my wife is quite happy that I'm home at reasonable times, and not leaving the house at 9 or 10 p.m. or four o'clock in the morning to go switch out controller cards or drives in my SAN. It's allowed me to work on other projects doing Office 365 roll out. As well as a lot of documentation that wasn't there before me, and helping out my users. Where I wasn't able to do so much because I was putting out all those fires. All right Chris, I've heard from Nutanix customers forgive me my weekend back. Lots of new opportunities. As the first one I think, it helped me in my home relationship. >> Chris: Yes. >> So families are happy to see, a happy wife, a happy life. >> Chris: Yes, exactly. >> Charu give us a little bit of color on what you're seeing and maybe some of the Nutanix Veeam partnership. >> Yeah, and I'll replay what I heard and what I saw actually from customers last week in New Orleans and this week here in Chicago. In New Orleans, Veeam folks had a break out session where they were going to talk about the partnership, and what we are doing together. And it was a full house, people had to be turned back, and could not be accommodated in that room. So that's just a testament to show how much interest there is in Nutanix, in Veeam and the joint solution. Then I talked to customers like Chris. Got talking to him in details on Monday, and Chris is talking about how Veeam and Nutanix has simplified his operations, reduced costs, tremendously for his company. And really helped in focus on driving business value to his internal clients verses like he said, "Keeping the lights on." Just talking to customers about this and hearing the excitement, the elation from our customers. That is really empowering, so I think the two companies have very similar principles. We both love simplicity for our clients. We are both extremely customer-centric, so that makes us very well positioned as companies who work very well together having that common DNA. So we are very excited to have a great partnership with Veeam and I would say now amping up our partnership, and doing even better, bigger stuff. >> Chris, one of the things I hear through both companies. Multi-hypervisors, all good. How the cloud story is maturing. Any commentaries? What you're using from the hypervisor space and what does cloud mean to your organization? >> Yeah, so we don't do too much of the cloud. We keep everything in-house but we are a VMware shop currently, but we're looking forward to Veeam and Nutanix to roll out their hypervisor. Get that solution ready for us. VMware is what we currently use and it's working great, but moving to Nutanix, it allowed me to save a lot of money on cost with the licensing I currently had to the licensing I have now. And Nutanix is going to help me out even further when I move over to their hypervisor, saving me even more money for my company, which is always good for everybody. >> All right, well Charu. Chris is a good set up there. We're talking about age V. I talked to Peter McKay a little bit about it at Veeam, but give us the update on bringing those solutions together. >> Yeah, great question, and yes, I guess some of the rumors are true. We are working on it. The teams are actively working on bringing that delight to customers like Chris because Chris you're not the first one who's asked for it. We've had thousands of customers asking us for that capability of Veeam being able to back up, not just with VMware but also now with our Acropolis Hypervisor. It's imminent. We already have hundreds of customers running the beta. We launched the beta a couple of months back, and the GA is right around the corner. It's not years, it's not months. What the Veeam folks tell me, it's a matter of a few weeks and we are very excited about getting that out. And really like Chris just said it so well. Helping them save costs and helping our thousands of customers do the same. >> It's really nice to see both companies working together, and know that they actually listen to their customers. They listen to what we want and then they go and they find the solutions and work together to actually make it a reality. >> All right Chris, I want to give you the final word. We're getting towards the end of the show. They got the closing keynote. They've got the big Veeam party. >> Chris: All right. >> Nutanix had a great party in New Orleans last week. Veeam actually had a great party too. >> Charu: That's true. >> New Orleans last year. So just for your peers, tell them some of the key take aways. One of the main things that you got out of coming to the show. >> Yeah, the big things I really liked. A lot of the break out sessions, I was able to actually sit down face-to-face with technicians that I had talked to over the phone that I looked up and I've learned so much from. And actually dig deeper into conversations with them 'cause coming to something like this, it's different than just being on the phone with somebody for support or asking questions, or reading knowledge-based articles. So a lot of the break out sessions, getting to meet more of the faces from Nutanix and Veeam, and talking to them about new things that I'm looking forward to. And just brainstorming how I can better run my business with their advice. >> All right, well Chris and Charu. I appreciate you helping bring us to a close of our coverage. Here in Chicago has been a deep dish of all of the technology for the culture. A little bit of sports discussion. So thank you so much for watching. Of course, always go to theCube.net for all the replays of this show. See where we're going to be at. Come say hi to us. Hit us up on any of the social media. For Stu Miniman, my co-host for the week Dave Vellante. The whole crew here from SiliconANGLE Media. Thank you so much for watching theCube. (uptempo techno music)

(lively brass music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's the Cube covering .NEXTconference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> So, you're watching the Cube and there's 55 hundred in attendance, here at the Nutanix .NEXTconference. Getting ready for a big party this evening at Mardi Gras world, get a flavor for the local cuisine and one of the things we always love at the show is, really, being able to dig in with the practitioners. Happy to welcome to the program, first, my guest Mike Spencer, vice president of hosting and managed services at ICF Olson, thanks so much for joining us. >> Well thank you very much for having me. It's been a great event, so far. Very inspiring keynote speech this morning. >> Awesome, so Mike. First of all, it's your first time here at .NEXT, tell us what brought you here and a little bit of background of yourself and your organization. >> Yep, so one of the reasons why we came here is my team is up for an award. We've been a user of the Nutanix platform for about three and a half years and it's done a lot to help us in our position in the marketplace, and so part of this is giving a little bit back, and some of it's, you know, coming to hear about what's next, so. >> So actually, could you tell us, what does this award mean to you, your team, and everything like, some people, like there's vendor awards, there's show awards, and like what's that like? >> Well, you know, I think my team is really excited to have some sort of external validation that, you know, the last three and a half or four years that we've been working towards this, you know, journey towards dev ops and infrastructures code, that somebody externally is starting to recognize that what we've done is great, and appreciating that work, so. >> Alright, so Kieth and I, I think are, you know, excited to dig in, we hear things like dev ops and infrastructures code. Something we've been documenting and talked to a lot of customers about, kind of digital transformation. Can you tell a little bit of the story? Bring us back. What was the challenge? What'd your organization look like and walk us through what you did. >> Yeah, so I think initially, very traditional IT team. Really managing things on a per-server basis, on a per-client basis and really needing that guy there to click next or to pay attention to a server. Really kind of that old adage of treating all of our servers like a pet versus more like cattle, which is where we are today and the efficiency around it. So we had some issues around stability, performance, availability, those types of things that really drove us to take a different look at the way we were doing things and so that's kind of what kicked us off on the journey to start looking at, how do we totally rethink this whole space and bring innovation in, in a space that historically doesn't have a ton of innovation. >> So let's talk about the innovation because, you know, the whole thing, whole thing services, you buy commodity hardware as cheap as possible, let it run as long as possible. When I think of Nutanix, I don't think commodity. Help bring the story together for us. >> Yep, so, you know, as architecturally, as we looked at everything we were doing, one of the unique things that we did is we decided to look at our infrastructure as more of a service-based architecture, which is very much more of a software development look at the world, versus an infrastructure look and some of the key tenants in that space are around driving for simplicity in your environment, and the Nutanix platform helped us eliminate a lot of the specialties that we needed in our area, right? So we are very much a commodity type person when it comes to servers, right? The name on the front of the server wasn't really important but what was really important for us and what Nutanix brought to the table was, they merged together all of the pieces in the server part of the stack down to the network stack. We no longer had to deal with things like storage. I didn't need to have SMEs on staff that were specialists in that space. It helped to simplify our networks. It helped us manage things through a single pane of glass, right? And we did it all in a very cost effective way. For us, it really helped us take that 25% of our labor in that space and refocus about 25% of it into really driving forward with the infrastructures code and dev ops methodologies. >> Mike, what does this mean for your business? Funny, I look at your website. It's a customer experience agency built to help you through this digital transformation. It's like, wow, it's what we're talking about at this kind of show. What does that mean to your company and, you know, your end users? >> So ICF Olson is the marketing services wing of ICF, our parent company, which is a large consulting wing but from a customer experience agency standpoint, we span everywhere from PR, brand, all the way down the stack, including managed services and hosting. A lot of our clients say, hey, you know what, you guys are really good at designing this. Why don't you guys go and run it for us? And so that's really where my art comes into place, is not just the hosting of something but also the running of something and working with the clients. It allowed us to become more of an end to end agency, right? It allowed our clients to focus on things more important like, you know, how they were going to change their brand, how they were going to look at the market, how they were going to advertise. And so from a business perspective, itself, one of the things that it did is it helped enable, you know, frankly we want a lot more business, right? Because we were willing to take these things on. We were able to repeat those types of things with a high level of success, so. >> How do you measure success? >> Success is... In our space, in particular? Honestly it is our clients not having to interact with us. (laughing) Right? We're not the sexy part of the digital ecosystem. (laughing) >> Modernization of data center is a critical piece of it. Clients are looking to you to basically make that invisible. The data center should be just something that they consume. As Nutanix has moved, you've been a customer for three years and Nutanix has moved from a hardware, software appliance, where they're selling you the entire platform to software only solution, how has, what has that meant to your business? >> Well, I mean, it's allowed us to take our focus off being experts in the hardware space. Again, something that didn't necessarily bring value, even in our private cloud. We do manage both public and private cloud but our private cloud space, it allowed us to not have to focus on the energy there and really allowed our infrastructure team to become more of a software development team. So that's been a big, big win for us. >> Talk to us a little bit about the organizational dynamics, rolling out dev ops. What did that mean for your team? You say things are invisible now. Was there a adjustment in head count, or roles, or retraining that you can share? >> Yes to all of that. In its simplest form, yeah. So a lot of people look at the implementation of dev ops being something that's kind of done to an infrastructure team. Right, it's designed to make an infrastructure team look more like a software development team or work more fluidly with a software development team and I think those things are all true but it also helped us transform our overall SDLC for software development. There's a lot of things. As we continue to build skill and trade out skill, right, continue to move up the stack, we basically became middleware developers, to where, now, our software developers for our core products and things that we sell for our clients, and support for our clients, those developers are now working on purely code and the aesthetics of things, the UX side of it. Where we are much more managing the middleware component, which interacts nicely with the hyper-converged platform. Right, Nutanix. There was a shift in labor, without a doubt. As you mature through the process you do a lot of investment in people. Right, making sure that they're kind of keeping up with the times, understanding the new methodologies. Huge shifts from the methodologies that a traditional IT team would use to what a software development team uses, right? It wasn't only moving an infrastructure team into that methodology, it was also getting the business and the software development team we work with used to us working more like them versus more like the old IT team. And so honestly, we probably caught the software development team more off guard than we did ourselves, so. (laughing) >> There's another side of that coin. As you develop that skill, as you develop that capability, retention becomes a problem. There's a natural headcount where, you know what, you don't need as many people to come in at midnight to do firmware revisions, do the low level work, but as they skill up, you look around, you know, you look at what happens in the rest of the dev ops movements, where you have entire teams leaving the fortune 500s to go to another fortune 500 to implement their dev ops. How do you encourage your team to stay? >> So to me, it's all about culture, right? Our team can work remote. They all choose to be in the office, right? They enjoy each other. It's also investing in people and investing in their growth. So it's not always about, necessarily, the size of a paycheck. It's also about work-life balance, the willingness of the organization to invest in their people, and giving them time to innovate. I mean, when you talk to the majority of infrastructure guys or even technology guys out there, what drives them every day is not necessarily their paycheck. That's a side effect of the good work they do. It's really the challenge, the pure problem solving of IT. We give them that opportunity to be able to innovate. >> Tell us a little bit about your Nutanix solution that you have, what you started with, how much you grew, what's not on your Nutanix today? >> So private cloud, we are 100% Nutanix today. We started with a four node environment that was, really, purpose built around our analytics platforms. We were looking for some way to isolate IOPS from our production environment. More of a standard, three tier architecture (clearing throat) and we did some research out there, this is at the same time that we're rethinking the architecture of everything, really kind of looking at the way we do business, and we came across several vendors, one of them being Nutanix. It was a very young company, fairly unproven, in at least our market, but their message was exactly the same message that we had developed and so we decided to take a chance on them. We put them in. You know, we did some load testing between that platform and our traditional platform and were very pleasantly surprised to find what we found. Almost a three X increase in disc IOPS and so we went live with this analytics platform, and really did a lot of testing there, right? And then we kind of started the natural process after we got comfortable with it for about six months of hey, why don't we start working through the life cycle process and bring through, bringing in Nutanix to offset? Instead of buying, you know, a storage shelf, right? I can go get a Nutanix cluster that has the same amount of storage but also brings compute with it. (clearing throat) So once we started doing that, we started putting production workloads onto the Nutanix platform and seeing great results. We expedited our journey. Within about a year and a half, we had replaced all of our traditional stand and compute plaforms. So the infrastructure guys, once they saw it in action, once the business saw the results, even the financial side of it, (laughing) you know, we were almost asked to expedite the process of moving towards Nutanix. Which, for us, it was great because it was less to manage. >> So as you guys moved to the Nutanix infrastructure, talk about the more advanced services that they've offered over the past few years. Specifically, the hypervisor, haven't you guys embraced AHV? >> So we have in dev. We are not running it as our primary hypervisor right now. In our architecture, we run VMware today. I'm not probably supposed to say that here but we run VMware. We have been looking at Acropolis. Really, the way we look at the hypervisor is as a component in our service space architecture. We are in a position where we can replace that because it's not an important part to us. We just haven't had the cycles in our roadmap to be able to put towards the replacement of VMware, yet. But it is certainly something on our roadmap and something we're marching towards because the APIs have continued to evolve on the Nutanix platform, we work quite closely with Nutanix on that. They seem to accommodate a lot of our asks but, yeah, it really has been more of a time thing, you know? There's so many things to code in this space, right now. >> You've got the award but what were you looking to really accomplish this week? Are there sessions you're looking for, are there products you're looking to dig into for you and your team? >> A lot of it was about vision, right? How well does the Nutanix vision align with our vision? And, like I said, from the keynote speeches this morning and some of the new services we see coming out, I think they're doing a great job. Their head is where our head is. They're headed the same direction we are. You know, in a lot of places where we're doing custom development, we can actually go in and say, hey, why don't we acquire this? You know, one of the exciting announcements this morning was around Beam. The ability to do compliance across our cloud platforms. We run today about 50% public cloud, 50% private cloud just depending on what the solution is we're providing, so it gives us that one pane of glass. >> What public clouds are you using and how does that, kind of the hybrid, hybrid world that Nutanix laid out this morning fit into your vision? >> Well, so. The right answer for me should be it shouldn't matter what cloud I'm running. But we are running Azure as well as AWS, just depending on the solution. So we have partnerships on both sides. But we don't necessarily look at them as being a long running relationship because, you know, this is a very, this space is changing at a very rapid pace. You know, who knows who the next person is that's going to stand up that we need to support. So we're very platform-agnostic when you look at it. When we deploy something, it really doesn't matter if it's on private cloud, public cloud, doesn't really matter. To us, it's just all building blocks that we plug in together and let code do its job. So, in that model, you guys do 50% public, 50% private. Nutanix has an opinionated view of cloud. How does that impact your business and services? >> Nutanix's approach? >> Yeah they're vision versus the...? >> Yeah, well I think their vision's great, right? Because it is a fairly agnostic vision. With them being, obviously, wanting the private cloud side of that but understanding that there is no 100%, you know, private cloud and 100% public cloud in today's world. It is all hybrid cloud environment and that certain workloads are better on prim, and certain workloads are better in the public cloud. I think that was in total alignment with everything we do. Our primary job is web hosting. So we deal with geographic workloads all the time. >> Well, Mike Spencer. I wish best of luck to the ICF Olson team. >> Yeah, thank you very much for having me. >> On the award this afternoon. You're a big winner in our books either way. Kieth Townsend, I'm Stuart Miniman. Thanks so much for watching the Cube. We'll be back with lots more. (electronic music)

(digital chime) (camera shutter) (bright pop music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, live in New Orleans, Louisiana, I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, marching band, you know, floats coming in, Mardi Gras atmosphere, and a slew of new products and updates. Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer at Nutanix. Sunil, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, likewise Stu, anytime. >> Alright, so a lot that you covered in, so let's get into it, start with, you know, some of the broad company updates. We've been talking about this journey for making everything invisible. I'm waiting, the next time you're going to have the invisible man. Is a... no, no, no, you're putting the IT person forward. >> Yeah, you know we talk about that continuum between all the way from mainframes to like, whatever, HCI to now we've got cloud instance, hyper-converge, then cloud, and then there's functions. Then eventually we'll have NaaS, which is nothing as a service. Right, something like that, but I mean our journey I think of invisible infrastructure started off at hyper-convergence, so computing storage, and essentially it's just increased layers of convergence is how we see it, so if you can converge the networking stack, we converge the automation aspects, then we go in invisible data centers, and then eventually if you hyper-converge the cloud, CapEx and OpEx, public cloud, private clouds, distributed clouds, then you get an invisible cloud. So it's essentially, I think that's really how we've sort of professed this conference is invisible infrastructure evolving to invisible data centers to evolving to invisible clouds. >> You know, so Sunill, one of the things, if we've been talking to your customers, the question is, "Who is the Nutanix customer?" So, when we talked about kind of HCI, even before it was HCI, let's get ourselves out of the silos, you were working with the administrators and the architects. You've built some of these things, you know, you've got a new SaaS offering, you've got micro-segmentation. You're touching more of the business, and sometimes going up the stack too. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Who do you see as the primary customers? >> Yeah, I mean, I think for us, you know, if we just stayed as a broad HCI platform play, then we would probably be slowly making up our way of, between the server guys and the storage guys and maybe the director of infrastructure and so forth. And a lot of it has been groundswell movement for Nutanix over the last six, seven years, right? But, you know, this is what I talk about it to our customers, like when you actually go to cloud on AWS or GCP, there is no storage admin, there is no server admin, there's no one. There's only a cloud architect, and so I think that's what we've seen over the last few years is this evolution to this one single org called the cloud org within enterprises, and then you heard me say this before about this, you know eventually as we move up, our value up the stack, as we go from invisible infrastructure to clouds, our relevancy is also growing to the CIO, because the CIO can now be the CAO, which is the Chief Amazon Officer, or the Chief Alphabet, or the Chief Azure Officer, essentially the Chief Cloud Officer, where we can help them blur the lines between AWS inside, which is Nutanix, and then AWS outside. >> Yeah, I love that, because when we talk to customers, it's not "I'm building out "my multicloud, hybrid cloud, composite," whatever you want to call it, it's "We're "figuring out our digital transformation, "and we've got applications, we've got stuff we're SaaSifying, "there's cool things I've built, you know, "in the public cloud, and I've got, you know, "my data center and the transformation that "I'm going through there." So, the question I have for you is, what is Nutanix's position in the cloud? I didn't hear you going up on stage saying you're going to put five to 10 billion dollars a year into building out data centers and availability zones, and all those things there. Sometimes people misconstrue some of the journey and things like Zy, and they're like, "Oh, it rhymes with what Amazon's doing," or even many times, you know, similar services to an Amazon there, but partnerships with the public cloud providers, and you know, please help us set the record straight, that you're not standing up a public cloud. >> Yeah, I think look, we think increasingly the world, of the world of clouds is a dispersed world, right? I mean, you had to say that we think this construct called the core cloud, which is essentially both, you know, a private version and a public version that's harmonized together into this one enterprise core cloud, but then increasingly we are seeing cloud-like architecture in a remote office branch office or in a retail store, so we call that the distributed cloud, and then it's also with IOT especially, it's getting extended all the way to the edge, whether it be a one-node Nutanix deployment talking to a data center of clusters talking to GCP for machine learning. So we think that the world of clouds is going to emerge as the de facto standard, and public cloud just happens to be a big percentage of that. Private cloud will also be a decent percentage of that. So will these other clouds, so what we need is, I guess, one OS to bind them all, right? And that's the end goal for what we're embarking on, so one of the things that we've recognized is that one of different kinds of clouds is an extended enterprise cloud, where instead of having two primary data centers and two secondary data centers, and then having five cloud availability zones, why even be in the secondary business? What if the secondary data centers were subsumed into a cloud as a service, but you retained the same operational tooling as your primary data center? And that's really where Zy's footprint comes in is, it's to augment what a customer is going through's journey of private cloud or public cloud to this distributed cloud environment, that there will be some news cases that need to be fulfilled using the same cloud architecture. >> So Sunil, let's talk about the customer journey alongside Nutanix's journey. You guys are walking, term I heard a lot so far in the conference is, Nutanix is our partner, our partner in this journey in digital transformation. However, the customer today is very much infrastructure customers. You guys talk to developers, internal customers of your customers. What has been that story, and what has been that conversation? What have, what have you guys learned, and what have you taught your customers along the way? >> I mean I think it's, look we generally know, as I've mentioned on stage today, that we're in another decades worth of journey, as we go from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. That's not going to happen in six six months or so, but what we're finding is that, in the last, I would say four to five years, the view of what cloud can be used for, the "why" of cloud has changed. Initially, there used to be, "Oh, I need to get past IT," by developers, then it eventually became, "Oh, no, no, no, I need to use it as a way to, you know, to deliver a better IT." Now it's being used as a way to actually drive my business. And that's why we use the word digital transformation, just because it's a direct connotation to driving the top line, right? So, when you look at our customers and the journey that we're on, we also want to set expectations of what we are versus what we are not, right? So we're not about enabling the applications to be built, in the sense that, you know, we're not application software companies, but at the end of the day though, if we can abstract out all the, if I can call it, issues below an app and allow IT or the business to focus on a new org that we're calling, you know, the CIO and the CTO merged to be the CDO, right, the Chief Digital Officer, that becomes one org, and that's what we're seeing with many of our large customers is, many of our customers are, their orgs, either they were in the CIO organization, or the infrastructure organization, or the cloud organization, they're all now being merged into the CDO org, and the goal then becomes for it to power a digital transformation through various apps, but with our, essentially leveraging infrastructure as a boat anchor, right? It's more of an accelerator at that point. >> So, there's debate on where that ends, like you know, we can talk about with edge computing, like where does edge start and the core begin. The same thing with infrastructure. You guys made a really interesting announcement around your capability with databases today and being able to, I don't even know the term but, to put a prism-like experience to databases. Talk about those areas around what we've considered traditionally infrastructure, storage network compute, going to this middleware layer, where do you think you can help customers simplify their journey? >> I mean, I think just to recap, some of the ways that we've, you know, approached this year is, look we think about it as three layers of the cloud stack, which is we had computer storage virtualization and we sort of completed the IA stack with our Flow product, which delivers one-click secure networks. And then for the first time, even though our stack is good for running third-party workloads, just like the public cloud runs a lot of PaaS services, increasingly in enterprises, customers are asking for an opinionated view of a PaaS service. So we do have third-party partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks, a whole bunch of other third-party providers, but the core database workload, especially with Oracle being such a complex beast, but it's mainstream, the customer has said, "Look, "can you provide a one plus one "equals three kind of solution "for the world of database?" And that's what Nutanix Era is, and that sort of becomes sort of cornerstone of our first PaaS service, where we're trying to simplify database operations, including things like Oracle RAC, and that's what we demonstrated was to actually provision Oracle RAC in minutes, make clones, create dev instances, and democratize databases for the rest of developers using APIs. So that's the sort of evolution of the stack for us with Nutanix Era, and then we didn't stop there. We also sort of innovated with our first Nutanix SaaS service, with this product called Beam with the acquisition of Minjar, which essentially says, look multi-cloud needs to start with stability, and then obviously you enable control and then you add operational automation, and then visibility and so forth, right? So, with Beam there, it's sort of, sort of sets the stage for the fact that we can now add more to the multi-cloud portfolio. >> Sinil, Beam's an interesting one. Your first SaaS offering. Keith and I were talking before this. There are lots of companies out there that are trying to tackle this challenge. >> Sunil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> With that have, you know, every single platform company out there is trying to tackle this, and then there's lot of independents. There's a lot that goes into, you know, maintaining, advising, you know, the whole consultancy world has spent decades doing this. How do you balance product development efforts there versus, you know, your core platform? You know, should this be an indication that you're going to build out a SaaS portfolio in the future? >> Got it, got it, got it. I know, that's a great question. So, so I think, just to take a step back, Minjar was an interesting company, because Netsil, the other acquisition, is also a bought in the cloud SaaS service that will integrate for hybrid, you know, visibility and networking, but also stand-alone application operations. But Minjar had this interesting history where it was originally a high-end advisory service for AWS. >> Stu: Right. >> It was in the top-five service partners for AWS, and they actually had dozens of customers that they still operate and manage and provide, you know, get a lot of learnings from helping customers, sort of, they are like the Navy SEALS of AWS and so forth, right? And when they built this product, which is now called as Beam, what we think about it is that, look that particular capability is a feature of a platform. It's not a stand-alone product category. What people are going to be looking forward to is a multi-cloud operational fabric, that has an app store and a marketplace, where I can go in and consume services, whether it be on prem or off prem, have a single pane of glass for visibility, again on prem or off prem, and then do one-click automation or orchestration, right? And so the fact that this single pane of glass has to cut over on prem as well as public cloud is the reason why we believe Nutanix has a play here to kind of make it a core feature, because we at least own one pillar of it, which is the on-prem stack, and to the extent that we can do an honest job of extending it to a deep job on AWS and DCP and others, then I think there's value added. >> How do you get closer to the application? When I look at this space, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft have all been talking some similar messages on this, and that, the cloud strategies that they've gone through have that operational model, and you know, they own these applications, so you know, why Nutanix? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's another interesting question. So look, I think the world of apps, and I would say that power shift is happening obviously. We know that with IBM, but even with Oracle, as a mainstream enterprise app, if you really look at, say a public cloud conference, especially AWS's conference, if anything, the only vendor that they take potshots at is Oracle, because they see it as long-hanging fruit in the enterprise from a complexity side, right? And I think with the advent of cloud, the first time the customers have seen a real alternative to move away from this SQL engine on Oracle to potential Postgres or other alternatives. But to do that, you need abstractions. I need to be able to simplify my current environment of Oracle. At the same time, do it in a way that I can actually harmonize the API so that, oh, at some point, can I actually create another instance, but it's on Postgres, right? And the more I can provide that abstracted APIs, the more, you know, flexibility that's there for the customers to actually move from this legacy apps to the next generation apps. So I think, I guess the simple answer to your question is, look for us, even if you're not in the app business, if anything it's an asset than a liability, because then we can be completely neutral to the transformation from the old to the new. We have no skin in the game of keeping you in the old architecture, so if a customer says, "Look, I need to manage "my old, but I need an accelerated "way to get to the new cloud-native apps," then we are all for it. >> So Sinil, one of the, I think I would call this one of the first principles of Nutanix is this ideal of want-quick provisioning, the ability to simplify really complex, really hard things. You guys did it with HCI. The database management piece is another example. You're talking about it now, with ACS and the cloud. Let's talk about the, what happens when you zig when you should have zagged. In the case of going with Docker, the leading solution at the time, >> Sure, sure. >> Seemed like the right approach to go, now you guys are zagging. What makes Nutanix capable of making such a quick change and providing the consistent layer, like as customers go along with you on this journey, 6they count on APIs, they count on integrations, they count on just to, that basic capability and that it's stable. What gives customers the comfort level, that you know what, the complex stuff, Nutanix will take care of, if there needs to be a course correction from a culture and development platform perspective, they can right the ship? >> Yeah, no I think to your first question there Keith, I think, look, in this era now, it doesn't matter which business you're in, the time to succeed obviously is accelerated, but the time to fail is also accelerated, right? We just have to internalize that in our DNA. I would say of any high-growth company is to just be honest about failing fast. And I, yeah I mean I think Docker was a thing a year and a half ago, and we were early to market, and in fact, I would say it was our ACs and a couple of guys in Europe who actually recognized that, look why are we focusing on all this, when every customer that I talk to is testing out Kubernetes. And sure, we were sitting in Silicon Valley and Kubernetes was just coming up and so forth, and so I think it's two things, one their internalization that look, we have to fail fast in a high-growth business like ours. And then two, having the sensors that give us indications of, are we in the right course or not is also important. And so, the other thing that I would say that has worked well with this company than my prior companies is the fact that it, while it is hierarchical for scale, it is one inch to end from a communications perspective. Things like Slack, things like the communication mechanism, allow us to have that real-time touch with the front guys that focus on the customers and so forth. So, so for example, once the clarity was there around ACS to kind of zag on Kubernetes, the whole system was able to lean in, because the "why" of doing that was clear. The "what" and the "how" follow, right? I mean that's really what, how we will keep it going. >> Alright Sunil, before we let you you go, I want to bring back to the infrastructure side. You've had a few of the solutions that are growing really fast. I know you've highlighted the AFS, the Acropolis File Services. I've got the new object service that just got announced. At core platform, what are the areas that are catching wildfire for your customers? >> That's a great question, so on the core platform, which is still our bread and butter to some extent, our core focus has been about it becoming like the OS for the enterprise, period, right? And there's no workloads left as an island. And right now if I can, you know, three years ago we were talking about workloads that we're good for. Nowadays, I talk about workloads that we're not good for. So if I'm a scale-up database that requires certification, I can tell you about some of those that we are short of getting certified, but once that happens, there should be no workload that we're not good far. And that's where AFS comes in, that's where object services come in is, these are all requirements in the core OS that are needed to solve for those kinds of workloads. And, one thing though, to Keith's earlier point, that we have tried to keep honest, and that's why some of these take longer to come out, is that they still have to hold the bar of instant upgrades. Start small, start quickly, pay as you grow. They all have to follow the same ground rules, right? And that is what is keeping us honest frankly, in the overall desire. >> Okay, want to give you the final word, as Keith said, your customers consider Nutanix a partner. As they leave Nutanix .NEXT 2018, how should they be considering Nutanix? >> Yeah, no I think leaving Nutanix, they should recognize us as a company that obviously needs to be hungry, that needs to have a bold vision. We, you know, in our core values, we will make mistakes, we are vulnerable. But we are, you know, hopefully transparent about it, so that that's the, at the end of the day, the core essence of a partnership is that level of transparency between two people, right? And that's what we are hoping that customers will take away from the conference. >> Alright, well Sunil, it's always been a pleasure to document everything going at, since the inaugural .NEXT back in Miami, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next show, where we'll make sure to pin you on, you know, how we've gone first. >> Sounds good. >> Sunil Potti and Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> PA Announcer: Off the plastic tab, and we'll turn on the colors. Welcome to New Orleans. ♪ This is it ♪ ♪ The part when I say I don't want ya ♪ ♪ I'm stronger than I've been before ♪ ♪ This is the part when I set your free ♪ (New Orleans jazz music) ("When the Saints Go Marching In") (rock music) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentleman, would you please welcome state of Louisiana chief design officer Matthew Vince and Choice Hotels director of infrastructure services Stacy Nigh. (rock music) >> Well good morning New Orleans, and welcome to my home state. My name is Matt Vince. I'm the chief design office for state of Louisiana. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all to .Next 2018. State of Louisiana is currently re-architecting our cloud infrastructure and Nutanix is the first domino to fall in our strategy to deliver better services to our citizens. >> And I'd like to second that warm welcome. I'm Stacy Nigh director of infrastructure services for Choice Hotels International. Now you may think you know Choice, but we don't own hotels. We're a technology company. And Nutanix is helping us innovate the way we operate to support our franchisees. This is my first visit to New Orleans and my first .Next. >> Well Stacy, you're in for a treat. New Orleans is known for its fabulous food and its marvelous music, but most importantly the free spirit. >> Well I can't wait, and speaking of free, it's my pleasure to introduce the Nutanix Freedom video, enjoy. ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ Ah, ah, ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I lose everything, so I can sing ♪ ♪ Hallelujah I'm free ♪ ♪ I'm free, I'm free, I'm free, I'm free ♪ ♪ Gritting your teeth, you hold onto me ♪ ♪ It's never enough, I'm never complete ♪ ♪ Tell me to prove, expect me to lose ♪ ♪ I push it away, I'm trying to move ♪ ♪ I'm desperate to run, I'm desperate to leave ♪ ♪ If I lose it all, at least I'll be free ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome chief marketing officer Ben Gibson ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Ah, ah ♪ ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Welcome, good morning. >> Audience: Good morning. >> And welcome to .Next 2018. There's no better way to open up a .Next conference than by hearing from two of our great customers. And Matthew, thank you for welcoming us to this beautiful, your beautiful state and city. And Stacy, this is your first .Next, and I know she's not alone because guess what It's my first .Next too. And I come properly attired. In the front row, you can see my Nutanix socks, and I think my Nutanix blue suit. And I know I'm not alone. I think over 5,000 people in attendance here today are also first timers at .Next. And if you are here for the first time, it's in the morning, let's get moving. I want you to stand up, so we can officially welcome you into the fold. Everyone stand up, first time. All right, welcome. (audience clapping) So you are all joining not just a conference here. This is truly a community. This is a community of the best and brightest in our industry I will humbly say that are coming together to share best ideas, to learn what's happening next, and in particular it's about forwarding not only your projects and your priorities but your careers. There's so much change happening in this industry. It's an opportunity to learn what's coming down the road and learn how you can best position yourself for this whole new world that's happening around cloud computing and modernizing data center environments. And this is not just a community, this is a movement. And it's a movement that started quite awhile ago, but the first .Next conference was in the quiet little town of Miami, and there was about 800 of you in attendance or so. So who in this hall here were at that first .Next conference in Miami? Let me hear from you. (audience members cheering) Yep, well to all of you grizzled veterans of the .Next experience, welcome back. You have started a movement that has grown and this year across many different .Next conferences all over the world, over 20,000 of your community members have come together. And we like to do it in distributed architecture fashion just like here in Nutanix. And so we've spread this movement all over the world with .Next conferences. And this is surging. We're also seeing just today the current count 61,000 certifications and climbing. Our Next community, close to 70,000 active members of our online community because .Next is about this big moment, and it's about every other day and every other week of the year, how we come together and explore. And my favorite stat of all. Here today in this hall amongst the record 5,500 registrations to .Next 2018 representing 71 countries in whole. So it's a global movement. Everyone, welcome. And you know when I got in Sunday night, I was looking at the tweets and the excitement was starting to build and started to see people like Adile coming from Casablanca. Adile wherever you are, welcome buddy. That's a long trip. Thank you so much for coming and being here with us today. I saw other folks coming from Geneva, from Denmark, from Japan, all over the world coming together for this moment. And we are accomplishing phenomenal things together. Because of your trust in us, and because of some early risk candidly that we have all taken together, we've created a movement in the market around modernizing data center environments, radically simplifying how we operate in the services we deliver to our businesses everyday. And this is a movement that we don't just know about this, but the industry is really taking notice. I love this chart. This is Gartner's inaugural hyperconvergence infrastructure magic quadrant chart. And I think if you see where Nutanix is positioned on there, I think you can agree that's a rout, that's a homerun, that's a mic drop so to speak. What do you guys think? (audience clapping) But here's the thing. It says Nutanix up there. We can honestly say this is a win for this hall here. Because, again, without your trust in us and what we've accomplished together and your partnership with us, we're not there. But we are there, and it is thanks to everyone in this hall. Together we have created, expanded, and truly made this market. Congratulations. And you know what, I think we're just getting started. The same innovation, the same catalyst that we drove into the market to converge storage network compute, the next horizon is around multi-cloud. The next horizon is around whether by accident or on purpose the strong move with different workloads moving into public cloud, some into private cloud moving back and forth, the promise of application mobility, the right workload on the right cloud platform with the right economics. Economics is key here. If any of you have a teenager out there, and they have a hold of your credit card, and they're doing something online or the like. You get some surprises at the end of the month. And that surprise comes in the form of spiraling public cloud costs. And this isn't to say we're not going to see a lot of workloads born and running in public cloud, but the opportunity is for us to take a path that regains control over infrastructure, regain control over workloads and where they're run. And the way I look at it for everyone in this hall, it's a journey we're on. It starts with modernizing those data center environments, continues with embracing the full cloud stack and the compelling opportunity to deliver that consumer experience to rapidly offer up enterprise compute services to your internal clients, lines of businesses and then out into the market. It's then about how you standardize across an enterprise cloud environment, that you're not just the infrastructure but the management, the automation, the control, and running any tier one application. I hear this everyday, and I've heard this a lot already this week about customers who are all in with this approach and running those tier one applications on Nutanix. And then it's the promise of not only hyperconverging infrastructure but hyperconverging multiple clouds. And if we do that, this journey the way we see it what we are doing is building your enterprise cloud. And your enterprise cloud is about the private cloud. It's about expanding and managing and taking back control of how you determine what workload to run where, and to make sure there's strong governance and control. And you're radically simplifying what could be an awfully complicated scenario if you don't reclaim and put your arms around that opportunity. Now how do we do this different than anyone else? And this is going to be a big theme that you're going to see from my good friend Sunil and his good friends on the product team. What are we doing together? We're taking all of that legacy complexity, that friction, that inability to be able to move fast because you're chained to old legacy environments. I'm talking to folks that have applications that are 40 years old, and they are concerned to touch them because they're not sure if they can react if their infrastructure can meet the demands of a new, modernized workload. We're making all that complexity invisible. And if all of that is invisible, it allows you to focus on what's next. And that indeed is the spirit of this conference. So if the what is enterprise cloud, and the how we do it different is by making infrastructure invisible, data centers, clouds, then why are we all here today? What is the binding principle that spiritually, that emotionally brings us all together? And we think it's a very simple, powerful word, and that word is freedom. And when we think about freedom, we think about as we work together the freedom to build the data center that you've always wanted to build. It's about freedom to run the applications where you choose based on the information and the context that wasn't available before. It's about the freedom of choice to choose the right cloud platform for the right application, and again to avoid a lot of these spiraling costs in unanticipated surprises whether it be around security, whether it be around economics or governance that come to the forefront. It's about the freedom to invent. It's why we got into this industry in the first place. We want to create. We want to build things not keep the lights on, not be chained to mundane tasks day by day. And it's about the freedom to play. And I hear this time and time again. My favorite tweet from a Nutanix customer to this day is just updated a lot of nodes at 38,000 feed on United Wifi, on my way to spend vacation with my family. Freedom to play. This to me is emotionally what brings us all together and what you saw with the Freedom video earlier, and what you see here is this new story because we want to go out and spread the word and not only talk about the enterprise cloud, not only talk about how we do it better, but talk about why it's so compelling to be a part of this hall here today. Now just one note of housekeeping for everyone out there in case I don't want anyone to take a wrong turn as they come to this beautiful convention center here today. A lot of freedom going on in this convention center. As luck may have it, there's another conference going on a little bit down that way based on another high growth, disruptive industry. Now MJBizCon Next, and by coincidence it's also called next. And I have to admire the creativity. I have to admire that we do share a, hey, high growth business model here. And in case you're not quite sure what this conference is about. I'm the head of marketing here. I have to show the tagline of this. And I read the tagline from license to launch and beyond, the future of the, now if I can replace that blank with our industry, I don't know, to me it sounds like a new, cool Sunil product launch. Maybe launching a new subscription service or the like. Stay tuned, you never know. I think they're going to have a good time over there. I know we're going to have a wonderful week here both to learn as well as have a lot of fun particularly in our customer appreciation event tonight. I want to spend a very few important moments on .Heart. .Heart is Nutanix's initiative to promote diversity in the technology arena. In particular, we have a focus on advancing the careers of women and young girls that we want to encourage to move into STEM and high tech careers. You have the opportunity to engage this week with this important initiative. Please role the video, and let's learn more about how you can do so. >> Video Plays (electronic music) >> So all of you have received these .Heart tokens. You have the freedom to go and choose which of the four deserving charities can receive donations to really advance our cause. So I thank you for your engagement there. And this community is behind .Heart. And it's a very important one. So thank you for that. .Next is not the community, the moment it is without our wonderful partners. These are our amazing sponsors. Yes, it's about sponsorship. It's also about how we integrate together, how we innovate together, and we're about an open community. And so I want to thank all of these names up here for your wonderful sponsorship of this event. I encourage everyone here in this room to spend time, get acquainted, get reacquainted, learn how we can make wonderful music happen together, wonderful music here in New Orleans happen together. .Next isn't .Next with a few cool surprises. Surprise number one, we have a contest. This is a still shot from the Freedom video you saw right before I came on. We have strategically placed a lucky seven Nutanix Easter eggs in this video. And if you go to Nutanix.com/freedom, watch the video. You may have to use the little scrubbing feature to slow down 'cause some of these happen quickly. You're going to find some fun, clever Easter eggs. List all seven, tweet that out, or as many as you can, tweet that out with hashtag nextconf, C, O, N, F, and we'll have a random drawing for an all expenses paid free trip to .Next 2019. And just to make sure everyone understands Easter egg concept. There's an eighth one here that's actually someone that's quite famous in our circles. If you see on this still shot, there's someone in the back there with a red jacket on. That's not just anyone. We're targeting in here. That is our very own Julie O'Brien, our senior vice president of corporate marketing. And you're going to hear from Julie later on here at .Next. But Julie and her team are the engine and the creativity behind not only our new Freedom campaign but more importantly everything that you experience here this week. Julie and her team are amazing, and we can't wait for you to experience what they've pulled together for you. Another surprise, if you go and visit our Freedom booths and share your stories. So they're like video booths, you share your success stories, your partnerships, your journey that I talked about, you will be entered to win a beautiful Nutanix brand compliant, look at those beautiful colors, bicycle. And it's not just any bicycle. It's a beautiful bicycle made by our beautiful customer Trek. I actually have a Trek bike. I love cycling. Unfortunately, I'm not eligible, but all of you are. So please share your stories in the Freedom Nutanix's booths and put yourself in the running, or in the cycling to get this prize. One more thing I wanted to share here. Yesterday we had a great time. We had our inaugural Nutanix hackathon. This hackathon brought together folks that were in devops practices, many of you that are in this room. We sold out. We thought maybe we'd get four or five teams. We had to shutdown at 14 teams that were paired together with a Nutanix mentor, and you coded. You used our REST APIs. You built new apps that integrated in with Prism and Clam. And it was wonderful to see this. Everyone I talked to had a great time on this. We had three winners. In third place, we had team Copper or team bronze, but team Copper. Silver, Not That Special, they're very humble kind of like one of our key mission statements. And the grand prize winner was We Did It All for the Cookies. And you saw them coming in on our Mardi Gras float here. We Did It All for Cookies, they did this very creative job. They leveraged an Apple Watch. They were lighting up VMs at a moments notice utilizing a lot of their coding skills. Congratulations to all three, first, second, and third all receive $2,500. And then each of them, then were able to choose a charity to deliver another $2,500 including Ronald McDonald House for the winner, we did it all for the McDonald Land cookies, I suppose, to move forward. So look for us to do more of these kinds of events because we want to bring together infrastructure and application development, and this is a great, I think, start for us in this community to be able to do so. With that, who's ready to hear form Dheeraj? You ready to hear from Dheeraj? (audience clapping) I'm ready to hear from Dheeraj, and not just 'cause I work for him. It is my distinct pleasure to welcome on the stage our CEO, cofounder and chairman Dheeraj Pandey. ("Free" by Broods) ♪ Hallelujah, I'm free ♪ >> Thank you Ben and good morning everyone. >> Audience: Good morning. >> Thank you so much for being here. It's just such an elation when I'm thinking about the Mardi Gras crowd that came here, the partners, the customers, the NTCs. I mean there's some great NTCs up there I could relate to because they're on Slack as well. How many of you are in Slack Nutanix internal Slack channel? Probably 5%, would love to actually see this community grow from here 'cause this is not the only even we would love to meet you. We would love to actually do this in a real time bite size communication on our own internal Slack channel itself. Now today, we're going to talk about a lot of things, but a lot of hard things, a lot of things that take time to build and have evolved as the industry itself has evolved. And one of the hard things that I want to talk about is multi-cloud. Multi-cloud is a really hard problem 'cause it's full of paradoxes. It's really about doing things that you believe are opposites of each other. It's about frictionless, but it's also about governance. It's about being simple, and it's also about being secure at the same time. It's about delight, it's about reducing waste, it's about owning, and renting, and finally it's also about core and edge. How do you really make this big at a core data center whether it's public or private? Or how do you really shrink it down to one or two nodes at the edge because that's where your machines are, that's where your people are? So this is a really hard problem. And as you hear from Sunil and the gang there, you'll realize how we've actually evolved our solutions to really cater to some of these. One of the approaches that we have used to really solve some of these hard problems is to have machines do more, and I said a lot of things in those four words, have machines do more. Because if you double-click on that sentence, it really means we're letting design be at the core of this. And how do you really design data centers, how do you really design products for the data center that hush all the escalations, the details, the complexities, use machine-learning and AI and you know figure our anomaly detection and correlations and patter matching? There's a ton of things that you need to do to really have machines do more. But along the way, the important lesson is to make machines invisible because when machines become invisible, it actually makes something else visible. It makes you visible. It makes governance visible. It makes applications visible, and it makes services visible. A lot of things, it makes teams visible, careers visible. So while we're really talking about invisibility of machines, we're talking about visibility of people. And that's how we really brought all of you together in this conference as well because it makes all of us shine including our products, and your careers, and your teams as well. And I try to define the word customer success. You know it's one of the favorite words that I'm actually using. We've just hired a great leader in customer success recently who's really going to focus on this relatively hard problem, yet another hard problem of customer success. We think that customer success, true customer success is possible when we have machines tend towards invisibility. But along the way when we do that, make humans tend towards freedom. So that's the real connection, the yin-yang of machines and humans that Nutanix is really all about. And that's why design is at the core of this company. And when I say design, I mean reducing friction. And it's really about reducing friction. And everything we do, the most mundane of things which could be about migrating applications, spinning up VMs, self-service portals, automatic upgrades, and automatic scale out, and all the things we do is about reducing friction which really makes machines become invisible and humans gain freedom. Now one of the other convictions we have is how all of us are really tied at the hip. You know our success is tied to your success. If we make you successful, and when I say you, I really mean Main Street. Main Street being customers, and partners, and employees. If we make all of you successful, then we automatically become successful. And very coincidentally, Main Street and Wall Street are also tied in that very same relation as well. If we do a great job at Main Street, I think the Wall Street customer, i.e. the investor, will take care of itself. You'll have you know taken care of their success if we took care of Main Street success itself. And that's the narrative that our CFO Dustin Williams actually went and painted to our Wall Street investors two months ago at our investor day conference. We talked about a $3 billion number. We said look as a company, as a software company, we can go and achieve $3 billion in billings three years from now. And it was a telling moment for the company. It was really about talking about where we could be three years from now. But it was not based on a hunch. It was based on what we thought was customer success. Now realize that $3 billion in pure software. There's only 10 to 15 companies in the world that actually have that kind of software billings number itself. But at the core of this confidence was customer success, was the fact that we were doing a really good job of not over promising and under delivering but under promising starting with small systems and growing the trust of the customers over time. And this is one of the statistics we actually talk about is repeat business. The first dollar that a Global 2000 customer spends in Nutanix, and if we go and increase their trust 15 times by year six, and we hope to actually get 17 1/2 and 19 times more trust in the years seven and eight. It's very similar numbers for non Global 2000 as well. Again, we go and really hustle for customer success, start small, have you not worry about paying millions of dollars upfront. You know start with systems that pay as they grow, you pay as they grow, and that's the way we gain trust. We have the same non Global 2000 pay $6 1/2 for the first dollar they've actually spent on us. And with this, I think the most telling moment was when Dustin concluded. And this is key to this audience here as well. Is how the current cohorts which is this audience here and many of them were not here will actually carry the weight of $3 billion, more than 50% of it if we did a great job of customer success. If we were humble and honest and we really figured out what it meant to take care of you, and if we really understood what starting small was and having to gain the trust with you over time, we think that more than 50% of that billings will actually come from this audience here without even looking at new logos outside. So that's the trust of customer success for us, and it takes care of pretty much every customer not just the Main Street customer. It takes care of Wall Street customer. It takes care of employees. It takes care of partners as well. Now before I talk about technology and products, I want to take a step back 'cause many of you are new in this audience. And I think that it behooves us to really talk about the history of this company. Like we've done a lot of things that started out as science projects. In fact, I see some tweets out there and people actually laugh at Nutanix cloud. And this is where we were in 2012. So if you take a step back and think about where the company was almost seven, eight years ago, we were up against giants. There was a $30 billion industry around network attached storage, and storage area networks and blade servers, and hypervisors, and systems management software and so on. So what did we start out with? Very simple premise that we will collapse the architecture of the data center because three tier is wasteful and three tier is not delightful. It was a very simple hunch, we said we'll take rack mount servers, we'll put a layer of software on top of it, and that layer of software back then only did storage. It didn't do networks and security, and it ran on top of a well known hypervisor from VMware. And we said there's one non negotiable thing. The fact that the design must change. The control plane for this data center cannot be the old control plane. It has to be rethought through, and that's why Prism came about. Now we went and hustled hard to add more things to it. We said we need to make this diverse because it can't just be for one application. We need to make it CPU heavy, and memory heavy, and storage heavy, and flash heavy and so on. And we built a highly configurable HCI. Now all of them are actually configurable as you know of today. And this was not just innovation in technologies, it was innovation in business and sizing, capacity planning, quote to cash business processes. A lot of stuff that we had to do to make this highly configurable, so you can really scale capacity and performance independent of each other. Then in 2014, we did something that was very counterintuitive, but we've done this on, and on, and on again. People said why are you disrupting yourself? You know you've been doing a good job of shipping appliances, but we also had the conviction that HCI was not about hardware. It was about a form factor, but it was really about an operating system. And we started to compete with ourselves when we said you know what we'll do arm's length distribution, we'll do arm's length delivery of products when we give our software to our Dell partner, to Dell as a partner, a loyal partner. But at the same time, it was actually seen with a lot of skepticism. You know these guys are wondering how to really make themselves vanish because they're competing with themselves. But we also knew that if we didn't compete with ourselves someone else will. Now one of the most controversial decisions was really going and doing yet another hypervisor. In the year 2015, it was really preposterous to build yet another hypervisor. It was a very mature market. This was coming probably 15 years too late to the market, or at least 10 years too late to market. And most people said it shouldn't be done because hypervisor is a commodity. And that's the word we latched on to. That this commodity should not have to be paid for. It shouldn't have a team of people managing it. It should actually be part of your overall stack, but it should be invisible. Just like storage needs to be invisible, virtualization needs to be invisible. But it was a bold step, and I think you know at least when we look at our current numbers, 1/3rd of our customers are actually using AHV. At least every quarter that we look at it, our new deployments, at least 35% of it is actually being used on AHV itself. And again, a very preposterous thing to have said five years ago, four years ago to where we've actually come. Thank you so much for all of you who've believed in the fact that virtualization software must be invisible and therefore we should actually try out something that is called AHV today. Now we went and added Lenovo to our OEM mix, started to become even more of a software company in the year 2016. Went and added HP and Cisco in some of very large deals that we talk about in earnings call, our HP deals and Cisco deals. And some very large customers who have procured ELAs from us, enterprise license agreements from us where they want to mix and match hardware. They want to mix Dell hardware with HP hardware but have common standard Nutanix entitlements. And finally, I think this was another one of those moments where we say why should HCI be only limited to X86. You know this operating systems deserves to run on a non X86 architecture as well. And that gave birth to this idea of HCI and Power Systems from IBM. And we've done a great job of really innovating with them in the last three, four quarters. Some amazing innovation that has come out where you can now run AIX 7.x on Nutanix. And for the first time in the history of data center, you can actually have a single software not just a data plane but a control plane where you can manage an IBM farm, an Power farm, and open Power farm and an X86 farm from the same control plane and have you know the IBM farm feed storage to an Intel compute farm and vice versa. So really good things that we've actually done. Now along the way, something else was going on while we were really busy building the private cloud, we knew there was a new consumption model on computing itself. People were renting computing using credit cards. This is the era of the millennials. They were like really want to bypass people because at the end of the day, you know why can't computing be consumed the way like eCommerce is? And that devops movement made us realize that we need to add to our stack. That stack will now have other computing clouds that is AWS and Azure and GCP now. So similar to the way we did Prism. You know Prism was really about going and making hypervisors invisible. You know we went ahead and said we'll add Calm to our portfolio because Calm is now going to be what Prism was to us back when we were really dealing with multi hypervisor world. Now it's going to be multi-cloud world. You know it's one of those things we had a gut around, and we really come to expect a lot of feedback and real innovation. I mean yesterday when we had the hackathon. The center, the epicenter of the discussion was Calm, was how do you automate on multiple clouds without having to write a single line of code? So we've come a long way since the acquisition of Calm two years ago. I think it's going to be a strong pillar in our overall product portfolio itself. Now the word multi-cloud is going to be used and over used. In fact, it's going to be blurring its lines with the idea of hyperconvergence of clouds, you know what does it mean. We just hope that hyperconvergence, the way it's called today will morph to become hyperconverged clouds not just hyperconverged boxes which is a software defined infrastructure definition itself. But let's focus on the why of multi-cloud. Why do we think it can't all go into a public cloud itself? The one big reason is just laws of the land. There's data sovereignty and computing sovereignty, regulations and compliance because of which you need to be in where the government with the regulations where the compliance rules want you to be. And by the way, that's just one reason why the cloud will have to disperse itself. It can't just be 10, 20 large data centers around the world itself because you have 200 plus countries and half of computing actually gets done outside the US itself. So it's a really important, very relevant point about the why of multi-cloud. The second one is just simple laws of physics. You know if there're machines at the edge, and they're producing so much data, you can't bring all the data to the compute. You have to take the compute which is stateless, it's an app. You take the app to where the data is because the network is the enemy. The network has always been the enemy. And when we thought we've made fatter networks, you've just produced more data as well. So this just goes without saying that you take something that's stateless that's without gravity, that's lightweight which is compute and the application and push it close to where the data itself is. And the third one which is related is just latency reasons you know? And it's not just about machine latency and electrons transferring over the speed light, and you can't defy the speed of light. It's also about human latency. It's also about multiple teams saying we need to federate and delegate, and we need to push things down to where the teams are as opposed to having to expect everybody to come to a very large computing power itself. So all the ways, the way they are, there will be at least three different ways of looking at multi-cloud itself. There's a centralized core cloud. We all go and relate to this because we've seen large data centers and so on. And that's the back office workhorse. It will crunch numbers. It will do processing. It will do a ton of things that will go and produce results for you know how we run our businesses, but there's also the dispersal of the cloud, so ROBO cloud. And this is the front office server that's really serving. It's a cloud that's going to serve people. It's going to be closer to people, and that's what a ROBO cloud is. We have a ton of customers out here who actually use Nutanix and the ROBO environments themselves as one node, two node, three node, five node servers, and it just collapses the entire server closet room in these ROBOs into something really, really small and minuscule. And finally, there's going to be another dispersed edge cloud because that's where the machines are, that's where the data is. And there's going to be an IOT machine fog because we need to miniaturize computing to something even smaller, maybe something that can really land in the palm in a mini server which is a PC like server, but you need to run everything that's enterprise grade. You should be able to go and upgrade them and monitor them and analyze them. You know do enough computing up there, maybe event-based processing that can actually happen. In fact, there's some great innovation that we've done at the edge with IOTs that I'd love for all of you to actually attend some sessions around as well. So with that being said, we have a hole in the stack. And that hole is probably one of the hardest problems that we've been trying to solve for the last two years. And Sunil will talk a lot about that. This idea of hybrid. The hybrid of multi-cloud is one of the hardest problems. Why? Because we're talking about really blurring the lines with owning and renting where you have a single-tenant environment which is your data center, and a multi-tenant environment which is the service providers data center, and the two must look like the same. And the two must look like the same is that hard a problem not just for burst out capacity, not just for security, not just for identity but also for networks. Like how do you blur the lines between networks? How do you blur the lines for storage? How do you really blur the lines for a single pane of glass where you can think of availability zones that look highly symmetric even though they're not because one of 'em is owned by you, and it's single-tenant. The other one is not owned by you, that's multi-tenant itself. So there's some really hard problems in hybrid that you'll hear Sunil talk about and the team. And some great strides that we've actually made in the last 12 months of really working on Xi itself. And that completes the picture now in terms of how we believe the state of computing will be going forward. So what are the must haves of a multi-cloud operating system? We talked about marketplace which is catalogs and automation. There's a ton of orchestration that needs to be done for multi-cloud to come together because now you have a self-service portal which is providing an eCommerce view. It's really about you know getting to do a lot of requests and workflows without having people come in the way, without even having tickets. There's no need for tickets if you can really start to think like a self-service portal as if you're just transacting eCommerce with machines and portals themselves. Obviously the next one is networking security. You need to blur the lines between on-prem and off-prem itself. These two play a huge role. And there's going to be a ton of details that you'll see Sunil talk about. But finally, what I want to focus on the rest of the talk itself here is what governance and compliance. This is a hard problem, and it's a hard problem because things have evolved. So I'm going to take a step back. Last 30 years of computing, how have consumption models changed? So think about it. 30 years ago, we were making decisions for 10 plus years, you know? Mainframe, at least 10 years, probably 20 plus years worth of decisions. These were decisions that were extremely waterfall-ish. Make 10s of millions of dollars worth of investment for a device that we'd buy for at least 10 to 20 years. Now as we moved to client-server, that thing actually shrunk. Now you're talking about five years worth of decisions, and these things were smaller. So there's a little bit more velocity in our decisions. We were not making as waterfall-ish decision as we used to with mainframes. But still five years, talk about virtualized, three tier, maybe three to five year decisions. You know they're still relatively big decisions that we were making with computer and storage and SAN fabrics and virtualization software and systems management software and so on. And here comes Nutanix, and we said no, no. We need to make it smaller. It has to become smaller because you know we need to make more agile decisions. We need to add machines every week, every month as opposed to adding you know machines every three to five years. And we need to be able to upgrade them, you know any point in time. You can do the upgrades every month if you had to, every week if you had to and so on. So really about more agility. And yet, we were not complete because there's another evolution going on, off-prem in the public cloud where people are going and doing reserved instances. But more than that, they were doing on demand stuff which no the decision was days to weeks. Some of these things that unitive compute was being rented for days to weeks, not years. And if you needed something more, you'd shift a little to the left and use reserved instances. And then spot pricing, you could do spot pricing for hours and finally lambda functions. Now you could to function as a service where things could actually be running only for minutes not even hours. So as you can see, there's a wide spectrum where when you move to the right, you get more elasticity, and when you move to the left, you're talking about predictable decision making. And in fact, it goes from minutes on one side to 10s of years on the other itself. And we hope to actually go and blur the lines between where NTNX is today where you see Nutanix right now to where we really want to be with reserved instances and on demand. And that's the real ask of Nutanix. How do you take care of this discontinuity? Because when you're owning things, you actually end up here, and when you're renting things, you end up here. What does it mean to really blur the lines between these two because people do want to make decisions that are better than reserved instance in the public cloud. We'll talk about why reserved instances which looks like a proxy for Nutanix it's still very, very wasteful even though you might think it's delightful, it's very, very wasteful. So what does it mean for on-prem and off-prem? You know you talk about cost governance, there's security compliance. These high velocity decisions we're actually making you know where sometimes you could be right with cost but wrong on security, but sometimes you could be right in security but wrong on cost. We need to really figure out how machines make some of these decisions for us, how software helps us decide do we have the right balance between cost, governance, and security compliance itself? And to get it right, we have introduced our first SAS service called Beam. And to talk more about Beam, I want to introduce Vijay Rayapati who's the general manager of Beam engineering to come up on stage and talk about Beam itself. Thank you Vijay. (rock music) So you've been here a couple of months now? >> Yes. >> At the same time, you spent the last seven, eight years really handling AWS. Tell us more about it. >> Yeah so we spent a lot of time trying to understand the last five years at Minjar you know how customers are really consuming in this new world for their workloads. So essentially what we tried to do is understand the consumption models, workload patterns, and also build algorithms and apply intelligence to say how can we lower this cost and you know improve compliance of their workloads.? And now with Nutanix what we're trying to do is how can we converge this consumption, right? Because what happens here is most customers start with on demand kind of consumption thinking it's really easy, but the total cost of ownership is so high as the workload elasticity increases, people go towards spot or a scaling, but then you need a lot more automation that something like Calm can help them. But predictability of the workload increases, then you need to move towards reserved instances, right to lower costs. >> And those are some of the things that you go and advise with some of the software that you folks have actually written. >> But there's a lot of waste even in the reserved instances because what happens it while customers make these commitments for a year or three years, what we see across, like we track a billion dollars in public cloud consumption you know as a Beam, and customers use 20%, 25% of utilization of their commitments, right? So how can you really apply, take the data of consumption you know apply intelligence to essentially reduce their you know overall cost of ownership. >> You said something that's very telling. You said reserved instances even though they're supposed to save are still only 20%, 25% utilized. >> Yes, because the workloads are very dynamic. And the next thing is you can't do hot add CPU or hot add memory because you're buying them for peak capacity. There is no convergence of scaling that apart from the scaling as another node. >> So you actually sized it for peak, but then using 20%, 30%, you're still paying for the peak. >> That's right. >> Dheeraj: That can actually add up. >> That's what we're trying to say. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? You know how can we deliver optimization across clouds and consumption models and bring the control while retaining that agility and demand elasticity? >> That's great. So you want to show us something? >> Yeah absolutely. So this is Beam as just Dheeraj outlined, our first SAS service. And this is my first .Next. And you know glad to be here. So what you see here is a global consumption you know for a business across different clouds. Whether that's in a public cloud like Amazon, or Azure, or Nutanix. We kind of bring the consumption together for the month, the recent month across your accounts and services and apply intelligence to say you know what is your spent efficiency across these clouds? Essentially there's a lot of intelligence that goes in to detect your workloads and consumption model to say if you're spending $100, how efficiently are you spending? How can you increase that? >> So you have a centralized view where you're looking at multiple clouds, and you know you talk about maybe you can take an example of an account and start looking at it? >> Yes, let's go into a cloud provider like you know for this business, let's go and take a loot at what's happening inside an Amazon cloud. Here we get into the deeper details of what's happening with the consumption of a specific services as well as the utilization of both on demand and RI. You know what can you do to lower your cost and detect your spend efficiency of a dollar to see you know are there resources that are provisioned by teams for applications that are not being used, or are there resources that we should go and rightsize because you know we have all this monitoring data, configuration data that we crunch through to basically detect this? >> You think there's billions of events that you look at everyday. You're already looking at a billon dollars worth of AWS spend. >> Right, right. >> So billions of events, billing, metering events every year to really figure out and optimize for them. >> So what we have here is a very popular international government organization. >> Dheeraj: Wow, so it looks like Russians are everywhere, the cloud is everywhere actually. >> Yes, it's quite popular. So when you bring your master account into Beam, we kind of detect all the linked accounts you know under that. Then you can go and take a look at not just at the organization level within it an account level. >> So these are child objects, you know. >> That's right. >> You can think of them as ephemeral accounts that you create because you don't want to be on the record when you're doing spams on Facebook for example. >> Right, let's go and take a look at what's happening inside a Facebook ad spend account. So we have you know consumption of the services. Let's go deeper into compute consumption, and you kind of see a trendline. You can do a lot of computing. As you see, looks like one campaign has ended. They started another campaign. >> Dheeraj: It looks like they're not stopping yet, man. There's a lot of money being made in Facebook right now. (Vijay laughing) >> So not only just get visibility at you know compute as a service inside a cloud provider, you can go deeper inside compute and say you know what is a service that I'm really consuming inside compute along with the CPUs n'stuff, right? What is my data transfer? You know what is my network? What is my load blancers? So essentially you get a very deeper visibility you know as a service right. Because we have three goals for Beam. How can we deliver visibility across clouds? How can we deliver visibility across services? And how can we deliver, then optimization? >> Well I think one thing that I just want to point out is how this SAS application was an extremely teachable moment for me to learn about the different resources that people could use about the public cloud. So all of you who actually have not gone deep enough into the idea of public cloud. This could be a great app for you to learn about things, the resources, you know things that you could do to save and security and things of that nature. >> Yeah. And we really believe in creating the single pane view you know to mange your optimization of a public cloud. You know as Ben spoke about as a business, you need to have freedom to use any cloud. And that's what Beam delivers. How can you make the right decision for the right workload to use any of the cloud of your choice? >> Dheeraj: How 'about databases? You talked about compute as well but are there other things we could look at? >> Vijay: Yes, let's go and take a look at database consumption. What you see here is they're using inside Facebook ad spending, they're using all databases except Oracle. >> Dheeraj: Wow, looks like Oracle sales folks have been active in Russia as well. (Vijay laughing) >> So what we're seeing here is a global view of you know what is your spend efficiency and which is kind of a scorecard for your business for the dollars that you're spending. And the great thing is Beam kind of brings together you know through its intelligence and algorithms to detect you know how can you rightsize resources and how can you eliminate things that you're not using? And we deliver and one click fix, right? Let's go and take a look at resources that are maybe provisioned for storage and not being used. We deliver the seamless one-click philosophy that Nutanix has to eliminate it. >> So one click, you can actually just pick some of these wasteful things that might be looking delightful because using public cloud, using credit cards, you can go in and just say click fix, and it takes care of things. >> Yeah, and not only remove the resources that are unused, but it can go and rightsize resources across your compute databases, load balancers, even past services, right? And this is where the power of it kind of comes for a business whether you're using on-prem and off-prem. You know how can you really converge that consumption across both? >> Dheeraj: So do you have something for Nutanix too? >> Vijay: Yes, so we have basically been working on Nutanix with something that we're going to deliver you know later this year. As you can see here, we're bringing together the consumption for the Nutanix, you know the services that you're using, the licensing and capacity that is available. And how can you also go and optimize within Nutanix environments >> That's great. >> for the next workload. Now let me quickly show you what we have on the compliance side. This is an extremely powerful thing that we've been working on for many years. What we deliver here just like in cost governance, a global view of your compliance across cloud providers. And the most powerful thing is you can go into a cloud provider, get the next level of visibility across cloud regimes for hundreds of policies. Not just policies but those policies across different regulatory compliances like HIPA, PCI, CAS. And that's very powerful because-- >> So you're saying a lot of what you folks have done is codified these compliance checks in software to make sure that people can sleep better at night knowing that it's PCI, and HIPA, and all that compliance actually comes together? >> And you can build this not just by cloud accounts, you can build them across cloud accounts which is what we call security centers. Essentially you can go and take a deeper look at you know the things. We do a whole full body scan for your cloud infrastructure whether it's AWS Amazon or Azure, and you can go and now, again, click to fix things. You know that had been probably provisioned that are violating the security compliance rules that should be there. Again, we have the same one-click philosophy to say how can you really remove things. >> So again, similar to save, you're saying you can go and fix some of these security issues by just doing one click. >> Absolutely. So the idea is how can we give our people the freedom to get visibility and use the right cloud and take the decisions instantly through one click. That's what Beam delivers you know today. And you know get really excited, and it's available at beam.nutanix.com. >> Our first SAS service, ladies and gentleman. Thank you so much for doing this, Vijay. It looks like there's going to be a talk here at 10:30. You'll talk more about the midterm elections there probably? >> Yes, so you can go and write your own security compliances as well. You know within Beam, and a lot of powerful things you can do. >> Awesome, thank you so much, Vijay. I really appreciate it. (audience clapping) So as you see, there's a lot of work that we're doing to really make multi-cloud which is a hard problem. You know think about working the whole body of it and what about cost governance? What about security compliance? Obviously what about hybrid networks, and security, and storage, you know compute, many of the things that you've actually heard from us, but we're taking it to a level where the business users can now understand the implications. A CFO's office can understand the implications of waste and delight. So what does customer success mean to us? You know again, my favorite word in a long, long time is really go and figure out how do you make you, the customer, become operationally efficient. You know there's a lot of stuff that we deliver through software that's completely uncovered. It's so latent, you don't even know you have it, but you've paid for it. So you've got to figure out what does it mean for you to really become operationally efficient, organizationally proficient. And it's really important for training, education, stuff that you know you're people might think it's so awkward to do in Nutanix, but it could've been way simpler if you just told you a place where you can go and read about it. Of course, I can just use one click here as opposed to doing things the old way. But most importantly to make it financially accountable. So the end in all this is, again, one of the things that I think about all the time in building this company because obviously there's a lot of stuff that we want to do to create orphans, you know things above the line and top line and everything else. There's also a bottom line. Delight and waste are two sides of the same coin. You know when we're talking about developers who seek delight with public cloud at the same time you're looking at IT folks who're trying to figure out governance. They're like look you know the CFOs office, the CIOs office, they're trying to figure out how to curb waste. These two things have to go hand in hand in this era of multi-cloud where we're talking about frictionless consumption but also governance that looks invisible. So I think, at the end of the day, this company will do a lot of stuff around one-click delight but also go and figure out how do you reduce waste because there's so much waste including folks there who actually own Nutanix. There's so much software entitlement. There's so much waste in the public cloud itself that if we don't go and put our arms around, it will not lead to customer success. So to talk more about this, the idea of delight and the idea of waste, I'd like to bring on board a person who I think you know many of you actually have talked about it have delightful hair but probably wasted jokes. But I think has wasted hair and delightful jokes. So ladies and gentlemen, you make the call. You're the jury. Sunil R.M.J. Potti. ("Free" by Broods) >> So that was the first time I came out from the bottom of a screen on a stage. I actually now know what it feels to be like a gopher. Who's that laughing loudly at the back? Okay, do we have the... Let's see. Okay, great. We're about 15 minutes late, so that means we're running right on time. That's normally how we roll at this conference. And we have about three customers and four demos. Like I think there's about three plus six, about nine folks coming onstage. So we'll have our own version of the parade as well on the main stage for the next 70 minutes. So let's just jump right into it. I think we've been pretty consistent in terms of our longterm plans since we started the company. And it's become a lot more clearer over the last few years about our plans to essentially make computing invisible as Dheeraj mentioned. We're doing this across multiple acts. We started with HCI. We call it making infrastructure invisible. We extended that to making data centers invisible. And then now we're in this mode of essentially extending it to converging clouds so that you can actually converge your consumption models. And so today's conference and essentially the theme that you're going to be seeing throughout the breakout sessions is about a journey towards invisible clouds, but make sure that you internalize the fact that we're investing heavily in each of the three phases. It's just not about the hybrid cloud with Nutanix, it's about actually finishing the job about making infrastructure invisible, expanding that to kind of go after the full data center, and then of course embark on some real meaningful things around invisible clouds, okay? And to start the session, I think you know the part that I wanted to make sure that we are all on the same page because most of us in the room are still probably in this phase of the journey which is about invisible infrastructure. And there the three key products and especially two of them that most of you guys know are Acropolis and Prism. And they're sort of like the bedrock of our company. You know especially Acropolis which is about the web scale architecture. Prism is about consumer grade design. And with Acropolis now being really mature. It's in the seventh year of innovation. We still have more than half of our company in terms of R and D spend still on Acropolis and Prism. So our core product is still sort of where we think we have a significant differentiation on. We're not going to let our foot off the peddle there. You know every time somebody comes to me and says look there's a new HCI render popping out or an existing HCI render out there, I ask a simple question to our customers saying show me 100 customers with 100 node deployments, and it will be very hard to find any other render out there that does the same thing. And that's the power of Acropolis the code platform. And then it's you know the fact that the velocity associated with Acropolis continues to be on a fast pace. We came out with various new capabilities in 5.5 and 5.6, and one of the most complicated things to get right was the fact to shrink our three node cluster to a one node, two node deployment. Most of you actually had requirements on remote office, branch office, or the edge that actually allowed us to kind of give us you know sort of like the impetus to kind of go design some new capabilities into our core OS to get this out. And associated with Acropolis and expanding into Prism, as you will see, the first couple of years of Prism was all about refactoring the user interface, doing a good job with automation. But more and more of the investments around Prism is going to be based on machine learning. And you've seen some variants of that over the last 12 months, and I can tell you that in the next 12 to 24 months, most of our investments around infrastructure operations are going to be driven by AI techniques starting with most of our R and D spend also going into machine-learning algorithms. So when you talk about all the enhancements that have come on with Prism whether it be formed by you know the management console changing to become much more automated, whether now we give you automatic rightsizing, anomaly detection, or a series of functionality that have gone into it, the real core sort of capabilities that we're putting into Prism and Acropolis are probably best served by looking at the quality of the product. You probably have seen this slide before. We started showing the number of nodes shipped by Nutanix two years ago at this conference. It was about 35,000 plus nodes at that time. And since then, obviously we've you know continued to grow. And we would draw this line which was about enterprise class quality. That for the number of bugs found as a percentage of nodes shipped, there's a certain line that's drawn. World class companies do about probably 2% to 3%, number of CFDs per node shipped. And we were just broken that number two years ago. And to give you guys an idea of how that curve has shown up, it's now currently at .95%. And so along with velocity, you know this focus on being true to our roots of reliability and stability continues to be, you know it's an internal challenge, but it's also some of the things that we keep a real focus on. And so between Acropolis and Prism, that's sort of like our core focus areas to sort of give us the confidence that look we have this really high bar that we're sort of keeping ourselves accountable to which is about being the most advanced enterprise cloud OS on the planet. And we will keep it this way for the next 10 years. And to complement that, over a period of time of course, we've added a series of services. So these are services not just for VMs but also for files, blocks, containers, but all being delivered in that single one-click operations fashion. And to really talk more about it, and actually probably to show you the real deal there it's my great pleasure to call our own version of Moses inside the company, most of you guys know him as Steve Poitras. Come on up, Steve. (audience clapping) (rock music) >> Thanks Sunil. >> You barely fit in that door, man. Okay, so what are we going to talk about today, Steve? >> Absolutely. So when we think about when Nutanix first got started, it was really focused around VDI deployments, smaller workloads. However over time as we've evolved the product, added additional capabilities and features, that's grown from VDI to business critical applications as well as cloud native apps. So let's go ahead and take a look. >> Sunil: And we'll start with like Oracle? >> Yeah, that's one of the key ones. So here we can see our Prism central user interface, and we can see our Thor cluster obviously speaking to the Avengers theme here. We can see this is doing right around 400,000 IOPs at around 360 microseconds latency. Now obviously Prism central allows you to mange all of your Nutanix deployments, but this is just running on one single Nutanix cluster. So if we hop over here to our explore tab, we can see we have a few categories. We have some Kubernetes, some AFS, some Xen desktop as well as Oracle RAC. Now if we hope over to Oracle RAC, we're running a SLOB workload here. So obviously with Oracle enterprise applications performance, consistency, and extremely low latency are very critical. So with this SLOB workload, we're running right around 300 microseconds of latency. >> Sunil: So this is what, how many node Oracle RAC cluster is this? >> Steve: This is a six node Oracle RAC deployment. >> Sunil: Got it. And so what has gone into the product in recent releases to kind of make this happen? >> Yeah so obviously on the hardware front, there's been a lot of evolutions in storage mediums. So with the introduction of NVME, persistent memory technologies like 3D XPoint, that's meant storage media has become a lot faster. Now to allow you to full take advantage of that, that's where we've had to do a lot of optimizations within the storage stack. So with AHV, we have what we call AHV turbo mode which allows you to full take advantage of those faster storage mediums at that much lower latency. And then obviously on the networking front, technologies such as RDMA can be leveraged to optimize that network stack. >> Got it. So that was Oracle RAC running on a you know Nutanix cluster. It used to be a big deal a couple of years ago. Now we've got many customers doing that. On the same environment though, we're going to show you is the advent of actually putting file services in the same scale out environment. And you know many of you in the audience probably know about AFS. We released it about 12 to 14 months ago. It's been one of our most popular new products of all time within Nutanix's history. And we had SMB support was for user file shares, VDI deployments, and it took awhile to bake, to get to scale and reliability. And then in the last release, in the recent release that we just shipped, we now added NFS for support so that we can no go after the full scale file server consolidation. So let's take a look at some of that stuff. >> Yep, let's do it. So hopping back over to Prism, we can see our four cluster here. Overall cluster-wide latency right around 360 microseconds. Now we'll hop down to our file server section. So here we can see we have our Next A File Server hosting right about 16.2 million files. Now if you look at our shares and exports, we can see we have a mix of different shares. So one of the shares that you see there is home directories. This is an SMB share which is actually mapped and being leveraged by our VDI desktops for home folders, user profiles, things of that nature. We can also see this Oracle backup share here which is exposed to our rack host via NFS. So RMAN is actually leveraging this to provide native database backups. >> Got it. So Oracle VMs, backup using files, or for any other file share requirements with AFS. Do we have the cluster also showing, I know, so I saw some Kubernetes as well on it. Let's talk about what we're thinking of doing there. >> Yep, let's do it. So if we think about cloud, cloud's obviously a big buzz word, so is containers in Kubernetes. So with ACS 1.0 what we did is we introduced native support for Docker integration. >> And pause there. And we screwed up. (laughing) So just like the market took a left turn on Kubernetes, obviously we realized that, and now we're working on ACS 2.0 which is what we're going to talk about, right? >> Exactly. So with ACS 2.0, we've introduced native Kubernetes support. Now when I think about Kubernetes, there's really two core areas that come to mind. The first one is around native integration. So with that, we have our Kubernetes volume integration, we're obviously doing a lot of work on the networking front, and we'll continue to push there from an integration point of view. Now the other piece is around the actual deployment of Kubernetes. When we think about a lot of Nutanix administrators or IT admins, they may have never deployed Kubernetes before, so this could be a very daunting task. And true to the Nutanix nature, we not only want to make our platform simple and intuitive, we also want to do this for any ecosystem products. So with ACS 2.0, we've simplified the full Kubernetes deployment and switching over to our ACS two interface, we can see this create cluster button. Now this actually pops up a full wizard. This wizard will actually walk you through the full deployment process, gather the necessary inputs for you, and in a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes, we have a full Kubernetes deployment fully provisioned, the masters, the workers, all the networking fully done for you, very simple and intuitive. Now if we hop back over to Prism, we can see we have this ACS2 Kubernetes category. Clicking on that, we can see we have eight instances of virtual machines. And here are Kubernetes virtual machines which have actually been deployed as part of this ACS2 installer. Now one of the nice things is it makes the IT administrator's job very simple and easy to do. The deployment straightforward monitoring and management very straightforward and simple. Now for the developer, the application architect, or engineers, they interface and interact with Kubernetes just like they would traditionally on any platform. >> Got it. So the goal of ACS is to ensure that the developer ecosystem still uses whatever tools that they are you know preferring while at that same time allowing this consolidation of containers along with VMs all on that same, single runtime, right? So that's ACS. And then if you think about where the OS is going, there's still some open space at the end. And open space has always been look if you just look at a public cloud, you look at blocks, files, containers, the most obvious sort of storage function that's left is objects. And that's the last horizon for us in completing the storage stack. And we're going to show you for the first time a preview of an upcoming product called the Acropolis Object Storage Services Stack. So let's talk a little bit about it and then maybe show the demo. >> Yeah, so just like we provided file services with AFS, block services with ABS, with OSS or Object Storage Services, we provide native object storage, compatibility and capability within the Nutanix platform. Now this provides a very simply common S3 API. So any integrations you've done with S3 especially Kubernetes, you can actually leverage that out of the box when you've deployed this. Now if we hop back over to Prism, I'll go here to my object stores menu. And here we can see we have two existing object storage instances which are running. So you can deploy however many of these as you wanted to. Now just like the Kubernetes deployment, deploying a new object instance is very simple and easy to do. So here I'll actually name this instance Thor's Hammer. >> You do know he loses it, right? He hasn't seen the movies yet. >> Yeah, I don't want any spoilers yet. So once we specified the name, we can choose our capacity. So here we'll just specify a large instance or type. Obviously this could be any amount or storage. So if you have a 200 node Nutanix cluster with petabytes worth of data, you could do that as well. Once we've selected that, we'll select our expected performance. And this is going to be the number of concurrent gets and puts. So essentially how many operations per second we want this instance to be able to facilitate. Once we've done that, the platform will actually automatically determine how many virtual machines it needs to deploy as well as the resources and specs for those. And once we've done that, we'll go ahead and click save. Now here we can see it's actually going through doing the deployment of the virtual machines, applying any necessary configuration, and in the matter of a few clicks and a few seconds, we actually have this Thor's Hammer object storage instance which is up and running. Now if we hop over to one of our existing object storage instances, we can see this has three buckets. So one for Kafka-queue, I'm actually using this for my Kafka cluster where I have right around 62 million objects all storing ProtoBus. The second one there is Spark. So I actually have a Spark cluster running on our Kubernetes deployed instance via ACS 2.0. Now this is doing analytics on top of this data using S3 as a storage backend. Now for these objects, we support native versioning, native object encryption as well as worm compliancy. So if you want to have expiry periods, retention intervals, that sort of thing, we can do all that. >> Got it. So essentially what we've just shown you is with upcoming objects as well that the same OS can now support VMs, files, objects, containers, all on the same one click operational fabric. And so that's in some way the real power of Nutanix is to still keep that consistency, scalability in place as we're covering each and every workload inside the enterprise. So before Steve gets off stage though, I wanted to talk to you guys a little bit about something that you know how many of you been to our Nutanix headquarters in San Jose, California? A few. I know there's like, I don't know, 4,000 or 5,000 people here. If you do come to the office, you know when you land in San Jose Airport on the way to longterm parking, you'll pass our office. It's that close. And if you come to the fourth floor, you know one of the cubes that's where I sit. In the cube beside me is Steve. Steve sits in the cube beside me. And when I first joined the company, three or four years ago, and Steve's if you go to his cube, it no longer looks like this, but it used to have a lot of this stuff. It was like big containers of this. I remember the first time. Since I started joking about it, he started reducing it. And then Steve eventually got married much to our surprise. (audience laughing) Much to his wife's surprise. And then he also had a baby as a bigger surprise. And if you come over to our office, and we welcome you, and you come to the fourth floor, find my cube or you'll find Steve's Cube, it now looks like this. Okay, so thanks a lot, my man. >> Cool, thank you. >> Thanks so much. (audience clapping) >> So single OS, any workload. And like Steve who's been with us for awhile, it's my great pleasure to invite one of our favorite customers, CSC Karen who's also been with us for three to four years. And I'll share some fond memories about how she's been with the company for awhile, how as partners we've really done a lot together. So without any further ado, let me bring up Karen. Come on up, Karen. (rock music) >> Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, thank you. So I remember, so how many of you guys were with Nutanix first .Next in Miami? I know there was a question like that asked last time. Not too many. You missed it. We wished we could go back to that. We wouldn't fit 3/4s of this crowd. But Karen was our first customer in the keynote in 2015. And we had just talked about that story at that time where you're just become a customer. Do you want to give us some recap of that? >> Sure. So when we made the decision to move to hyperconverged infrastructure and chose Nutanix as our partner, we rapidly started to deploy. And what I mean by that is Sunil and some of the Nutanix executives had come out to visit with us and talk about their product on a Tuesday. And on a Wednesday after making the decision, I picked up the phone and said you know what I've got to deploy for my VDI cluster. So four nodes showed up on Thursday. And from the time it was plugged in to moving over 300 VDIs and 50 terabytes of storage and turning it over for the business for use was less than three days. So it was really excellent testament to how simple it is to start, and deploy, and utilize the Nutanix infrastructure. Now part of that was the delight that we experienced from our customers after that deployment. So we got phone calls where people were saying this report it used to take so long that I'd got out and get a cup of coffee and come back, and read an article, and do some email, and then finally it would finish. Those reports are running in milliseconds now. It's one click. It's very, very simple, and we've delighted our customers. Now across that journey, we have gone from the simple workloads like VDIs to the much more complex workloads around Splunk and Hadoop. And what's really interesting about our Splunk deployment is we're handling over a billion events being logged everyday. And the deployment is smaller than what we had with a three tiered infrastructure. So when you hear people talk about waste and getting that out and getting to an invisible environment where you're just able to run it, that's what we were able to achieve both with everything that we're running from our public facing websites to the back office operations that we're using which include Splunk and even most recently our Cloudera and Hadoop infrastructure. What it does is it's got 30 crawlers that go out on the internet and start bringing data back. So it comes back with over two terabytes of data everyday. And then that environment, ingests that data, does work against it, and responds to the business. And that again is something that's smaller than what we had on traditional infrastructure, and it's faster and more stable. >> Got it. And it covers a lot of use cases as well. You want to speak a few words on that? >> So the use cases, we're 90%, 95% deployed on Nutanix, and we're covering all of our use cases. So whether that's a customer facing app or a back office application. And what are business is doing is it's handling large portfolios of data for fortune 500 companies and law firms. And these applications are all running with improved stability, reliability, and performance on the Nutanix infrastructure. >> And the plan going forward? >> So the plan going forward, you actually asked me that in Miami, and it's go global. So when we started in Miami and that first deployment, we had four nodes. We now have 283 nodes around the world, and we started with about 50 terabytes of data. We've now got 3.8 petabytes of data. And we're deployed across four data centers and six remote offices. And people ask me often what is the value that we achieved? So simplification. It's all just easier, and it's all less expensive. Being able to scale with the business. So our Cloudera environment ended up with one day where it spiked to 1,000 times more load, 1,000 times, and it just responded. We had rally cries around improved productivity by six times. So 600% improved productivity, and we were able to actually achieve that. The numbers you just saw on the slide that was very, very fast was we calculated a 40% reduction in total cost of ownership. We've exceeded that. And when we talk about waste, that other number on the board there is when I saved the company one hour of maintenance activity or unplanned downtime in a month which we're now able to do the majority of our maintenance activities without disrupting any of our business solutions, I'm saving $750,000 each time I save that one hour. >> Wow. All right, Karen from CSE. Thank you so much. That was great. Thank you. I mean you know some of these data points frankly as I started talking to Karen as well as some other customers are pretty amazing in terms of the genuine value beyond financial value. Kind of like the emotional sort of benefits that good products deliver to some of our customers. And I think that's one of the core things that we take back into engineering is to keep ourselves honest on either velocity or quality even hiring people and so forth. Is to actually the more we touch customers lives, the more we touch our partner's lives, the more it allows us to ensure that we can put ourselves in their shoes to kind of make sure that we're doing the right thing in terms of the product. So that was the first part, invisible infrastructure. And our goal, as we've always talked about, our true North is to make sure that this single OS can be an exact replica, a truly modern, thoughtful but original design that brings the power of public cloud this AWS or GCP like architectures into your mainstream enterprises. And so when we take that to the next level which is about expanding the scope to go beyond invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers, it starts with a few things. Obviously, it starts with virtualization and a level of intelligent management, extends to automation, and then as we'll talk about, we have to embark on encompassing the network. And that's what we'll talk about with Flow. But to start this, let me again go back to one of our core products which is the bedrock of our you know opinionated design inside this company which is Prism and Acropolis. And Prism provides, I mentioned, comes with a ton of machine-learning based intelligence built into the product in 5.6 we've done a ton of work. In fact, a lot of features are coming out now because now that PC, Prism Central that you know has been decoupled from our mainstream release strain and will continue to release on its own cadence. And the same thing when you actually flip it to AHV on its own train. Now AHV, two years ago it was all about can I use AHV for VDI? Can I use AHV for ROBO? Now I'm pretty clear about where you cannot use AHV. If you need memory overcome it, stay with VMware or something. If you need, you know Metro, stay with another technology, else it's game on, right? And if you really look at the adoption of AHV in the mainstream enterprise, the customers now speak for themselves. These are all examples of large global enterprises with multimillion dollar ELAs in play that have now been switched over. Like I'll give you a simple example here, and there's lots of these that I'm sure many of you who are in the audience that are in this camp, but when you look at the breakout sessions in the pods, you'll get a sense of this. But I'll give you one simple example. If you look at the online payment company. I'm pretty sure everybody's used this at one time or the other. They had the world's largest private cloud on open stack, 21,000 nodes. And they were actually public about it three or four years ago. And in the last year and a half, they put us through a rigorous VOC testing scale, hardening, and it's a full blown AHV only stack. And they've started cutting over. Obviously they're not there yet completely, but they're now literally in hundreds of nodes of deployment of Nutanix with AHV as their primary operating system. So it is primetime from a deployment perspective. And with that as the base, no cloud is complete without actually having self-service provisioning that truly drives one-click automation, and can you do that in this consumer grade design? And Calm was acquired, as you guys know, in 2016. We had a choice of taking Calm. It was reasonably feature complete. It supported multiple clouds. It supported ESX, it supported Brownfield, It supported AHV. I mean they'd already done the integration with Nutanix even before the acquisition. And we had a choice. The choice was go down the path of dynamic ops or some other products where you took it for revenue or for acceleration, you plopped it into the ecosystem and sold it at this power sucking alien on top of our stack, right? Or we took a step back, re-engineered the product, kept some of the core essence like the workflow engine which was good, the automation, the object model and all, but refactored it to make it look like a natural extension of our operating system. And that's what we did with Calm. And we just launched it in December, and it's been one of our most popular new products now that's flying off the shelves. If you saw the number of registrants, I got a notification of this for the breakout sessions, the number one session that has been preregistered with over 500 people, the first two sessions are around Calm. And justifiably so because it just as it lives up to its promise, and it'll take its time to kind of get to all the bells and whistles, all the capabilities that have come through with AHV or Acropolis in the past. But the feature functionality, the product market fit associated with Calm is dead on from what the feedback that we can receive. And so Calm itself is on its own rapid cadence. We had AWS and AHV in the first release. Three or four months later, we now added ESX support. We added GCP support and a whole bunch of other capabilities, and I think the essence of Calm is if you can combine Calm and along with private cloud automation but also extend it to multi-cloud automation, it really sets Nutanix on its first genuine path towards multi-cloud. But then, as I said, if you really fixate on a software defined data center message, we're not complete as a full blown AWS or GCP like IA stack until we do the last horizon of networking. And you probably heard me say this before. You heard Dheeraj and others talk about it before is our problem in networking isn't the same in storage. Because the data plane in networking works. Good L2 switches from Cisco, Arista, and so forth, but the real problem networking is in the control plane. When something goes wrong at a VM level in Nutanix, you're able to identify whether it's a storage problem or a compute problem, but we don't know whether it's a VLAN that's mis-configured, or there've been some packets dropped at the top of the rack. Well that all ends now with Flow. And with Flow, essentially what we've now done is take the work that we've been working on to create built-in visibility, put some network automation so that you can actually provision VLANs when you provision VMs. And then augment it with micro segmentation policies all built in this easy to use, consume fashion. But we didn't stop there because we've been talking about Flow, at least the capabilities, over the last year. We spent significant resources building it. But we realized that we needed an additional thing to augment its value because the world of applications especially discovering application topologies is a heady problem. And if we didn't address that, we wouldn't be fulfilling on this ambition of providing one-click network segmentation. And so that's where Netsil comes in. Netsil might seem on the surface yet another next generation application performance management tool. But the innovations that came from Netsil started off at the research project at the University of Pennsylvania. And in fact, most of the team right now that's at Nutanix is from the U Penn research group. And they took a really original, fresh look at how do you sit in a network in a scale out fashion but still reverse engineer the packets, the flow through you, and then recreate this application topology. And recreate this not just on Nutanix, but do it seamlessly across multiple clouds. And to talk about the power of Flow augmented with Netsil, let's bring Rajiv back on stage, Rajiv. >> How you doing? >> Okay so we're going to start with some Netsil stuff, right? >> Yeah, let's talk about Netsil and some of the amazing capabilities this acquisition's bringing to Nutanix. First of all as you mentioned, Netsil's completely non invasive. So it installs on the network, it does all its magic from there. There're no host agents, non of the complexity and compatibility issues that entails. It's also monitoring the network at layer seven. So it's actually doing a deep packet inspection on all your application data, and can give you insights into services and APIs which is very important for modern applications and the way they behave. To do all this of course performance is key. So Netsil's built around a completely distributed architecture scaled to really large workloads. Very exciting technology. We're going to use it in many different ways at Nutanix. And to give you a flavor of that, let me show you how we're thinking of integrating Flow and Nestil together, so micro segmentation and Netsil. So to do that, we install Netsil in one of our Google accounts. And that's what's up here now. It went out there. It discovered all the VMs we're running on that account. It created a map essentially of all their interactions, and you can see it's like a Google Maps view. I can zoom into it. I can look at various things running. I can see lots of HTTP servers over here, some databases. >> Sunil: And it also has stats, right? You can go, it actually-- >> It does. We can take a look at that for a second. There are some stats you can look at right away here. Things like transactions per second and latencies and so on. But if I wanted to micro segment this application, it's not really clear how to do so. There's no real pattern over here. Taking the Google Maps analogy a little further, this kind of looks like the backstreets of Cairo or something. So let's do this step by step. Let me first filter down to one application. Right now I'm looking at about three or four different applications. And Netsil integrates with the metadata. So this is that the clouds provide. So I can search all the tags that I have. So by doing that, I can zoom in on just the financial application. And when I do this, the view gets a little bit simpler, but there's still no real pattern. It's not clear how to micro segment this, right? And this is where the power of Netsil comes in. This is a fairly naive view. This is what tool operating at layer four just looking at ports and TCP traffic would give you. But by doing deep packet inspection, Netsil can get into the services layer. So instead of grouping these interactions by hostname, let's group them by service. So you go service tier. And now you can see this is a much simpler picture. Now I have some patterns. I have a couple of load balancers, an HA proxy and an Nginx. I have a web application front end. I have some application servers running authentication services, search services, et cetera, a database, and a database replica. I could go ahead and micro segment at this point. It's quite possible to do it at this point. But this is almost too granular a view. We actually don't usually want to micro segment at individual service level. You think more in terms of application tiers, the tiers that different services belong to. So let me go ahead and group this differently. Let me group this by app tier. And when I do that, a really simple picture emerges. I have a load balancing tier talking to a web application front end tier, an API tier, and a database tier. Four tiers in my application. And this is something I can work with. This is something that I can micro segment fairly easily. So let's switch over to-- >> Before we dot that though, do you guys see how he gave himself the pseudonym called Dom Toretto? >> Focus Sunil, focus. >> Yeah, for those guys, you know that's not the Avengers theme, man, that's the Fast and Furious theme. >> Rajiv: I think a year ahead. This is next years theme. >> Got it, okay. So before we cut over from Netsil to Flow, do we want to talk a few words about the power of Flow, and what's available in 5.6? >> Sure so Flow's been around since the 5.6 release. Actually some of the functionality came in before that. So it's got invisibility into the network. It helps you debug problems with WLANs and so on. We had a lot of orchestration with other third party vendors with load balancers, with switches to make publishing much simpler. And then of course with our most recent release, we GA'ed our micro segmentation capabilities. And that of course is the most important feature we have in Flow right now. And if you look at how Flow policy is set up, it looks very similar to what we just saw with Netsil. So we have load blancer talking to a web app, API, database. It's almost identical to what we saw just a moment ago. So while this policy was created manually, it is something that we can automate. And it is something that we will do in future releases. Right now, it's of course not been integrated at that level yet. So this was created manually. So one thing you'll notice over here is that the database tier doesn't get any direct traffic from the internet. All internet traffic goes to the load balancer, only specific services then talk to the database. So this policy right now is in monitoring mode. It's not actually being enforced. So let's see what happens if I try to attack the database, I start a hack against the database. And I have my trusty brute force password script over here. It's trying the most common passwords against the database. And if I happen to choose a dictionary word or left the default passwords on, eventually it will log into the database. And when I go back over here in Flow what happens is it actually detects there's now an ongoing a flow, a flow that's outside of policy that's shown up. And it shows this in yellow. So right alongside the policy, I can visualize all the noncompliant flows. This makes it really easy for me now to make decisions, does this flow should it be part of the policy, should it not? In this particular case, obviously it should not be part of the policy. So let me just switch from monitoring mode to enforcement mode. I'll apply the policy, give it a second to propagate. The flow goes away. And if I go back to my script, you can see now the socket's timing out. I can no longer connect to the database. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's like one click segmentation and play right now? >> Absolutely. It's really, really simple. You can compare it to other products in the space. You can't get simpler than this. >> Got it. Why don't we got back and talk a little bit more about, so that's Flow. It's shipping now in 5.6 obviously. It'll come integrated with Netsil functionality as well as a variety of other enhancements in that next few releases. But Netsil does more than just simple topology discovery, right? >> Absolutely. So Netsil's actually gathering a lot of metrics from your network, from your host, all this goes through a data pipeline. It gets processed over there and then gets captured in a time series database. And then we can slice and dice that in various different ways. It can be used for all kinds of insights. So let's see how our application's behaving. So let me say I want to go into the API layer over here. And I instantly get a variety of metrics on how the application's behaving. I get the most requested endpoints. I get the average latency. It looks reasonably good. I get the average latency of the slowest endpoints. If I was having a performance problem, I would know exactly where to go focus on. Right now, things look very good, so we won't focus on that. But scrolling back up, I notice that we have a fairly high error rate happening. We have like 11.35% of our HTTP requests are generating errors, and that deserves some attention. And if I scroll down again, and I see the top five status codes I'm getting, almost 10% of my requests are generating 500 errors, HTTP 500 errors which are internal server errors. So there's something going on that's wrong with this application. So let's dig a little bit deeper into that. Let me go into my analytics workbench over here. And what I've plotted over here is how my HTTP requests are behaving over time. Let me filter down to just the 500 ones. That will make it easier. And I want the 500s. And I'll also group this by the service tier so that I can see which services are causing the problem. And the better view for this would be a bar graph. Yes, so once I do this, you can see that all the errors, all the 500 errors that we're seeing have been caused by the authentication service. So something's obviously wrong with that part of my application. I can go look at whether Active Directory is misbehaving and so on. So very quickly from a broad problem that I was getting a high HTTP error rate. In fact, usually you will discover there's this customer complaining about a lot of errors happening in your application. You can quickly narrow down to exactly what the cause was. >> Got it. This is what we mean by hyperconvergence of the network which is if you can truly isolate network related problems and associate them with the rest of the hyperconvergence infrastructure, then we've essentially started making real progress towards the next level of hyperconvergence. Anyway, thanks a lot, man. Great job. >> Thanks, man. (audience clapping) >> So to talk about this evolution from invisible infrastructure to invisible data centers is another customer of ours that has embarked on this journey. And you know it's not just using Nutanix but a variety of other tools to actually fulfill sort of like the ambition of a full blown cloud stack within a financial organization. And to talk more about that, let me call Vijay onstage. Come on up, Vijay. (rock music) >> Hey. >> Thank you, sir. So Vijay looks way better in real life than in a picture by the way. >> Except a little bit of gray. >> Unlike me. So tell me a little bit about this cloud initiative. >> Yeah. So we've won the best cloud initiative twice now hosted by Incisive media a large magazine. It's basically they host a bunch of you know various buy side, sell side, and you can submit projects in various categories. So we've won the best cloud twice now, 2015 and 2017. The 2017 award is when you know as part of our private cloud journey we were laying the foundation for our private cloud which is 100% based on hyperconverged infrastructure. So that was that award. And then 2017, we've kind of built on that foundation and built more developer-centric next gen app services like PAS, CAS, SDN, SDS, CICD, et cetera. So we've built a lot of those services on, and the second award was really related to that. >> Got it. And a lot of this was obviously based on an infrastructure strategy with some guiding principles that you guys had about three or four years ago if I remember. >> Yeah, this is a great slide. I use it very often. At the core of our infrastructure strategy is how do we run IT as a business? I talk about this with my teams, they were very familiar with this. That's the mindset that I instill within the teams. The mission, the challenge is the same which is how do we scale infrastructure while reducing total cost of ownership, improving time to market, improving client experience and while we're doing that not lose sight of reliability, stability, and security? That's the mission. Those are some of our guiding principles. Whenever we take on some large technology investments, we take 'em through those lenses. Obviously Nutanix went through those lenses when we invested in you guys many, many years ago. And you guys checked all the boxes. And you know initiatives change year on year, the mission remains the same. And more recently, the last few years, we've been focused on converged platforms, converged teams. We've actually reorganized our teams and aligned them closer to the platforms moving closer to an SRE like concept. >> And then you've built out a full stack now across computer storage, networking, all the way with various use cases in play? >> Yeah, and we're aggressively moving towards PAS, CAS as our method of either developing brand new cloud native applications or even containerizing existing applications. So the stack you know obviously built on Nutanix, SDS for software fine storage, compute and networking we've got SDN turned on. We've got, again, PAS and CAS built on this platform. And then finally, we've hooked our CICD tooling onto this. And again, the big picture was always frictionless infrastructure which we're very close to now. You know 100% of our code deployments into this environment are automated. >> Got it. And so what's the net, net in terms of obviously the business takeaway here? >> Yeah so at Northern we don't do tech for tech. It has to be some business benefits, client benefits. There has to be some outcomes that we measure ourselves against, and these are some great metrics or great ways to look at if we're getting the outcomes from the investments we're making. So for example, infrastructure scale while reducing total cost of ownership. We're very focused on total cost of ownership. We, for example, there was a build team that was very focus on building servers, deploying applications. That team's gone down from I think 40, 45 people to about 15 people as one example, one metric. Another metric for reducing TCO is we've been able to absorb additional capacity without increasing operating expenses. So you're actually building capacity in scale within your operating model. So that's another example. Another example, right here you see on the screen. Faster time to market. We've got various types of applications at any given point that we're deploying. There's a next gen cloud native which go directly on PAS. But then a majority of the applications still need the traditional IS components. The time to market to deploy a complex multi environment, multi data center application, we've taken that down by 60%. So we can deliver server same day, but we can deliver entire environments, you know add it to backup, add it to DNS, and fully compliant within a couple of weeks which is you know something we measure very closely. >> Great job, man. I mean that's a compelling I think results. And in the journey obviously you got promoted a few times. >> Yep. >> All right, congratulations again. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Vijay. >> Hey Vijay, come back here. Actually we forgot our joke. So razzled by his data points there. So you're supposed to wear some shoes, right? >> I know my inner glitch. I was going to wear those sneakers, but I forgot them at the office maybe for the right reasons. But the story behind those florescent sneakers, I see they're focused on my shoes. But I picked those up two years ago at a Next event, and not my style. I took 'em to my office. They've been sitting in my office for the last couple years. >> Who's received shoes like these by the way? I'm sure you guys have received shoes like these. There's some real fans there. >> So again, I'm sure many of you liked them. I had 'em in my office. I've offered it to so many of my engineers. Are you size 11? Do you want these? And they're unclaimed? >> So that's the only feature of Nutanix that you-- >> That's the only thing that hasn't worked, other than that things are going extremely well. >> Good job, man. Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> Thanks Vijay. So as we get to the final phase which is obviously as we embark on this multi-cloud journey and the complexity that comes with it which Dheeraj hinted towards in his session. You know we have to take a cautious, thoughtful approach here because we don't want to over set expectations because this will take us five, 10 years to really do a good job like we've done in the first act. And the good news is that the market is also really, really early here. It's just a fact. And so we've taken a tiered approach to it as we'll start the discussion with multi-cloud operations, and we've talked about the stack in the prior session which is about look across new clouds. So it's no longer Nutanix, Dell, Lenova, HP, Cisco as the new quote, unquote platforms. It's Nutanix, Xi, GCP, AWS, Azure as the new platforms. That's how we're designing the fabric going forward. On top of that, you obviously have the hybrid OS both on the data plane side and control plane side. Then what you're seeing with the advent of Calm doing a marketplace and automation as well as Beam doing governance and compliance is the fact that you'll see more and more such capabilities of multi-cloud operations burnt into the platform. And example of that is Calm with the new 5.7 release that they had. Launch supports multiple clouds both inside and outside, but the fundamental premise of Calm in the multi-cloud use case is to enable you to choose the right cloud for the right workload. That's the automation part. On the governance part, and this we kind of went through in the last half an hour with Dheeraj and Vijay on stage is something that's even more, if I can call it, you know first order because you get the provisioning and operations second. The first order is to say look whatever my developers have consumed off public cloud, I just need to first get our arm around to make sure that you know what am I spending, am I secure, and then when I get comfortable, then I am able to actually expand on it. And that's the power of Beam. And both Beam and Calm will be the yin and yang for us in our multi-cloud portfolio. And we'll have new products to complement that down the road, right? But along the way, that's the whole private cloud, public cloud. They're the two ends of the barbell, and over time, and we've been working on Xi for awhile, is this conviction that we've built talking to many customers that there needs to be another type of cloud. And this type of a cloud has to feel like a public cloud. It has to be architected like a public cloud, be consumed like a public cloud, but it needs to be an extension of my data center. It should not require any changes to my tooling. It should not require and changes to my operational infrastructure, and it should not require lift and shift, and that's a super hard problem. And this problem is something that a chunk of our R and D team has been burning the midnight wick on for the last year and a half. Because look this is not about taking our current OS which does a good job of scaling and plopping it into a Equinix or a third party data center and calling it a hybrid cloud. This is about rebuilding things in the OS so that we can deliver a true hybrid cloud, but at the same time, give those functionality back on premises so that even if you don't have a hybrid cloud, if you just have your own data centers, you'll still need new services like DR. And if you think about it, what are we doing? We're building a full blown multi-tenant virtual network designed in a modern way. Think about this SDN 2.0 because we have 10 years worth of looking backwards on how GCP has done it, or how Amazon has done it, and now sort of embodying some of that so that we can actually give it as part of this cloud, but do it in a way that's a seamless extension of the data center, and then at the same time, provide new services that have never been delivered before. Everyone obviously does failover and failback in DR it just takes months to do it. Our goal is to do it in hours or minutes. But even things such as test. Imagine doing a DR test on demand for you business needs in the middle of the day. And that's the real bar that we've set for Xi that we are working towards in early access later this summer with GA later in the year. And to talk more about this, let me invite some of our core architects working on it, Melina and Rajiv. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> You're messing up the names again. >> Oh Rajiv, Vinny, same thing, man. >> You need to back up your memory from Xi. >> Yeah, we should. Okay, so what are we going to talk about, Vinny? >> Yeah, exactly. So today we're going to talk about how Xi is pushing the envelope and beyond the state of the art as you were saying in the industry. As part of that, there's a whole bunch of things that we have done starting with taking a private cloud, seamlessly extending it to the public cloud, and then creating a hybrid cloud experience with one-click delight. We're going to show that. We've done a whole bunch of engineering work on making sure the operations and the tooling is identical on both sides. When you graduate from a private cloud to a hybrid cloud environment, you don't want the environments to be different. So we've copied the environment for you with zero manual intervention. And finally, building on top of that, we are delivering DR as a service with unprecedented simplicity with one-click failover, one-click failback. We're going to show you one click test today. So Melina, why don't we start with showing how you go from a private cloud, seamlessly extend it to consume Xi. >> Sounds good, thanks Vinny. Right now, you're looking at my Prism interface for my on premises cluster. In one-click, I'm going to be able to extend that to my Xi cloud services account. I'm doing this using my my Nutanix credential and a password manager. >> Vinny: So here as you notice all the Nutanix customers we have today, we have created an account for them in Xi by default. So you don't have to log in somewhere and create an account. It's there by default. >> Melina: And just like that we've gone ahead and extended my data center. But let's go take a look at the Xi side and log in again with my my Nutanix credentials. We'll see what we have over here. We're going to be able to see two availability zones, one for on premises and one for Xi right here. >> Vinny: Yeah as you see, using a log in account that you already knew mynutanix.com and 30 seconds in, you can see that you have a hybrid cloud view already. You have a private cloud availability zone that's your own Prism central data center view, and then a Xi availability zone. >> Sunil: Got it. >> Melina: Exactly. But of course we want to extend my network connection from on premises to my Xi networks as well. So let's take a look at our options there. We have two ways of doing this. Both are one-click experience. With direct connect, you can create a dedicated network connection between both environments, or VPN you can use a public internet and a VPN service. Let's go ahead and enable VPN in this environment. Here we have two options for how we want to enable our VPN. We can bring our own VPN and connect it, or we will deploy a VPN for you on premises. We'll do the option where we deploy the VPN in one-click. >> And this is another small sign or feature that we're building net new as part of Xi, but will be burned into our core Acropolis OS so that we can also be delivering this as a stand alone product for on premises deployment as well, right? So that's one of the other things to note as you guys look at the Xi functionality. The goal is to keep the OS capabilities the same on both sides. So even if I'm building a quote, unquote multi data center cloud, but it's just a private cloud, you'll still get all the benefits of Xi but in house. >> Exactly. And on this second step of the wizard, there's a few inputs around how you want the gateway configured, your VLAN information and routing and protocol configuration details. Let's go ahead and save it. >> Vinny: So right now, you know what's happening is we're taking the private network that our customers have on premises and extending it to a multi-tenant public cloud such that our customers can use their IP addresses, the subnets, and bring their own IP. And that is another step towards making sure the operation and tooling is kept consistent on both sides. >> Melina: Exactly. And just while you guys were talking, the VPN was successfully created on premises. And we can see the details right here. You can track details like the status of the connection, the gateway, as well as bandwidth information right in the same UI. >> Vinny: And networking is just tip of the iceberg of what we've had to work on to make sure that you get a consistent experience on both sides. So Melina, why don't we show some of the other things we've done? >> Melina: Sure, to talk about how we preserve entities from my on-premises to Xi, it's better to use my production environment. And first thing you might notice is the log in screen's a little bit different. But that's because I'm logging in using my ADFS credentials. The first thing we preserved was our users. In production, I'm running AD obviously on-prem. And now we can log in here with the same set of credentials. Let me just refresh this. >> And this is the Active Directory credential that our customers would have. They use it on-premises. And we allow the setting to be set on the Xi cloud services as well, so it's the same set of users that can access both sides. >> Got it. There's always going to be some networking problem onstage. It's meant to happen. >> There you go. >> Just launching it again here. I think it maybe timed out. This is a good sign that we're running on time with this presentation. >> Yeah, yeah, we're running ahead of time. >> Move the demos quicker, then we'll time out. So essentially when you log into Xi, you'll be able to see what are the environment capabilities that we have copied to the Xi environment. So for example, you just saw that the same user is being used to log in. But after the use logs in, you'll be able to see their images, for example, copied to the Xi side. You'll be able to see their policies and categories. You know when you define these policies on premises, you spend a lot of effort and create them. And now when you're extending to the public cloud, you don't want to do it again, right? So we've done a whole lot of syncing mechanisms making sure that the two sides are consistent. >> Got it. And on top of these policies, the next step is to also show capabilities to actually do failover and failback, but also do integrated testing as part of this compatibility. >> So one is you know just the basic job of making the environments consistent on two sides, but then it's also now talking about the data part, and that's what DR is about. So if you have a workload running on premises, we can take the data and replicate it using your policies that we've already synced. Once the data is available on the Xi side, at that point, you have to define a run book. And the run book essentially it's a recovery plan. And that says okay I already have the backups of my VMs in case of disaster. I can take my recovery plan and hit you know either failover or maybe a test. And then my application comes up. First of all, you'll talk about the boot order for your VMs to come up. You'll talk about networking mapping. Like when I'm running on-prem, you're using a particular subnet. You have an option of using the same subnet on the Xi side. >> Melina: There you go. >> What happened? >> Sunil: It's finally working.? >> Melina: Yeah. >> Vinny, you can stop talking. (audience clapping) By the way, this is logging into a live Xi data center. We have two regions West Coat, two data centers East Coast, two data centers. So everything that you're seeing is essentially coming off the mainstream Xi profile. >> Vinny: Melina, why don't we show the recovery plan. That's the most interesting piece here. >> Sure. The recovery plan is set up to help you specify how you want to recover your applications in the event of a failover or a test failover. And it specifies all sorts of details like the boot sequence for the VMs as well as network mappings. Some of the network mappings are things like the production network I have running on premises and how it maps to my production network on Xi or the test network to the test network. What's really cool here though is we're actually automatically creating your subnets on Xi from your on premises subnets. All that's part of the recovery plan. While we're on the screen, take a note of the .100 IP address. That's a floating IP address that I have set up to ensure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app that I have protected with this plan after a failover. So I'll be able to access it from the public internet really easily from my phone or check that it's all running. >> Right, so given how we make the environment consistent on both sides, now we're able to create a very simple DR experience including failover in one-click, failback. But we're going to show you test now. So Melina, let's talk about test because that's one of the most common operations you would do. Like some of our customers do it every month. But usually it's very hard. So let's see how the experience looks like in what we built. >> Sure. Test and failover are both one-click experiences as you know and come to expect from Nutanix. You can see it's failing over from my primary location to my recovery location. Now what we're doing right now is we're running a series of validation checks because we want to make sure that you have your network configured properly, and there's other configuration details in place for the test to be successful. Looks like the failover was initiated successfully. Now while that failover's happening though, let's make sure that I'm going to be able to access my three tier web app once it fails over. We'll do that by looking at my network policies that I've configured on my test network. Because I want to access the application from the public internet but only port 80. And if we look here under our policies, you can see I have port 80 open to permit. So that's good. And if I needed to create a new one, I could in one click. But it looks like we're good to go. Let's go back and check the status of my recovery plan. We click in, and what's really cool here is you can actually see the individual tasks as they're being completed from that initial validation test to individual VMs being powered on as part of the recovery plan. >> And to give you guys an idea behind the scenes, the entire recovery plan is actually a set of workflows that are built on Calm's automation engine. So this is an example of where we're taking some of power of workflow and automation that Clam has come to be really strong at and burning that into how we actually operationalize many of these workflows for Xi. >> And so great, while you were explaining that, my three tier web app has restarted here on Xi right in front of you. And you can see here there's a floating IP that I mentioned early that .100 IP address. But let's go ahead and launch the console and make sure the application started up correctly. >> Vinny: Yeah, so that .100 IP address is a floating IP that's a publicly visible IP. So it's listed here, 206.80.146.100. And that's essentially anybody in the audience here can go use your laptop or your cell phone and hit that and start to work. >> Yeah so by the way, just to give you guys an idea while you guys maybe use the IP to kind of hit it, is a real set of VMs that we've just failed over from Nutanix's corporate data center into our West region. >> And this is running live on the Xi cloud. >> Yeah, you guys should all go and vote. I'm a little biased towards Xi, so vote for Xi. But all of them are really good features. >> Scroll up a little bit. Let's see where Xi is. >> Oh Xi's here. I'll scroll down a little bit, but keep the... >> Vinny: Yes. >> Sunil: You guys written a block or something? >> Melina: Oh good, it looks like Xi's winning. >> Sunil: Okay, great job, Melina. Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Melina. >> Melina: Thanks. >> Thank you, great job. Cool and calm under pressure. That's good. So that was Xi. What's something that you know we've been doing around you know in addition to taking say our own extended enterprise public cloud with Xi. You know we do recognize that there are a ton of workloads that are going to be residing on AWS, GCP, Azure. And to sort of really assist in the try and call it transformation of enterprises to choose the right cloud for the right workload. If you guys remember, we actually invested in a tool over last year which became actually quite like one of those products that took off based on you know groundswell movement. Most of you guys started using it. It's essentially extract for VMs. And it was this product that's obviously free. It's a tool. But it enables customers to really save tons of time to actually migrate from legacy environments to Nutanix. So we took that same framework, obviously re-platformed it for the multi-cloud world to kind of solve the problem of migrating from AWS or GCP to Nutanix or vice versa. >> Right, so you know, Sunil as you said, moving from a private cloud to the public cloud is a lift and shift, and it's a hard you know operation. But moving back is not only expensive, it's a very hard problem. None of the cloud vendors provide change block tracking capability. And what that means is when you have to move back from the cloud, you have an extended period of downtime because there's now way of figuring out what's changing while you're moving. So you have to keep it down. So what we've done with our app mobility product is we have made sure that, one, it's extremely simple to move back. Two, that the downtime that you'll have is as small as possible. So let me show you what we've done. >> Got it. >> So here is our app mobility capability. As you can see, on the left hand side we have a source environment and target environment. So I'm calling my AWS environment Asgard. And I can add more environments. It's very simple. I can select AWS and then put in my credentials for AWS. It essentially goes and discovers all the VMs that are running and all the regions that they're running. Target environment, this is my Nutanix environment. I call it Earth. And I can add target environment similarly, IP address and credentials, and we do the rest. Right, okay. Now migration plans. I have Bifrost one as my migration plan, and this is how migration works. First you create a plan and then say start seeding. And what it does is takes a snapshot of what's running in the cloud and starts migrating it to on-prem. Once it is an on-prem and the difference between the two sides is minimal, it says I'm ready to cutover. At that time, you move it. But let me show you how you'd create a new migration plan. So let me name it, Bifrost 2. Okay so what I have to do is select a region, so US West 1, and target Earth as my cluster. This is my storage container there. And very quickly you can see these are the VMs that are running in US West 1 in AWS. I can select SQL server one and two, go to next. Right now it's looking at the target Nutanix environment and seeing it had enough space or not. Once that's good, it gives me an option. And this is the step where it enables the Nutanix service of change block tracking overlaid on top of the cloud. There are two options one is automatic where you'll give us the credentials for your VMs, and we'll inject our capability there. Or manually you could do. You could copy the command either in a windows VM or Linux VM and run it once on the VM. And change block tracking since then in enabled. Everything is seamless after that. Hit next. >> And while Vinny's setting it up, he said a few things there. I don't know if you guys caught it. One of the hardest problems in enabling seamless migration from public cloud to on-prem which makes it harder than the other way around is the fact that public cloud doesn't have things like change block tracking. You can't get delta copies. So one of the core innovations being built in this app mobility product is to provide that overlay capability across multiple clouds. >> Yeah, and the last step here was to select the target network where the VMs will come up on the Nutanix environment, and this is a summary of the migration plan. You can start it or just save it. I'm saving it because it takes time to do the seeding. I have the other plan which I'll actually show the cutover with. Okay so now this is Bifrost 1. It's ready to cutover. We started it four hours ago. And here you can see there's a SQL server 003. Okay, now I would like to show the AWS environment. As you can see, SQL server 003. This VM is actually running in AWS right now. And if you go to the Prism environment, and if my login works, right? So we can go into the virtual machine view, tables, and you see the VM is not there. Okay, so we go back to this, and we can hit cutover. So this is essentially telling our system, okay now it the time. Quiesce the VM running in AWS, take the last bit of changes that you have to the database, ship it to on-prem, and in on-prem now start you know configure the target VM and start bringing it up. So let's go and look at AWS and refresh that screen. And you should see, okay so the SQL server is now stopping. So that means it has quiesced and stopping the VM there. If you go back and look at the migration plan that we had, it says it's completed. So it has actually migrated all the data to the on-prem side. Go here on-prem, you see the production SQL server is running already. I can click launch console, and let's see. The Windows VM is already booting up. >> So essentially what Vinny just showed was a live cutover of an AWS VM to Nutanix on-premises. >> Yeah, and what we have done. (audience clapping) So essentially, this is about making two things possible, making it simple to migrate from cloud to on-prem, and making it painless so that the downtime you have is very minimal. >> Got it, great job, Vinny. I won't forget your name again. So last step. So to really talk about this, one of our favorite partners and customers has been in the cloud environment for a long time. And you know Jason who's the CTO of Cyxtera. And he'll introduce who Cyxtera is. Most of you guys are probably either using their assets or not without knowing their you know the new name. But is someone that was in the cloud before it was called cloud as one of the original founders and technologists behind Terremark, and then later as one of the chief architects of VMware's cloud. And then they started this new company about a year or so ago which I'll let Jason talk about. This journey that he's going to talk about is how a partner, slash customer is working with us to deliver net new transformations around the traditional industry of colo. Okay, to talk more about it, Jason, why don't you come up on stage, man? (rock music) Thank you, sir. All right so Cyxtera obviously a lot of people don't know the name. Maybe just give a 10 second summary of why you're so big already. >> Sure, so Cyxtera was formed, as you said, about a year ago through the acquisition of the CenturyLink data centers. >> Sunil: Which includes Savvis and a whole bunch of other assets. >> Yeah, there's a long history of those data centers, but we have all of them now as well as the software companies owned by Medina capital. So we're like the world's biggest startup now. So we have over 50 data centers around the world, about 3,500 customers, and a portfolio of security and analytics software. >> Sunil: Got it, and so you have this strategy of what we're calling revolutionizing colo deliver a cloud based-- >> Yeah so, colo hasn't really changed a lot in the last 20 years. And to be fair, a lot of what happens in data centers has to have a person physically go and do it. But there are some things that we can simplify and automate. So we want to make things more software driven, so that's what we're doing with the Cyxtera extensible data center or CXD. And to do that, we're deploying software defined networks in our facilities and developing automations so customers can go and provision data center services and the network connectivity through a portal or through REST APIs. >> Got it, and what's different now? I know there's a whole bunch of benefits with the integrated platform that one would not get in the traditional kind of on demand data center environment. >> Sure. So one of the first services we're launching on CXD is compute on demand, and it's powered by Nutanix. And we had to pick an HCI partner to launch with. And we looked at players in the space. And as you mentioned, there's actually a lot of them, more than I thought. And we had a lot of conversations, did a lot of testing in the lab, and Nutanix really stood out as the best choice. You know Nutanix has a lot of focus on things like ease of deployment. So it's very simple for us to automate deploying compute for customers. So we can use foundation APIs to go configure the servers, and then we turn those over to the customer which they can then manage through Prism. And something important to keep in mind here is that you know this isn't a manged service. This isn't infrastructure as a service. The customer has complete control over the Nutanix platform. So we're turning that over to them. It's connected to their network. They're using their IP addresses, you know their tools and processes to operate this. So it was really important for the platform we picked to have a really good self-service story for things like you know lifecycle management. So with one-click upgrade, customers have total control over patches and upgrades. They don't have to call us to do it. You know they can drive that themselves. >> Got it. Any other final words around like what do you see of the partnership going forward? >> Well you know I think this would be a great platform for Xi, so I think we should probably talk about that. >> Yeah, yeah, we should talk about that separately. Thanks a lot, Jason. >> Thanks. >> All right, man. (audience clapping) So as we look at the full journey now between obviously from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds, you know there is one thing though to take away beyond many updates that we've had so far. And the fact is that everything that I've talked about so far is about completing a full blown true IA stack from all the way from compute to storage, to vitualization, containers to network services, and so forth. But every public cloud, a true cloud in that sense, has a full blown layer of services that's set on top either for traditional workloads or for new workloads, whether it be machine-learning, whether it be big data, you know name it, right? And in the enterprise, if you think about it, many of these services are being provisioned or provided through a bunch of our partners. Like we have partnerships with Cloudera for big data and so forth. But then based on some customer feedback and a lot of attention from what we've seen in the industry go out, just like AWS, and GCP, and Azure, it's time for Nutanix to have an opinionated view of the past stack. It's time for us to kind of move up the stack with our own offering that obviously adds value but provides some of our core competencies in data and takes it to the next level. And it's in that sense that we're actually launching Nutanix Era to simplify one of the hardest problems in enterprise IT and short of saving you from true Oracle licensing, it solves various other Oracle problems which is about truly simplifying databases much like what RDS did on AWS, imagine enterprise RDS on demand where you can provision, lifecycle manage your database with one-click. And to talk about this powerful new functionality, let me invite Bala and John on stage to give you one final demo. (rock music) Good to see you guys. >> Yep, thank you. >> All right, so we've got lots of folks here. They're all anxious to get to the next level. So this demo, really rock it. So what are we going to talk about? We're going to start with say maybe some database provisioning? Do you want to set it up? >> We have one dream, Sunil, one single dream to pass you off, that is what Nutanix is today for IT apps, we want to recreate that magic for devops and get back those weekends and freedom to DBAs. >> Got it. Let's start with, what, provisioning? >> Bala: Yep, John. >> Yeah, we're going to get in provisioning. So provisioning databases inside the enterprise is a significant undertaking that usually involves a myriad of resources and could take days. It doesn't get any easier after that for the longterm maintence with things like upgrades and environment refreshes and so on. Bala and team have been working on this challenge for quite awhile now. So we've architected Nutanix Era to cater to these enterprise use cases and make it one-click like you said. And Bala and I are so excited to finally show this to the world. We think it's actually Nutanix's best kept secrets. >> Got it, all right man, let's take a look at it. >> So we're going to be provisioning a sales database today. It's a four-step workflow. The first part is choosing our database engine. And since it's our sales database, we want it to be highly available. So we'll do a two node rack configuration. From there, it asks us where we want to land this service. We can either land it on an existing service that's already been provisioned, or if we're starting net new or for whatever reason, we can create a new service for it. The key thing here is we're not asking anybody how to do the work, we're asking what work you want done. And the other key thing here is we've architected this concept called profiles. So you tell us how much resources you need as well as what network type you want and what software revision you want. This is actually controlled by the DBAs. So DBAs, and compute administrators, and network administrators, so they can set their standards without having a DBA. >> Sunil: Got it, okay, let's take a look. >> John: So if we go to the next piece here, it's going to personalize their database. The key thing here, again, is that we're not asking you how many data files you want or anything in that regard. So we're going to be provisioning this to Nutanix's best practices. And the key thing there is just like these past services you don't have to read dozens of pages of best practice guides, it just does what's best for the platform. >> Sunil: Got it. And so these are a multitude of provisioning steps that normally one would take I guess hours if not days to provision and Oracle RAC data. >> John: Yeah, across multiple teams too. So if you think about the lifecycle especially if you have onshore and offshore resources, I mean this might even be longer than days. >> Sunil: Got it. And then there are a few steps here, and we'll lead into potentially the Time Machine construct too? >> John: Yeah, so since this is a critical database, we want data protection. So we're going to be delivering that through a feature called Time Machines. We'll leave this at the defaults for now, but the key thing to not here is we've got SLAs that deliver both continuous data protection as well as telescoping checkpoints for historical recovery. >> Sunil: Got it. So that's provisioning. We've kicked off Oracle, what, two node database and so forth? >> John: Yep, two node database. So we've got a handful of tasks that this is going to automate. We'll check back in in a few minutes. >> Got it. Why don't we talk about the other aspects then, Bala, maybe around, one of the things that, you know and I know many of you guys have seen this, is the fact that if you look at database especially Oracle but in general even SQL and so forth is the fact that look if you really simplified it to a developer, it should be as simple as I copy my production database, and I paste it to create my own dev instance. And whenever I need it, I need to obviously do it the opposite way, right? So that was the goal that we set ahead for us to actually deliver this new past service around Era for our customers. So you want to talk a little bit more about it? >> Sure Sunil. If you look at most of the data management functionality, they're pretty much like flavors of copy paste operations on database entities. But the trouble is the seemingly simple, innocuous operations of our daily lives becomes the most dreaded, complex, long running, error prone operations in data center. So we actually planned to tame this complexity and bring consumer grade simplicity to these operations, also make these clones extremely efficient without compromising the quality of service. And the best part is, the customers can enjoy these services not only for databases running on Nutanix, but also for databases running on third party systems. >> Got it. So let's take a look at this functionality of I guess snapshoting, clone and recovery that you've now built into the product. >> Right. So now if you see the core feature of this whole product is something we call Time Machine. Time Machine lets the database administrators actually capture the database tape to the granularity of seconds and also lets them create clones, refresh them to any point in time, and also recover the databases if the databases are running on the same Nutanix platform. Let's take a look at the demo with the Time Machine. So here is our customer relationship database management database which is about 2.3 terabytes. If you see, the Time Machine has been active about four months, and SLA has been set for continuously code revision of 30 days and then slowly tapers off 30 days of daily backup and weekly backups and so on, so forth. On the right hand side, you will see different colors. The green color is pretty much your continuously code revision, what we call them. That lets you to go back to any point in time to the granularity of seconds within those 30 days. And then the discreet code revision lets you go back to any snapshot of the backup that is maintained there kind of stuff. In a way, you see this Time Machine is pretty much like your modern day car with self driving ability. All you need to do is set the goals, and the Time Machine will do whatever is needed to reach up to the goal kind of stuff. >> Sunil: So why don't we quickly do a snapshot? >> Bala: Yeah, some of these times you need to create a snapshot for backup purposes, Time Machine has manual controls. All you need to do is give it a snapshot name. And then you have the ability to actually persist this snapshot data into a third party or object store so that your durability and that global data access requirements are met kind of stuff. So we kick off a snapshot operation. Let's look at what it is doing. If you see what is the snapshot operation that this is going through, there is a step called quiescing the databases. Basically, we're using application-centric APIs, and here it's actually RMAN of Oracle. We are using the RMan of Oracle to quiesce the database and performing application consistent storage snapshots with Nutanix technology. Basically we are fusing application-centric and then Nutanix platform and quiescing it. Just for a data point, if you have to use traditional technology and create a backup for this kind of size, it takes over four to six hours, whereas on Nutanix it's going to be a matter of seconds. So it almost looks like snapshot is done. This is full sensitive backup. You can pretty much use it for database restore kind of stuff. Maybe we'll do a clone demo and see how it goes. >> John: Yeah, let's go check it out. >> Bala: So for clone, again through the simplicity of command Z command, all you need to do is pick the time of your choice maybe around three o'clock in the morning today. >> John: Yeah, let's go with 3:02. >> Bala: 3:02, okay. >> John: Yeah, why not? >> Bala: You select the time, all you need to do is click on the clone. And most of the inputs that are needed for the clone process will be defaulted intelligently by us, right? And you have to make two choices that is where do you want this clone to be created with a brand new VM database server, or do you want to place that in your existing server? So we'll go with a brand new server, and then all you need to do is just give the password for you new clone database, and then clone it kind of stuff. >> Sunil: And this is an example of personalizing the database so a developer can do that. >> Bala: Right. So here is the clone kicking in. And what this is trying to do is actually it's creating a database VM and then registering the database, restoring the snapshot, and then recoding the logs up to three o'clock in the morning like what we just saw that, and then actually giving back the database to the requester kind of stuff. >> Maybe one finally thing, John. Do you want to show us the provision database that we kicked off? >> Yeah, it looks like it just finished a few seconds ago. So you can see all the tasks that we were talking about here before from creating the virtual infrastructure, and provisioning the database infrastructure, and configuring data protection. So I can go access this database now. >> Again, just to highlight this, guys. What we just showed you is an Oracle two node instance provisioned live in a few minutes on Nutanix. And this is something that even in a public cloud when you go to RDS on AWS or anything like that, you still can't provision Oracle RAC by the way, right? But that's what you've seen now, and that's what the power of Nutanix Era is. Okay, all right? >> Thank you. >> Thanks. (audience clapping) >> And one final thing around, obviously when we're building this, it's built as a past service. It's not meant just for operational benefits. And so one of the core design principles has been around being API first. You want to show that a little bit? >> Absolutely, Sunil, this whole product is built on API fist architecture. Pretty much what we have seen today and all the functionality that we've been able to show today, everything is built on Rest APIs, and you can pretty much integrate with service now architecture and give you your devops experience for your customers. We do have a plan for full fledged self-service portal eventually, and then make it as a proper service. >> Got it, great job, Bala. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, John. Good stuff, man. >> Thanks. >> All right. (audience clapping) So with Nutanix Era being this one-click provisioning, lifecycle management powered by APIs, I think what we're going to see is the fact that a lot of the products that we've talked about so far while you know I've talked about things like Calm, Flow, AHV functionality that have all been released in 5.5, 5.6, a bunch of the other stuff are also coming shortly. So I would strongly encourage you guys to kind of space 'em, you know most of these products that we've talked about, in fact, all of the products that we've talked about are going to be in the breakout sessions. We're going to go deep into them in the demos as well as in the pods. So spend some quality time not just on the stuff that's been shipping but also stuff that's coming out. And so one thing to keep in mind to sort of takeaway is that we're doing this all obviously with freedom as the goal. But from the products side, it has to be driven by choice whether the choice is based on platforms, it's based on hypervisors, whether it's based on consumption models and eventually even though we're starting with the management plane, eventually we'll go with the data plane of how do I actually provide a multi-cloud choice as well. And so when we wrap things up, and we look at the five freedoms that Ben talked about. Don't forget the sixth freedom especially after six to seven p.m. where the whole goal as a Nutanix family and extended family make sure we mix it up. Okay, thank you so much, and we'll see you around. (audience clapping) >> PA Announcer: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our morning keynote session. Breakouts will begin in 15 minutes. ♪ To do what I want ♪