(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)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix dot Conf, everybody, sorry, .NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Stu Minamin. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We have a real treat for you, the day two keynote was done by Sunil Potti, who's the head of product, Chief Product Officer in development at Nutanix, long-time CUBE guest. Sunil, good to see you again. Thank you for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Good to be here. >> Agree with Stu, great energy in the keynote this morning. Have to say, we got in there, Stu, at around ten of, the place was not packed, but by the time you started, the play was packed. We heard the Lenovo party went till like two a.m. >> Stu: The extent of it. There was some excitement. >> People came in and, yeah, lot of cheering, so you must feel pretty good about that. >> Yeah, now I think, I was telling some of you guys, I think right now we are in our growth years where it sort of feels like we've got a lot of fans because folks want to sort of relate to technology companies that foundationally are disruptive and keep disrupting. It helps folks' careers, it helps their personal lives, everything, right? So, the wipe that we get out of these .NEXT conferences are mostly about this, well, not so young people, they feel young using the technology at work and while at the conference, so that's, I guess, part and parcel of some of the, sort of the excitement that you're seeing probably. >> Well, so let's get into it. I mean, a lot of announcements this week. Where do you want to start? >> I think, that's a big question. There's a lot of stuff. >> Maybe we start with the strategy, which you laid out two years ago, we're not just HCI, we're goin' cloud. So that's sort of the set-up, and you've had a number of proof points and product announcements this week that underscore that strategy. >> I think I'll break this down into four parts, just to structure it, which is, obviously we've moved way beyond HCI, we subsumed virtualization, and then, we said cloud, if you remember 2015, and then we improved on it in 2016 and so forth. The big thing was every few years it gives you an opportunity to truly offer a step function change in transformation with the company, and that's 2017 for us is. That's why the announcements are all so packed, it's not just an incremental set of things. Let me break it down into four segments. One, the first thing is the fact that it truly is clear to us and to our customers that this needs to be this single software-centric fabric that gives you optionality of any hardware platform, any hypervisor, any consumption model, whether it be a pay-as-you go, it could be appliance-driven, it could be pure software ELAs and so forth. And then, obviously with our partnerships with Dell, Lenovo, support of Amazon and Azure, and now Google in a big way from the public cloud side, and I'll come to, but then extending that to our software support on Cisco and HP, and now with IBM, power especially, changing the game in terms of an enterprise worker. The first sort of segment of capabilities is to really make it look like our platform story is becoming an OS that cuts across, if I can call it, all of our applications, deployment full factors while being open. So that's the first category. Let me just maybe quickly summarize, and then we'll come back. >> Perfect. >> The second is the fact that, look, while we we're doing that, we were still taking an infrastructure-centric view, whether it's VMs, containers, whatever it is. So now, what we've found is that fundamentally we need to change the operational construct, elevate it to be an application-centric work, and that's where Calm comes in. Independent of hybrid clouds, just from a private cloud side itself, even if I'm just elevating my current infrastructure to a private cloud, an app-first automation is a good thing, and then, what we've done is in that second category is to merge, quote-unquote, on-prem infrastructure with off-prem using this multicloud thing. That's the second thing, that's Calm. The third thing is the fact that, well guess what, while we can bring provisioning and operational convergence with Calm, true lift and shift is still very high because the stacks on both sides are different within public cloud and private cloud, and that's where Xi comes in, which is our new cloud services. Essentially, it replicates your on-prem stack and seamlessly extends your data center so you can do some things like one-click DL and so forth. And the last but not the least was as we were building Xi, and we'll get into it, Google and Nutanix have started getting really close from a technology integration and a delivery perspective where things like Xi could become ubiquitously delivered, but more importantly, I could take Google Cloud past services and fuse them with Nutanix enterprise solutions. So, those are the four. >> Sunil, let me poke at something. We've heard this story before, broad, lots of choice, let's build an ecosystem, but AHV seems to be a strong component, so Xi, you got to use AHV, you got to use Nutanix replication. It's like you've got lots of choice unless you want to use all these cool things we're doing, in which case you want the full Nutanix stack. >> And I think that's a constant thing for us is, look, at the end of the day, to us lock-in should be by choice, not by need. It's up to us to offer a series of value-added services on our full stack, but customers choose to go to that full stack for value. It's just like on-prem, right? I mean, look, 60, 70% of our enterprise workloads are still ESX-based, Hyper-V is still there, under the cover SuperMicro or NX is no longer 100%, it's coming down. Frankly from a customer perspective of deployment, that's where they start, maybe they'll stay there. We can add value to that environment, but if you use AHV, you get micro-segmentation for free, it's one click. It's up to the customer to choose to use AHV based on the choice at that point. And the same thing applies to Xi as well, saying, look, on day one it'll replicate on-premise to off-premise, but on off-premise, at least on the enterprise side, Stu, we will still support ESX and Multi, you know, essentially the open environment is still a source for us. The target, on day one at least, we can build an honest product without being completely integrated. >> And Sunil, definitely there's choice there, even look at the Google announcement. Well, they've got the HV solution tour if you want to go down the containerization, Kubernetes, that's going to be somewhere. We've been positing that the partnership with Google should help you accelerate that move towards containerization. We know it's early for a lot of customers, but any commentary you can give on virtualization? >> Absolutely, and in fact, I would say containerization sort of expanded to the broader cloud-native workloads aspects, which is to us the big thing that customers came to us, and we've seen that now resonate as they just don't want DR. Obviously, one-click DR is a big deal, if you can pull it off by replicating the stacks. But really what they want from the enterprise side is they want to take enterprise apps that they are elastic, consume them as a cloud service, but co-locate them in such a way, not just in the data center level, but at an application-operations level, application-integration level, so that they can co-reside as if they were on the same node with a set of Google past services. So essentially, think about it, I've done all this work to do one-click DR, I have mode warehouse management system running SQL server or something else into the Nutanix cloud, that's a little bit easy now with Xi, but now, I can now run a big query app, I can honestly use those services as if they were in the same VLAN, and that's the real power of isolating containers. >> I love that, and I guess the easy compare on that is later this year we expect VMware on AWS to run. I'm sure you would posit that VMware and Amazon, you know, pricing might be a little bit different than the Nutanix and Google offering and what services and how you have them, a little different. >> I think, I'm sure you get a lot of responses on that one, but I'll tell you my take is, actually, even before comparing the approach. First of all, just philosophically, I think the strategy it makes sense of trying to make hybrid invisible, in general, right? I mean, vCloud frankly was the first cut at that. The way we look at it was vCloud was the right use case, wrong implementation. And to me, I think that is still the most important thing, which is before we build this hybrid cloud, whether it is with AWS or Google or anybody else that we've talked to and over at Nutanix or VMware, you still have to build a proper private cloud, as in the cloud that powers your primary data centers needs to look like a true Google or AWS. And to us, unless someone re-engineers that stack that's going to not be the same as, oh, even if I took, if I can call it, a half-baked fiber cloud, and I extended it as a service, it's still half-baked hybrid cloud. That's going to be the big thing, I think, that's going to turn things up. >> And that led us at Wikibon to coin this term, "true private cloud." We get a lot of grief for that term some time, but we saw a lot of cloud-washing, and the concept is basically to substantially mimic what's in the public cloud on-prem, and then, create a control plane that spans multiple physical locations. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Now, one of the things I've been getting a little grief on in this show, 'cause we think Nutanix is an instantiation of what we call true private cloud. One of the folks in our community who has been hitting on me, and he actually wrote a piece, this guy, Yaron Haviv, he's a very sharp guy, said that guys like you and others have no chance against the public cloud because he said this, "HCI is stateful," I want to read it and get your feedback. "HCI is stateful, its VMs, its vdisks, "they're like IT pets with a lot of labor. "AWS is stateless with micro-services, "its object, its database is a service, AI is a service, "and it's built for devs." I know you understand this, but how do you respond? >> I think, look, you know, frankly, we had a choice as a company a couple of years ago when we were growing, the primary question for this company was, well, if the apps are moving outside, forget about IAS or AWS, it's us, and users are moving outside, again, forget about dev and object store and all that. It's about consumerization because of mobility, everybody's got a phone, they can access an app. Who worries about infrastructure? As an enterprise infrastructure company, that's a secular question to answer, right? For us-- >> It's profound. >> For us, there's a reason why we didn't pack up and sell the company and move on. There's a thesis for the company. The thesis for the company is that we fundamentally think that cloud is not a zero sum game. And we're seeing that not just with the largest assets, like all the big dot-coms that went with cloud, defined cloud, and they're coming back now. One of your popular, whether it's your, you can call it your consumer devices that actually started with their service completely, as they grow, they're actually moving half of their services back to the private cloud. I think but it applies to the mainstream enterprise, which I call the fact that because public cloud is not a zero sum game not because of security or compliance, because those are temporal things, in my opinion. The moment AWS puts a data center right beside my data center, security is a little bit, compliance or data regulation is a little bit avoided. The real reason is purely going to be a financial choice for the kind of workload. If it's a predictable workload, even if I could re-engineer it, if it's predictable, it's kind of like me coming in, staying here in D.C. for three days, I'll rent a hotel. If it's there for a year, I'll lease an apartment. If I'm there for five years, financially, accel makes certain math deal, right? Doesn't matter if my costs are cheap, it's going to just work that way. I can buy hardware, cap excise it, amortize and so forth. I guess the simple answer to it is eventually I think there'll be 100% of the market will move. In some markets, there'll be 70-30, in some markets, it'll be 30-70. We are in 1% of that market, so for Nutanix, the more someone tastes the wine of public cloud, the faster they'll actually make the transition of their private infrastructure to look like Amazon. And in that sense, we are like, look, that's why want to do Xi is because Xi actually takes DR infrastructure away from us. We're probably making more money selling Nutanix in the DR data center when we are accelerating the move because we think that that eventually accelerates every workload to come through the primary infrastructure in Nutanix. At the end of the day, it's going to be not about objects, which is vdisk, I mean, he's right also, in the sense that shame on us if we don't have a level of abstraction that is app-centric, then you don't have really care about whether it's an object storage or vdisk or anybody, so that whether it's a developer or an IT operator, they use the same operation levels. >> Sunil, we like that Nutanix is putting out a vision, my understanding, you know, the cloud service next year? >> Sunil: Yeah, early next year. >> What I'm a little worried about is, we're almost out of time with you, and you went through so many different pieces. There of course, there's the Calm. We're going to talk to Aditya in a little bit, but maybe give us some of the highlights as to the stuff that's shipping now or soon that your customers have been talking about. >> What's happening is basically you take those four segments, the core software fabric evolving across every platform and so forth. There's a bunch of stuff that has started shipping in the 5.1 release which came out a few months ago, and a lot of it was shipped in the 5.5 release that's coming later in the year. Calm is part of that release, as you guys know, it's part of the same, it's baked in. We had a choice, so basically Calm has been engineered a couple of times over six, seven years. It's not a vulnerable product, but we took the time from last year, we didn't release it, create a Frankenstein, a power-sucking alien on the side, like some other tools. We took the time, to be honest, to integrate it into the console. You saw it, I mean, it's apps, it's taken time. Functionally, it's there. But that'll be part of the same release, and then, the Xi project will be early 2018. The Google integrations will come in a staged way, even as early as later this year with Calm and Kubernetes and so forth, and then extending to Xi. So the timeframe that we're talking about is probably minus three month to plus nine months. >> So, the DR solution that you showed, though, that is native Nutanix tech, right? That's not partners in the ecosystem. >> It's Nutanix software delivered as a full stack, and this is another thing that we had to take a hard call. It is raging debate couple of years ago is like who builds a public cloud in these days? Because that'll be the obvious question. And the question was really, it's not about building a public cloud, are you building a cloud service, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, are you being honest in the product design? Do you do billing and metering in one click? We don't do that today. But as building a cloud service through Xi, we are building all those for our private cloud customers. And so, the goal was, kind of like six years ago, the easy answer was to take Nutanix, sell our software and say we are VMware for the new era, not worry about BIOS firmware, upgrades, and all that stuff. And so, until we did Nutanix on SuperMicro, people actually believed that the market existed, and then, Dell and Lenovo and others came to buy. Same thing applies with Xi in an accelerated way. The moment we have the conviction to go build a full stack, make it look like an exact replica, but build these cloud capabilities, that's the big thing that I think some of our competitors didn't do was they took the same stack that was in the cloud and quickly tried to make it a cloud service. That's the reason why we are starting with our own service and data centers, and then, scaling through Google, for example, as a way for not just get global reach, but also to merge cloud-native apps with these enterprises. >> But the other obvious question, and I'm sure you guys had that conversation about this internally is, some of the folks in our ecosystem are in that space, and is this competitive to what they're doing? You guys have always been a customer problem solving company, but what was the conversation like in that regard? >> It hasn't come up, to be honest, I think the cloud service aspect is still relatively new, it's siloed, I mean, we are pretty clear. This is not an end-all, be-all service. We don't want to overreach from our things. It's about, look, you first move to Nutanix on-premise, and it's your choice to say, it should be as simple as, "I provision VMs, and the more VMs I have, "or containers on Nutanix, I should right-click "and say protect." And just like iCloud for the iPhone, they're in the cloud, right? That's the goal, the true product goal. >> That Amazon-like experience that you're describing. >> And it's a service that's integrated into it. And so, when we have partners who have been hosting Nutanix, if you're talking about service providers, you've already had questions on, rather than just create yet another service provider partner program that automatically conflicts at all, eventually what we think is that we will offer turnkey services, not a general purpose infrastructure. There's always use cases where somebody wants to outsource their primary data center, and that's where a lot of our partners will be, especially the mid-tier partners are in the mode of outsourcing the full data center, and for them, offering one-click DR on their primary outsource thing is another advantage. >> He's too good, we're not going to let him go yet. >> Sunil: No, no, keep going. >> Are we done? >> Central, some of the other announcements outside of the cloud, can we just touch on some of the highlights there? >> They're all part of the core fabric, and unfortunately, they get subsumed into the, you know, when you have big announcement, they kind of subsumed. But a couple interesting things that came up is I think, and this particularly I'm pretty fond of couple of features. One is Acropolis File Services. I made this joke about killing an air app a couple of years ago, and people keep reminding me about it. I think it's one of our fastest growing features in the last six to nine months, and it's a natural sale for us. People go in there, it's been a little bit limited because of SMB functionality, but now with NFS, it opens up that. Another one, though, that's probably more secular is this concept of machine learning now coming into mainstream. People talk about AI and all that, and it is a lot of churn for us, but it all comes down to manifesting itself as tangible things that the customer sees. For example, if I can show that certain amount of down time genuinely reduced from four nines, it became five nines, without the operator having to do anything, then it is becoming intelligent. I think our bar for machine learning, which you will see more and more, by the way, as a secular thing, I think, I'll predict that not just from Nutanix. >> Dave: Sure. >> AI, if I have to use the word, is going to become more prominent in the next few years, just like cloud was. >> So, Sunil last question I have for you. From a development standpoint, where won't Nutanix go? >> Where will we not go? Great question, so for example, there's an obvious thing like AWS. It says let me instrument every service that sits on my platform. If I like that service, I might end up doin' it. The classic, if I can call it, the tyranny of being a platform partner. See, for us, I think because of two things. One, our ceiling of our current market is super high right now, Stu, right? I mean, we still, yeah, it's a billion bucks, growing 50, 60%, whatever, but we're still, even if half the business goes to AWS, Google, and Amazon, we can still be a company larger than we were. >> It's nearly a trillion dollar market. >> I mean, it's a big market, so therefore, we don't have to be greedy about near-term. We can be long-term greedy. >> Dave: Alright, we got to go. >> All right. >> Thanks so much for coming on, we really appreciate it, Sunil. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)