(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.

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

live from London England it's the cube covering dot next conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix hi and welcome back on with you pissed car and I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to the CTO segment at Nutanix next 2018 welcome back to the program to my right is Vinnie Gill who's the CTO of cloud services and to his right is Rajeev Murray ani not very honest I mean you know the CTO of cloud platforms a gentleman thanks so much for joining us again thanks dude for having us being back all right rajiv and Binny mechanics it's been kind of busy since last time we've chatted AOS got really a file system rewrite there's been some M&A integration going on as well as organic activity so you know I love talking the CTO is just if you can bring us inside a little bit you know what's been happening what your team's been working on some of the hard challenges I mean things like page be nested hypervisor on top of DCP you know these are some hard challenge getting ready for nvme over fabric you know so some real you know massive things that happen underneath the cover as well as some new products so didn't want to start with you it's tough yeah you know what I'm keeping you to your team busy oh the teams have been quite busy especially you know once you have you know more than 10,000 customers and a product that's earning a lot of revenue coming in and at the same time you have to change the dark surfer preparing for the next generation so it's a lot of work I mean if you're starting from scratch it's much easier whether you know we've had a lot of experience bringing in new capabilities making it transparent to the customer one-click upgrade is really important for us so learning from the past we have been able to rewrite the engine the storage in a way that customers wouldn't notice but it's gonna run just faster you know kudos to the team that they've pulled it off and it goes across the board when we are acquiring new companies that come into the fold of the Nutanix family the whole idea is to make it look seamless to the customer because that's one thing that you know customers know us for like hey is the willit have neutronic simplicity so a lot of learnings we have created some thumb rules to guide people coming in and those are working fine for us and there's you know a method to the madness over here there is in the end one vision that we want to provide a true hybrid cloud experience to our users do that we feel you're the first start by building the best private cloud you can't have hybrid without private and to do that we need to have an infrastructure that actually works for private cloud so we start with HCI as an initial platform we build on top of that with private cloud features and not just still a networking compute and storage like in the past but more platform services like era and carbon and so on and then once we have that we can then layer on the new hybrid cloud services so even though it looks like getting a lot of things it's all guided by that one region so tell me you know that hybrid that hybrid cloud vision you know where doesn't lead us doesn't lead us to you know the public cloud in the end does it lead us to a new 10x cloud where where does that help customers go towards well the way I look at it is that it doesn't lead to any one place it leads to multiple clouds there'll be private clouds of the edge clouds distributed clouds big central public clouds the important thing is can you move applications and data between between flowers and analogy I use is you know 20 years ago if you if you were writing applications to Solaris you were pretty much locked into Sun if you go by writing applications for hp-ux you were pretty much locked into into HP once Linux came along and made it possible to write applications for any x86 everywhere got independence from from from underlying hardware and the same thing will happen with cloud today you have to write applications for Amazon for GCP for Asha who can build an operating system that actually commoditize is all that that makes it possible for you to run on any cloud with the same set of applications so that kind of sounds to me like you're you know doing V motion and H a India res but then you know for a new generation of technologies well not be motion across clouds is of course the goal it is the goal but it's not just enough to move the applications around data around you have to move the management plan has to be the same so the lot more to it than just simply copying by it's across maybe you want to add to it yeah I mean basically adding to what Rajeev said if you ask where will hybrid cloud lead I think it leads to a dispersed cloud you know some of it was also mentioned by readers in the keynote which is you know this big monolithic cloud concept has to atomize into much smaller pieces and distributed and that's what's going to happen but you start with solving it at the hybrid and at least solve it for two and from two you go to many and that's what's really exciting yeah it's a really good point then I want you to help expand on that a little I I think back to companies that don't portfolios and you look at it and say okay well I product a B and C and boy I I don't know how to use those together because they for an inner basis and how do I work them together today you know I think micro-services architecture I think about api's pulling everything together what are those guiding principles that you give internally to teams to make sure that I can use the pieces that I want they work all together they work with you know there's really broad ecosystem you have and all these multi cloud environments so you know as much effort we put in building architecture for the product design I mean we have to put the same amount in terms of how is it going to be consumed by the customer in just having a long portfolio is no longer what customers are looking for looking for simplicity so to your point one of the things we are really careful about is especially when we are acquiring technology in organically is how do you make sure identity and billing is it's the same right that's the most important thing so you don't have to login once in this product once natural basic stuff but if you get it you know right it's just delightful the other thing is about experience developer experience and user experiences these are the two other out of the four factors user experiences around like do I have to learn this again like if you look at companies like Apple I mean if I've used the Mac use they try to make it very similar such that even a two-year-old can figure out how to use it and we would like to say that if you have been an IT industry for two years you should be able to use any Nutanix product and developer experience is around api's we have a standard that we have Jade version three intent full api is and that is creating a standardization across you saw a little bit of the opening the demo today there you know I went through calm and epoch and flow and prison throw all from one pane of glass it didn't look like four different products in fact why not mentioned there were four different products it probably wouldn't have been obvious that they were and that's important to us keeping that experience seamless is very important and that comes at a cost I mean it's we could have released it as soon as we acquired some of these things and punted it on to the customer to figure out how these pieces come together but we know our customers have a higher expectation from us so we take the time and from from that perspective you know as a as a user you know I'm used to working with different types of clouds public private I wrote anything in between and the amount of interfaces I have to touch to get you know something working to get a series of products to to align to do what I wanted to do that's becoming such a difficult task that you know having a single interface or having a familiar interface would actually help in that so maybe you can talk a little while use that UI to go into the public clamor into the hybrid cloud as well to make you know that experience easier as well talk about a couple of things one whenever there's a proliferation of technologies and you're trying to glue it together I mean single pane of glass is one thing that people talk about I think that's not the most important thing I mean obviously it's a requirement it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to make it sufficient you also have to bring in opinion into the design and the opinion is where we are taking some decisions for the customer where you know the customer would care about learning about those things and that's where no tonics will come in and through our best practices we put our opinion in the design of the product so that the number of decision points where the customer is minimize and that's how you basically start consuming this diversity out there at the end of the day for the business the only two things matter that business logic and business data infrastructure is sitting in the middle lights it's like a necessary evil so you know if we can hide it and make it seamless you know customers really happy about it can you talk about that the feedback loop you have with customers things are changing very fast you know it's hard for anybody to keep up you know this week even you know hoot anacs has a lot of announcements that I'm sure will take people all the time to there how do you get the feedback loop to customers to make sure your your they're getting what they need from to understand your products and your understanding where they are in their journey and you know mature the product line yeah I mean we have a whole bunch of channels we have we just had a customer advisory board yesterday you know invite customers and have a really deep intimate conversation and frank conversation you know what's working for you what's not working we have our engineering team on slack channels and whatsapp channels with our customers especially the customers who are really you know they complain about a product and they have opinions amenity so we just try to short-circuit this thing and then it's all about empathy so getting a team note here the customers just absolutely retrieve I definitely want your pin but just feedback actually I talked to a few customers and they said I don't know how Nutanix does it but for a company their size I feel like I get personal attention in touch points so congratulations it's good the stuff you saw today is a direct result of the feedback the grouping of products into core essentials and enterprise kind of also reflects the customer journey a lot of customers start with us for with the core once they get used to that get their sense as far as build a true private cloud and only then they started looking at multi cloud so right products for the right customer it's something that we are taking very very seriously at this point so I want to dive into that you know right product right customer so one of the announcements you made is carbon had kubernetes as as a manager platform so what customers do you do you service with that product how do you go into customers like that and how do you help them kubernetes is one of the most fastest growing technologies in the IT space that we have seen in the in the recent years and a lot of our customers I would say especially this year we have seen they have developers using containers and they are at a point where they're trying to decide how can I put it in production a production has a many requirements their carbon is being used by our customers who are trying to see how they'll put containers into production and what we are doing with carbon is we providing native kubernetes api Zsasz is there an open source but we're solving the heart problems of upgrades scale out high availability troubleshooting these mundane things that you know usually people don't want to do and that's where we come in and help so I've seen customers use our storage volumes for even databases containerized to stateless things it's all across the board but still early years I mean for this kind of ecosystem but it's headed into you know it's going to be the future you know one of the things I found really interesting to watch is over the last two decades we've talked about intelligence and automation in infrastructure but really things are happening fast now when you talk about you know whether a I or ml there's really things that are creating some intelligence that it's not like oh I created some script and it does something but you know it's working well I know there's a number of places that that fits into your portfolio maybe maybe prism X play it would seem to get some good resonance and cheers from the audience because maybe they've all played with you know the you know if TTT so start from there and how do you think about the AI in ml space yeah so we we look at you know computing evolving from manual mostly manual in the past to more automated but really you want to get to this autonomous computing that that sort of talked about so you know think of it as you know causes to be really difficult to drive in the past it used to require knowing how the carburetors work and cleaning them out once in a while to the point where maybe 15 years ago pretty much didn't know anything about the internals of a car but you could drive it was reliable it would work which is probably where we are today in IT but the real goal is to get as an autonomous computing the self-driving cars at Tesla Google now where you don't even have to be paying attention at the car will just drive itself yeah I have TTT and the x-play stuff that we have as a step in that direction it's obviously very early but it's the beginning of a journey where you can then start taking feedback loops learning what works modeling that out and extending capabilities on your own and that is something we'll be looking at over the next few years and you know it's something where I don't think it's it's not cute and that's why it needs to be done it's actually required you know if you look at Moore's law it applies to machines so every year you will have double the number of course and you know the same dollar can buy more if you look at humans that's not true I mean ever here then you're only getting more expensive in fact lower for customers here say talent is scarce so just by that definition you see machines are growing and the people who manage the machines are shrinking or you know static so you have to put in a layer of the machine which is smart in the in the between in between of the human and the large form of machines and that if you don't do it there is no data center so it's inevitable and you'll see this happen more and more so that kind of sounds like you're you know positioning your portfolio in a way that you enable the IT of people to not care about infrastructure as much anymore but help you know the their employer their customer do other stuff so how does your portfolio relate to the freeing up of time for those employees for those jobs personnel people some of it is just goes back to the poor design principle I would go to them basic you know how do we how do we start as a company we're looking at storage and they were dual controller a and B a ties B is running but guess what I'm worried that B will also die is the same age so I have to run to fix a run to fix a is my weekend and the night wasted if I had n one dies fine of it's a capacity problem so that goes to the core like how do we design things that are scale out and web scale we talked about so everything that we do including now prism central scale out I have to rush to go fix things hardware will always fail right and that's you know it permeates in the entire organization in terms of how we design things and then on top of that you can add automation and machine intelligence and all that but fundamentally it goes to engineering when you talk about we talked about earlier in the discussion kind of the rewrite that went on for emerging applications and emerging technologies I guess what's exciting you these days you know the industry of the Hall containers you know we looked at you know Flash technology containerization you know I looked at Nutanix when it first came out as was you know some of these waves coming together hyper scale and software-defined and flash all kind of with a perfect storm for the original generation what what are what are those next waves coming together that that you think will you know have a massive impact on the industry a lot of innovation going on on every layer of the stack I mean if we start with the hardware it's been coming for a while but it's almost here now the whole concept of having persistent memory essentially dims blocks having memory that can persist across reboots and we byte addressable so this is a big difference for the storage market right we've always had block addressable story let's become flight addressable paradigms of computing will change and Wharton's will change how we write programs will change so there's a whole big wave coming and getting prepared for that was very important for you yeah and if I control into that a little bit cuz you know what I thought about you know before it was I had you know like like pull of storage and my full of compute and I had my networking and well you know what your solution is I just have a pool of infrastructure but I need specific data in specific places and latency is really important you know Amazon just announced do you know a new compute instance with hundred gigabit networking for you know the same type of application we're talking about Hana and persistent memory and the like so do we not think of it as a pool anymore it's a here you know metadata and data are gonna get more localized so how should we think of your infrastructure going forward you should think of it as a fool we should worry about making it all all work well and that's that that is essentially our job if we can succeed at that then you would never have to think about it as well this particular you know storage is allocated with this particular application at this current time it's up to us to make that happen as applications are running from your direction you feel you know absolutely another thing that's happening in IT in the in the space of compute is the upper limit of this pool is being hidden right so for example in the old days those discs then there was a virtual disc but it had a capacity and you would format it when you look at s3 doesn't have a capacity you don't format it that's what's and that's more to application design when you don't think about the capacity of the pool that you're using that's the direction where we need to go and hide all this right Amina so just-in-time purchase of the next hardware that you need to get but the developer does not see the upper limit well retrieving Binnie thank you so much for sharing all that this Congrats on all the progress and look forward to what were you gonna bring on down lives down the road thanks to you for you piss car I'm Stu minimun lot more coverage here and Nutanix dot next London 2018 thanks for watching

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

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Joep Piscaer, and you're watching theCUBE here at Nutanix .NEXT, London, 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj, thanks so much. Congratulations on 3500 people here at the third annual European show, and thanks so much for having theCUBE. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. So, Dheeraj, first of all, you got a lot going on. Big company event here, last night you announced the Q1 2019 earnings. I guess, step back for a second. Nutanix is now, nine years since the founding, you've been public now for a little while, you got to be feeling good. The company's reached a certain size, very respected in the marketplace. So how are you and the team feeling? >> Yeah, well, I tell people that it's actually fun to be a public company. And obviously there is a cost to being a public company, because you're on a quarterly treadmill, in some sense. But Wall Street also keeps you honest. Just like Main Street keeps you honest on quality of product and customer service, Wall Street keeps you honest on spend and what does it really mean to grow at scale. So I like the fact that there is two good streets that are keeping the company honest. And it's really fun to think about capital allocation, one of the big things as you grow. I mean, you're going to spend more than a billion dollars this year alone. How do you allocate capital wisely is something that I think a lot about in (mumbles). >> Yeah. So, at this show, you kind of change some of the positioning of the portfolio. It's the Core, Essentials, and Enterprise, and right, that asset allocation, when I look at Essential, Xi Cloud, there's all these different pieces, some of them through acquisition, some of them created internally. You need to be careful that you don't over-commit, but when do you decide to kill stuff or keep it going, so you got a lot of plates to spin now, a lot more than you did a year or two ago. >> Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just product development. It's also marketing and sales and G&A. I mean, there's other departments we need to think hard about. Like, how do you create brand awareness for these new things? How do you do demand generation? How do you have a specialty sales force? All those things have to be considered, so, nine years, it's been a journey, but it still looks like it's nothing. And we're still a very small company, and we need to think hard about the next five years, in some sense. >> Yeah. So, one of the metrics you gave Wall Street to be able to look at is, what percentage of customers are using more than just the Core? So the Essentials or the Enterprise. And if I got it right, it's up to 19% from 15%, the quarter before. I wonder, is the packaging, how much of that is for Wall Street? Somebody cynically might look and be like, hey, is the Core market slowing down? And therefore you need to expand. We've all seen public companies that need to go into adjacencies, and shouldn't you stick to your knitting? You've got a great solid product with leadership in the marketplace. >> Yep, absolutely. Also, look, we are not bundling them in SKUs so we cannot force customers to actually buy them. We're not doing financial engineering of dollars, because these not SKUs or bundles. This is a journey which is mostly advisory, in some sense. This is how you should start, this is how you should go, and this is advisory for our sellers and our buyers and our channel people. Everybody needs to say, look, have the customer go through the journey. If you had to do what he just said, probably would've bundled them in SKUs and then allocated capital to one or the other. I think, to your other comment about just sticking to the core, Juniper stuck to the core. And many companies out there which just stayed as a single-box company, they stayed at the core. And eventually you realize the market has moved faster than your core itself. So there's this business school thinking, they call it the Icarus Effect. The Icarus Effect is all about, I'm so good at what I do that I can fly to the sun and nothing will happen. But you don't realize that Icarus, the wings were actually pasted using wax. And you go to the sun, and the sun actually melts the wax. So companies like FGI and SUN, Norca, many companies just stuck to one thing. And they couldn't evolve, actually. >> Obviously you're not sticking to the core alone, right? You're expanding the portfolio, I mean, you're not just an infrastructure company anymore. You do so much on top of the infrastructure on-prem. You have so many SAP services, so how do you manage the portfolio in terms of the customer journey? Because there's so much to tell to a customer. How do you sell it? How do you convince a customer to go from Core to Essentials to Enterprise? >> The most important thing is leverage. Is Essentials going to leverage Core, and is the Enterprise going to leverage Essentials and Core itself? Case in point, Files is completely built on top of Core. So every time somebody's using Files, they're also using Core. If you think about Flow, it uses AHV underneath. Frame, and case in point. When it's going to deliver desktops, it's going to use Files because every desktop needs a filer as well. And then when Frame delivers desktops on-prem, it's going to use all the Core. So the important thing is how they don't become disparate things, like they're all going in their own direction, is there a level of progressiveness where you say, well, if you're using the Enterprise features, a lot of them actually go in and drag in the Core as well as Essentials. So how do we build that progressive experience for the customer, where each of these layers are actually being utilized, is the important piece. >> Dheeraj, so, we're talking a lot about the expansion beyond the Core. But there was a pretty significant activity that your team did on Core itself. So the first time I heard about it, it basically said, we're doing an entire file system rewrite. Think of it almost as AoS 2.0. Now, from a product name, I believe it's 5.10, so I might have trouble remembering which release it was, but talk about what went involved in that. Obviously a lot has changed in the nine years since you created it, so. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yesterday in the earnings call I talked about it too, that people scoff at Core infrastructure. Like, oh, it's going to be a commodity because it's good enough infrastructure. But then I argue that there's no such thing as good enough infrastructure. And companies struggle when they don't focus on infrastructure itself. It's like food, shelter, clothing in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't get that, then there's no point self-actualizing it. So, Core infrastructure completely destroys network insecurity. You got to get it right. I mean, look at Oracle, how it's struggling with IaaS. And look at Google, they're trying to figure out how to make it relevant for the Enterprise. Azure has like three or four different stacks for infrastructure. One for old 265, one for Azure DB, one for Azure, and now they're rewriting it for Azure itself. VMware has three different infrastructure stacks. One for three tier, where they are very happily, they're saying, look, let EMC, their NetApps actually are underneath, and Cisco's, and stuff like that. And then they have this software-defined infrastructure with commodity servers. And finally, they have VMware-enabled AWS which is going to use AWS services. So now you have three different forks of your core base, in some sense. And for us, what's important is how we use a single core base for everything. So architecture matters. I was arguing yesterday in the earnings call that good enough infrastructure is an oxymoron. You need to get core right before you can go and try to live the other layers of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, actually. And that's why we went back and thought about, as the workloads were growing and increasing, and we had mission-critical stuff in memory databases, what do we need to really do about the way we lay out the data and lay out the metadata? So as you know, metadata is at the core of anything in systems, and especially storage systems. And the metadata of our erstwhile system was actually very completely distributed. And then we realized that some things can be local, and some things can be distributed, and that's better scale. Again, going back to this understanding of what things can be represented locally for a certain disk versus what things need to be global so that you can go and say, okay, where is this data really located? What drive? But once you go to the drive, you can actually get more metadata. So, again, you're getting more progressive scanning. So at the end of the day, our engineers are constantly thinking about performance and scalability, and how do you change the wings of the plane at 35,000 feet? It's a very big challenge. >> So that's one of the issues, right? So you're still focusing on your own infrastructure layer, right? But many customers do already have presence in a different hardware stack, or the public cloud, or some service provider. So not everything runs on your platform. So how are you planning to deliver the services ensemble to customers that don't necessarily run on AoS? >> So that's the multi-cloud journey, which is basically the enterprise journey of our customers. I said this yesterday in the earnings call as well, that all our services should be available both on-prem and off-prem. This idea of a VPC, that is multi-location, is what hybrid cloud is all about. So how do you get a virtual private cloud to really span multiple clouds in multiple locations? I think you saw from the demos today of how you're really running all of AoS on top of GCP virtual infrastructure. And in the course of the coming year or two, you'll see us do the same thing, BEM at Amazon, BEM at Azure. Because they deliver servers in their data centers and that's leverage for them because they've already gone and spent so much money on data centers that it's easy for them to deliver a physical server that our software can run on top of. And if people are not using AoS, they'll still want to use things like Frame and Beam and COM and other such things like that. >> Yep, Dheeraj, what are you hearing from customers and how do you think of hybrid, as it were? You know, a lot of attention gets played to things like Azure Stack from Microsoft from VMware on AWS, I know you've got some view points on this. >> Yeah, no, in fact, so if you go back five years, hyperconvergence had become a buzz word maybe three, four years ago. And there were a lot of companies doing hyperconvergence. And only one or two have survived and it's us and VMware, basically have survived that. Everybody else has a checkbox because the customers said well, what about that? Will we have a check box? But, it's really about operating system sort of hyperconvergence. And it has to be honest. And it has to really blur the lines between compute and storage and networking and security. I think hybrid needs to be honest and one of the killer things that hybrid needs is blurring the lines between networks, blurring the lines on storage so you can do one click replication and one click fail over. So a lot of those things have required a lot of innovations from us. That's why we were delayed in Xi. We didn't want to just put up data centers and just like that. I mean, if you go back in time to many hardware companies were putting open stack data centers and calling it their new cloud in response to Amazon. And VMware tried vCloud Air. And they had a charter to go spend money. They weren't going to spend a ton of money on hardware. Without even knowing that the cloud is not about data centers. Cloud is about an experience. It's about eCommerce and computing coming together. And you have to be passionate about a catalog. You know, the marketplace, the catalog so that people can really go and consume things from a catalog. I think that's what our experience has been that. Look, if you don't think of it like a retail giant or retail customer, which is what Amazon has done such a good job of. You know, they've thought about computing as an eCommerce problem as opposed to as a compute storage networking problem itself. And those are the lessons that we have learned about hybrid just as much >> Alright, you did a nice job on the keynote, laying out that Nutanix, like your customers, you're going through a journey. The crawl-walk-run, if you will. We got a tease in the keynote this morning about something cloud native. Where you're going. Final question for you is as you look at the company, you said it's still young, where are your customers going, where are some of the things they need to work on, and that Nutanix will mature with them as we look to move forward? >> Well, I mean, look. I think everybody knows where customers are headed. They're questioning who fulfills the promise because the requirements are all the same. They all want to go and use next generation infrastructure, they want to modernize their data centers, the infrastructure. They want to use some things that they want to own, some things they want to rent. The question is, where is the best experience possible? And by that, I mean not just systems experience of hybrid clouds but also customer service and having an ever-growing catalog and being able to deliver things for developers and devops. And technology will come and go. Two, three years ago, the Puppet and Chef were the hottest thing on, now today, it's Kubernetes. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. It's the fact that what you see is what you do. And what you do is what you say. In our business, it's about integrity. I was arguing about this yesterday in the earnings call, as well, that building business software is a little bit easier. I shouldn't trivialize it as much but if people use business software, they can work around weaknesses of business software. But if you are in the business of infrastructure, applications cannot work around weaknesses of infrastructure. So integrity matters a lot in our space, actually, and that is about great products, great customer service, fast innovation, recovering fast, being resilient. Those are the things that we focus a lot on. >> Alright, well, Dheeraj, thanks again, always. We didn't even get to talk about the width part, the fourth H that you've been talking about for the honest, humble, and hungry. So, thank you. Congratulations to the team and always appreciate you having on our program. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us. Two days live of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music) >> I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now. And so I've had the opportunity as a marketer.

>> Voiceover: From San Jose, California, it's The Cube, covering big data Silicon Valley 2017. >> Welcome back, everyone. Live in Silicon Valley for BigData SV, BigData Silicon Valley. This is Silicon Angles, The Cube's event in Silicon Valley, with our companion event, BigData NYC, in conjunction with O'Reilly, Strata, Hadoop, Hadoop World, our eighth year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Jeff Frick, breaking down all the action, and our superguest, Abhi Mehta, the CEO of Tresata. He's been on every year since 2010, and the CEO of very successful Tresata, building out the vertical approach in financial net health. Welcome back, good to see you. Thank you, John, always good to see you. >> The annual pilgrimage to have you on The Cube. >> Abhi: This is literally a pilgrimage. I was exchanging messages with your co-host here, and he was pinging me, saying, "You got to come here, you got to get to this thing." I made it. The pilgrimage is successful. >> Yeah, a lot's happened, right? Data's the new oil. We've heard it over again. You had the seminal first interview in 2010, calling the oil refineries the data refineries. Turns out that was true. We always love to talk about that prediction every time you're on, but it's so much going on now. You can't believe the shift. Certainly, Hadoop has got a nice little niche position as Batch, but real time processing, you've seen the convergence of Batch, and streaming, and all that good stuff in real time, with the advances of clouds, certainly, more compute, Intel processors are getting more powerful, 5G over the top, you have connective cars, smart cities, on and on, IoT, Internet of things, all powering this new deep learning and AI trend. Man, it is game changes. I see this as a step-up function. What's your thoughts? This is going to create more data, more action. >> I agree with you. I always remind myself, John, especially when I talk to you guys, and we were chatting about this right before we went on air, which is, as smart as we as humans are, trends repeat themself. I'll be talking about AI. We all went to school, and did things in AI, you know? The whole neural networks thing has not been new. It's almost like fashion. Bell bottoms come in fashion every 20 years. I will never be seen in them again. Hopefully, neither will you. AI seems to be like that. I think the thing that hasn't changed, and yes, absolutely agree with you, that as escrows shift, as you've said, almost at this point a decade ago, there's a fundamentally new technology escrow shift under way, and escrow shifts take time. We will look back at this 10 years saying it was literally the first, second inning of this new escrow shift. I think we are entering the second innings where the conversation around Batch, real time storage, databases, the stacks, is becoming less important, and AI and deep learnings are examples of it, conversations on, how can you leverage cheaper, better, faster technology to solve and answer unanswered problems is becoming interesting. I think the basics haven't changed though. What we have spoken with you for almost eight years remain the same. The three basics around every technology trend remain the same. I think you guys will agree with me. Let me just play it by you and you can either contest it or agree with me. Data is the new competitive effort. It is unequivocally clear that the new asset, the most valuable enterprise asset has become data, and we've seen it in data companies, Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb, they're all fundamentally data companies. Data is the new competitive effort. The more you have of it, the better off you are. I always love people who say, "Big Data, this is a bad term." It isn't, because big data, fundamentally, in those two words, defines the very pieces of what we built Tresata on, which is, the more data you have, and if you can process and extract intelligence from it, borrowing your term, extract signal from the noise, you can make a lot of money on it. I think that fundamental basic hasn't changed. >> Big Data, to me, was always about big storage kind of a view. We coined the term Fast Data on The Cube, so that now speaks to the real time. It's interesting. I just see that the four main new areas that are being talked about outside of the Big Data world are autonomous vehicles, smart cities, smart home, and media and entertainment, and each one of those, I would say that the data is the new weaponization. There's an article that was great this month called "Weaponizing AI," and it had to do with Breitbart, and the election, and that's media and entertainment. You've got Netflix, all these new companies. Data is content, content is data. It's a digital asset. This AI component fits into autonomous vehicles, it fits into media and entertainment, fits into smart cities, and smart home. >> You also raise a very interesting point. I think that we can take comfort in the fact that we have seen this happen. This is not an idea anymore, or it's not just a wild idea anymore, which is, we have seen massive disruption happen in consumer industries. Google has created a brand new industry in how to market stuff, could be any stuff. Facebook created a brand new way of not just being in touch with your friends globally, 'cause people have thousands of friends, not true, but also, how do you monetize deep preferences, right? A twist on deep learning, but deep, deep preferences. If I know what Jeff likes, I can market to him better. I think we're about to see, the industries you just mention, is, where will success come from in enterprise software? I always ask myself that question when I come to any of these conferences, Strata, others, there's now an AI conference. What will the disruption that we have seen happen in consumer industries, we'll just mention automobiles, media entertainment, et cetera, what is going to happen to enterprise software? I think the time is ripe in the next five years to see the emergence of massive scale creation. I actually don't think it'll get disrupted. I think we will see, just like with Facebook, Google, Uber, the creation of brand new industries in enterprise software. I think that's going to be interesting. >> Mark Cuban said at South by Southwest this week, where The Cube was with the AI lounge with Intel, he was on stage saying, "The first tech trillionaire "will come out of deep learning," and deep learning is kind of the underpins for AI, if you look at all the geek stuff. To your point that a new shift of opportunity, whether it comes in from the enterprise side, or consumer, or algorithmic side, is that there's never been a trillionaire. >> Abhi: No, there hasn't. >> I want to push back a little bit, because I don't think it always was that way with data. We used to have sampling. It was all about sophistication on sampling, and data was expensive to store, expensive to collect, and expensive to manage. I think that's where the significant change is. The economics of collecting, and storing, and analyzing are such that sampling is no longer the preferred method. To your point, it's the bigness. >> Absolutely, you know exactly where I stand on that. >> Jeff: Now it's an asset. >> You know exactly where I stand on that. I said on The Cube, at this point, almost a decade ago, sampling is dead, and it's for that particular reason. I think the reality is that it has become a very tricky area to be in. Buzzwords aside, whether it's deep learning, AI, streaming, Batch, doesn't matter, Flash, all buzzwords aside, the very interesting thing is, are we seeing, as a community, the emergence of new enterprise software business models? I think ours is an example. We are now six years old. We announced Tresata on The Cube. We have celebrated our significant milestones on The Cube. We'll announce today that we are now a valuable member of society in terms of you pay tax as a company, another big milestone for a company. We have never raised venture money. We had a broad view when we started that every single thing we have learned as a industry enterprise software, the stack, databases, storage, BI, algorithms are free. Dave was talking about this earlier this week. Algorithms, analytical tools, will all become free. What is this new class of enterprise software that creates value that can then be sold as value? Buyers, corporations are becoming smart to realize and say, "Maybe I can't hire people "as smart as some of the web industries "on this side of the coast, "but I can still hire good talent, the tool set is free. "Should I build versus buy?" It fundamentally changes the conversation. Databases is a $2 trillion industry. Where does that value shift to if databases are free? I think that's what is going to be interesting to see, is, what model creates the new enterprise software industry? What is that going to be? I do agree with Mark Cuban's statement, that the answer is going to lie in, if the building blocks are free and commoditized, you guys know exactly where I stand on that one, if the building blocks are commoditized, how do you add value in the building block? It comes from the point you made, industry knowledge, data, owning data and domain knowledge. If you can combine deep domain expertise to be an advanced application that solve business problems, people don't want to know if the data is stored in a free HDFS system, or in some other system, or quantum computing, people don't care. >> I got to get your take on the data layer because this is where it's come. We had a lot of guests on saying, with the cloud, you can rent things, algorithms are free, so essentially, commoditization has happened, which is a good thing, more compute, everything else is all great, all the goodness around that. You still own your data. The data layer seems to be the LAN grab, metadata. How do you cross-connect the data layer to be consistent fabric? >> Here's how we think of it, and this is something we haven't shared publicly yet, but I believe you see us talk a lot more about this. We believe there are three new layers in the technology fabric. There is what we call the hardware operating system. The battle has been won by a company that we all like a lot, Red Hat, I think mostly won. Then there is what we call the data operating system, what you call the data layer. I think there's a new layer emerging where people like us sit. We call it the analytics operating system. The data layer will commoditize as much as the hardware operating system, what I call the layer, commoditized. The data operating system fight is moot. Metadata should not be charged for. Massive data management, draining the swamp, whatever you want to call it, every single thing in the data operating system is a commodity where you need volumes, you all are businessmen, you need volumes, in the P times V game, you need volumes to sustain a profit business model. The interesting action, in my opinion, is going to come in the analytics operating system. You are now automating hardcore, what I call, finding intelligence questions, whether it's using deep learning, AI, or whatever other buzzword the industry dreams up in the next five years, whatever the buzzwords may be, immaterial, the layer that automates the extraction of intelligence from massive amounts of data sitting in the data layer, no matter who owns it, our opinion is, Tresata, as an enterprise software player, is not interested to be a data owner. That game, I can't play anymore, right? You guys are a content company, though. You guys are data owners, and you have incredible value in the data you're building. For us, it is, I want to be the tool builder for this next gold rush. If you need the tools to extract intelligence from your data, who's going to give you those tools? I think all that value sits in what we call the analytics operating system. The world hasn't seen enough players in it yet. >> This is an interesting mind bender, if you think about it. When you said, "analytics operating system," that rings a few bells and gets the hair standing on the back of my head up because we're in a systems world now. We kind of talk about this in The Cube where operating systems concepts are very much in play. If you look at this ecosystem and who's winning, who's losing, who's struggling, who's falling away, is, the winners are nailing the integration game, and they're nailing the functional game, I think, a core functional component of an operating environment, AKA, the cloud, AKA data. >> Agreed. >> Having those functional systems, as an operating system game. What is your view of what an analytics operating system? What are some of those components? I mean, most operating systems have a linker, loader, filer, all these things going on. What's your thoughts on this analytical operating system? What is it made of? >> It's made of three core components that we have now invested six years in. The first one is exactly what you said. We don't use the word integration. We now call it the same word, we have been saying it for six years, we call it the factory, but it's very similar, which is, the ability to go to a company or enterprises with unique data assets, and enrich, I will borrow your term, integrate, enrich. We call it the data factory, the automation of 90% of the workload to make data sitting in a swamp usable data, part one. We call that creation of a data asset, a nice twist or separation from the word data warehousing we all grew up on. That's number one, the ability to make raw data usable. It's actually quite hard. If you haven't built a company squarely on data, you have to be able to buy it because building is very hard, number one. Number two is what I call the infusion of domain-centric knowledge. Can industries and industry players take expert systems and convert them into machine systems? The moment we convert expert systems into machine systems, we can do automation at very large scale. As you can imagine, the ability to add value is exponentially higher for each of those tiers, from data asset to now infusion of domain knowledge, to take an expert into a machine system, but the value trade is incredibly large as well. If you actually have the system built out, you can afford to sell it for all the value. That's number two, the ability to take expert system, go to machine systems. Number three is the most interesting, and we are very early in it. I use the term on The Cube, I'm going to be more forward-thinking over here, which is automation. Today, the best we can do with leveraging incredibly smart machines, algorithms, at scale on massive amounts of data is augmenting humans. I do fundamentally believe, just like self-driving cars, that the era where software will automate a tremendous amount of business processes in all industries is upon us. How long it takes, I think we will see it in our lifetimes too. When you and I have both a little bit more gray hair, we're saying, "Remember, we said about that? "I think automation's going to come." I do believe automation will happen. Currently, it's all about augmentation, but I do believe that business-- >> John: Cubebots are coming. We're going to have some Cubebots. >> We will have Cubebots. >> John: Automated Cube broadcasting. >> John, we'll give them your magnificent hair, and they know they'll do it. I do believe automation of complex human processes, the era of enlightenment, is upon us, where we will be able to take incredibly manual activities, like hailing a car today, to complex activities, looking at transaction information, trading information, in split second time, even quicker than real time, and making the right trading decision to make sure that Jeff's kids go to college in a robo-advisor-like mode. It's all early, but the augmentation will transform to automation, and that will take some time to do them at three tiers in the AOS. >> Then, if we are successful at converting the expert to machine system, will the value of that expert system quickly be driven to zero due to the same factors that automation has added to many other things that have been sucked in? >> You guys always blow my mind. You always push my thinking when I come here. >> I just love the concept, but then, will the same economics that have driven asumtotically approaching zero costs, then now go to these expert systems? >> You know the answer. The answer is absolutely, yes. The question then becomes, how long of an era is it? What we have learned in technology is escrow shifts take time. This era of enlightenment, what I'm calling the era of enlightenment, that enterprise software is about to enable, and leaving aside all other buzzwords, whether it's deep learning, AI, machines, chatbot, doesn't matter, the era of enlightenment is absolute. I think there'll be two things. First of all, it'll take time to mature. Yes, whether it's 50 years, 40 years, or 30 years, does it, at some point, become it's own commodity? Absolutely. The marginal value we can deliver with a machine, at some point, does go to zero, because it commoditizes it, at scale, it commoditizes it, absolutely, but does that mean the next 30 years will not be a renaissance in enterprise software? Absolutely not. I think we will see ... Let's take the enterprise IT market, what, two to three trillion dollars a year? All of it is up for grabs, and we will see in the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years that, as it is up for grabs, tremendous amount of value will be re-traded and recreated in completely new industry models. I think that's the exciting part. I won't live for 50 years, so it's okay. >> I know we got a minute or so left. I want to get your thoughts on something that we're seeing here, The Cube this year pointed out. We've kind of teased around it, but again, Batch and real time process streaming, all that's coming together. The center of that's IoT data and AI, is causing product gaps. There are some gaps that are developing, either a pure play Batch player, or your real time, some people have been one or the other, some are integrating in. When you try to blend it together, there's product gaps, organizational gaps, and then process gaps. Can you talk about how companies are solving that? Because one supplier might have a great Batch solution, data lake, some might have streaming and whatnot. Now there seems to be more of an integrated approach, bringing those worlds together, but it's causing some gaps. How do companies figure that out? >> I believe there's only one way, in the near term, and then potentially even moreso in the long term, to bridge that divide that you talk about. There absolutely is a divide. It's been very interesting for us especially. I'll use our example to answer your question. We have a very advanced health analytics application to go after diabetes. The challenge is, in order to run it, not only do you need lots and lots of data, IoT, streamed, real time from sensors you wear on your body, you need that. Not only do you need the ability and processing power to crunch all that data, not only do you need the specific algorithms to find insights that were not findable before, the unanswered questions, but the last point, you need to be able to then deliver it across all channels so you can monetize it. That is a end-to-end, what I call, business process around data monetization. Our customers don't care about it. They come to Tresata and they say, "I love your predictive diabetes outcomes application. "I have rented the system from the cloud," Amazon, Azure, I think at this point, only two players. We don't see Google much in it. I'm sure they're doing something in it. We have rented you the wheels, and the steering, and the body, so if you want to put it together to run your car on the track, you could. Everything else is containerized by us. I call them advanced analytics applications. They're fully managed. They run on any environment that is given to them because they are resource ready, whatever environment they play in, and they are completely backwards and forwards integrated. I think you will see the emergence of a class of enterprise software, what we call advanced analytics applications, that actually take away the pain from enterprises to worry about those gaps, 'cause in our case, in that example I just gave you, yes, there are gaps, but we have done it enough off a automation cycle on the business process itself, that we can title with the gaps. >> Abhi, we got to go. Glad we could squeeze you in. >> Abhi: Thank you. >> Quick 30 seconds, the show this year, what are you seeing? What's the buzz coming out of? What's the meat, what's the buzz from the show here? What's the story? >> I continue to believe that we are in an era that will redefine what we have seen humans do. The people at the show continue to surprise me because the questions they've been asking over the last eight years have slightly changed. I'm done with buzzwords. I don't pay attention to buzzwords anymore. I see a maturation. I think I said it to you before. I see more bald heads and big pates. When I see that in shows like these, it gives me hope that, when people who grew up in a different escrow have borrowed a new escrow, the pace would strengthen. As always, phenomenal show, great community. The community's changing and looking different in a good way. >> We feel your pain in the buzzword. As we proceed down this epic digital transformation, over the top, 5G, autonomous vehicles, Big Data analytics, moving the needle, all this headroom, future proofing, AI, machine learning, thanks for sharing. >> Abhi: Thank you so much, as always. >> More buzzwords, more signal from the noise here on The Cube. I'm John Furrier, Jeff Frick, and George Gilbert will be back right after this short break. (electronic music)