>> Live from London England, it's The Cube, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer. And you're watching The Cube, and actually Bear Grylls is going to be on the keynote shortly, but we're gonna talk a little bit more tech first. First of all I wanna welcome back to the program Chris Kaddaras is the senior vice president and general manager for EMEA with Nutanix, and welcome to the program for the first time, Sylvain Siou, senior director of Systems Engineering, also for EMEA with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so Chris, we were thinking back, two years ago, the first European show in Vienna, I had you on the program, and you were fresh on, I always loved getting people when they're fresh into the company because they have the why they're joining in, why they think they're doing things. So, bring us up to speed. Two years, couple things have changed in Nutanix, couple things have changed in the industry, but why don't you bring us up to speed? >> Sure, no I'm happy to do that. First I'll tell you that some of the things I told you on the show two years ago actually proved true. I could see the energy in Vienna at that time in regards to what I call kind of a religious following in Nutanix because of the compelling-ness of the technology and the solution, and that hasn't stopped. One thing that I wasn't quite prepared for is just the rate of growth of this company, and how our customers really embraced us in the market. Now in the EMEA market we've had some success I would say. The team's done a really good job. When I started we had less than a thousand customers, now we have over 3,000 customers. When I started with Nutanix, in the region we had about 200 employees, now we have almost 800 employees in the region. So collectively as a region we're growing a bit faster than the rest of the world which is a good thing for us, and customers are showing their appreciation for us, so it's been a really good experience, but something like the hyper-growth that we have at Nutanix takes some getting used to when you come from other companies, but it's been a really good thing for our customers. The thing that I think I'm the most proud of is we've done that hyper-growth and we've still kept our NPS score above 90 for our customers, so our customers are getting a really good experience both from our sales teams, our product, our implementation teams, and our support teams, that it's kept everything in check for our customers which I'm really proud of. >> Well congratulations on that. Sylvain I have to think that your team has something to do with that NPS score. In my career, I have great respect for the SEs, they're the one that have to not only know the product inside and out, but they need to be working closely with the customers, have a good viewpoint on the customers. Being here at a European show, I wanna get your viewpoint. Tell us, what's different here compared to what you hear from people back at Corporate, what are some of the differences here your team sees? >> So we have a very good relationship with Corporate, so we're really aligned and we're involved in the project in same way as any other region. I think we were faster on some very big accounts, and that was really surprising and also the, I think the timing for the need of the customer to solve situation after virtualization was the exact timing when we start in EMEA, the product was mature enough so that was exactly the right timing, it's five years ago when I joined, so really we solved this first situation and after that everything we promised in term of making this platform a true cloud platform for enterprise is there, I think all these services on top of it, who have the same kind of services you can see on public cloud, is there, we show it this morning, and now giving the ability to the customer to manage situation with this cloud from different providers and what is on premise is there, so I think all the control, the costs on the compliance and so on have done a lot to manage the situation and take you through the control everyday. >> So, what is the adoption maybe compared to the US for the core products that you have now versus the additional services? Is there a big change or a big difference between the US and Europe or, what are you seeing with your customers? >> So, we follow the same path. There is some region and maybe I will relay on Chris, some region that we invest later than the others so, of course France, Germany, UK, Northern Europe was really the beginning and after that we have more southern regions or eastern region that come after, but we are surprised sometimes because people can jump to the last technology faster than the others, so I don't think there are really rules, there is really people who is painpoint, we have the solution, and when it fits, they go faster. >> Yeah I think from a solution perspective we are thriving at the same rate our emerging technologies into the market as our other regions in the world. In some cases we're ahead, things like IoT, what was originally called Sherlock, we're ahead, we have like first customer, second customer to start coming to adopt, so we do have markets within the EMEA region that are much earlier adopters compared to other regions. Think of places like the Middle East, the Nordics, France, adopting much quicker than some other regions of the world. So we see our new products starting to roll, we're really excited about Xi Leap, I know that the first instantiation went live, I think yesterday or today within the Americas, we're looking forward to going live within London, and then moving in to mainland Europe from there, and I think that will be a huge difference-maker for us in the markets as well. >> So looking at those regions specifically, I know there's a couple of markets in Europe, especially Germany, that have such strict data sovereignty laws that it makes it really difficult to actually do business from a DR or cloud perspective. How's Nutanix dealing with that? >> I think that's where we... When we have our SAS-based products, that's a challenge. When we have our cloud-based products, that's a challenge.` So, for our cloud-based products we have a plan really quickly to go into places that have data sovereignty compliance regulations that they have to adhere to. So Germany, we have a plan to go into Germany really quickly; we obviously have a plan to go into some other markets, Amsterdam, we have a plan to go into London for cloud. For SAS, a lot of customers are consuming SAS and they're okay if there's a good security problem, parameter around SAS, and they're consuming Salesforce.com without data centers, they're consuming other products that way so, as long as we put the right security parameters in place, then their consumption model around SAS is typically gonna work, I don't see us distributing SAS data centers all throughout every market in the world to do that. Our core product right now consumption is mostly local, and it's consumed either in an appliance way or it's consumed in a software way, so that's not something that we have to worry about. >> Yeah it's interesting, you wonder if North America has a greater adoption of public cloud, if that actually gets you an advantage in the EMEA region here to get deeper with some of the core and essential offerings. >> It does; customers will adopt a private cloud because of those data sovereignty regulations. But a lot of the uber-clouds have come in and solved that, they've come in into country, they've created gov clouds, they've done it in Germany, they've done it in the UK, so they're starting to solve that, but they have to put out a lot of investment to do that. But it has given us a lead in the marketplace, but there are certain markets that are very much like the US market, so the UK, it's very similar to the US market with regards to uber-cloud or public cloud adoptions so in that market we have a lot of opportunities with somebody like Beam, because they've consumed a lot of the other uber-clouds, whether it's AWS, UCP, or... And we have that opportunity to sit down and provide them with solutions. >> Sylvain, what else are you hearing from your customers, what are some of the pain points that they're feeling that your team's able to help with? >> Clearly in the past we saw the proliferation of the VM, and we find a way to control that, but with the cloud the proliferation is without any limits. So really this is something important for the customer to take back control, take control of the shuttle IT and so on, and it's very lowly. And also I want to take a specific point really the R&D are really taken care of when we see in the field, I will take just an example, the synchronus replication, metro-culturing and stuff like this to high availability, between (inaudible) and so on, it's typically European, because we have fiber, we are really city close to each other and so on, in America, that makes no sense, and really at really early stage of the company we get the R&D taking care of that, developing specifically for our market what is needed for our market, and it means that we're a really global company and not really American company, we have also R&D in different places, we have in Serbia with Frame, we have in India, and so on, so really to be really taking care of each issue or pain point of the customer is really our main driver. >> So one of those other differences I see a lot is the scale of the organization, the size. So what is an SMB in the Americas might be an enterprise in Europe. So what are the solutions you have for those types of customers, for that problem? >> So definitely we need, so we are talking to customers we have a critical science, they need to have a minimum of VM to face the issue of the bottom neck of the storage or the management part and so on, but also we have example of small customers just need a platform that works, and don't want to have anyone taking care of it. And so now it's like you phone, you don't take care of the storage and CPU, it's just your application and that's it, could be internal, external, and so on, so really the SMB of course is not the main market for us, it's more the big account and so on, but we have all kinds of customers in any verticals, there is no specific one that we cover, and it's really because the platform is something that has become just normal to be invisible. >> Yeah I would add on that, if you don't mind, I'd say that the nice thing about the product is it's in a form factor in a pricing mechanism that can be consumed from SMB all the way up to global accounts. That's the nice thing. Now, maybe we spend a lot of our field resource on mid-market up, because that's where we get larger transactions from customers, and it's just a value conversation with regards to return on investment, but the nice thing is our product can be consumed at the smallest customer. We have just released new pricing mechanisms that allow our customers to now consume at much smaller levels, so we're not allow for SMB but for ROBO, because if you think about it if you just have a one size fits all pricing structure how does that work in the data center, that same price doesn't work in the ROBO area, so you have to give the customers the ability to look at the same experience in the remote office or the small sites compared to a data center, and that's something that we've just kinda brought to the market in the last three to four months, and I think that's a real advantage of not only the product but the pricing structure. >> Chris, we wanna give you the final word. If EMEA customers, what do you want them taking away from this week? >> Sure. I think, they've already told me, and I'll tell you, which is good, 'cause it's what I want them to take away, is just the credibility that Nutanix is here for the enterprise work load, they can look at their entire data center delivery mechanism on a Nutanix platform. But also Nutanix is a company they should be looking for for their cloud-based platform. There is a decision in the marketplace to be had right now around what do you use for your cloud, lack of a better word, orchestration layout, cloud automation layout? And there's only a few choices in the market today, some of them are more open source, some of them are specific vendors, and what I want them to take way is Nutanix is an option for that, leave it up to me and my team to prove why we think we're the best option for it, but that's really what I want them to take away, the credibIlity of tier one platforms running Nutanix in their data center, and then two, Nutanix for the cloud-based platform. >> Congratulations on the progress. I wanna say some feedback I've heard from customers is despite how fast Nutanix has been growing, they still feel that they're getting the personal touch, don't feel like just a number for some fast-growing company so congrats on that, I know a lot of effort goes into that. Alright so we're at the end of the Day 1 for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Minimn, be sure to join us tomorrow for a full day of wall-to-wall coverage. Of course go to theCube.net for all the websites to watch us live and on demand for all the shows we're doing and once again thank you for watching the cube. (digital music)

(news theme music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCube's preview of Nutanix.next London 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program two friends of the program, Julie O'Brien who's the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Sunil Potti who's the Chief Product and Development Officer, both of Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, it's great to be here again. >> Alright, so, we've been there since day one. I was actually, just recently down at the Fontainebleau in Miami reliving one of my favorite sets that we did. It was beautiful Miami colors, which match the bright green and blue of Nutanix with theCube. I've been to every single one of em. You have. The European version, which is the third year. We did Vienna. We did Nice. And now London. So Julie, start us in as what we can expect this year. >> Sure, we actually just finished our .next tour in APJ in the Americas. We were from Beijing to Boston. Over 20,000 registrants and 44 cities. So, now we're coming off of that and heading into the conference, which is our multi-day event. First time being in London for the multi-day conference. We have a great lineup of speakers. From a main stage perspective, Bear Grylls. Who you may be familiar with. "Man vs. Wild" He's a well known survivalist. I'm sure he'll have tips to connect what we survive every day in technology with what he survives in the wilderness. We're going to have Jane Goodall joining us. Renowned anthropologist. She's giving back to conservation. A phenomenal woman who's going to be on stage with me in a fireside chat. Cannot wait for that. Anna Alex from a startup in Berlin, called Outfittery. We always like to bring in some fun, interesting companies from the region. They're actually using a mashup of AI with their clothing business, to figure out how to dress elegant professionals, such as yourselves, with all of the right clothing items. So she should be a lot of fun. And then I did want to share something really special today. There's breaking news that we haven't shared anywhere else yet on one of our new main stage speakers. For those of you who are football fans, this gentleman was one of the top performing German national football team members, when he played. And his name is Michael Ballack. So, he'll be joining us and we're really excited about that. For all the Germans out there, hopefully they'll be thrilled. >> We'll do some light juggling on the keynote. (Julie laughs) >> One of the things I always love about this show is customers always want to expand their horizons, learn new products, get to know what they have even better, help their job, but also expand your mind some. You've had some great thought leaders on the program. I've had the opportunity of interviewing some of them on theCUBE, which is great. Authors I've read. Professors that you read their research. Thought leaders in the space. It's always fun. But, the main reason most people go to Sunil is to learn about the solutions that they have, learn about some of the cool new stuff, and you're always well dressed on stage, and helping the customers understand where things are today and where they're goin. So what can they expect from you? >> I think this time around, just like prior times, is going to be a bit of the continuation of the journey, which is what is practical about the company, is that the vision continues to be consistently evolving. In a sense that we've embarked on this two-part re-architecture of the enterprise cloud. And in the first act it was all about converging various silos of infrastructure. We called it the Invisible Infrastructure Era. And then we believe, and you'll see a lot of this in .next London, is that a little more light around the reality that we are on the cusp of the world of many clouds. From going from the world of many silos of infrastructure to the world of many clouds. And a lot more depth of products, beyond what we've done in the first act around invisible infrastructure transforming to invisible clouds, is what's going to be the underpinning of the keynote. >> You bring up something we've been watching at a lot of the shows and in our research, cloud was supposed to be, many people thought it's going to be simple and and it's going to be inexpensive, and what we've found is that it's often neither of those. We live in a multi-cloud world. Absolutely. The question I have for many users is, how did you get there? Was it by choice? Do you have a good plan and who's going to help you get your arms around things or have we recreated, through multiple clouds and applications everywhere, the silos that we were trying to collapse in our data centers before? >> And I think some of this is also going to be, just like in any problem-solving, define the problem well is 50% of the solution. So in some cases, in the world of multi-cloud, one of the things that we've had to give some time and it's right of passage, is to really characterize, when we say multi-cloud, most people think it's just public and private. So it's to really characterize the problem of the multiple clouds, or the multi-cloud era, actually is a construct of many public clouds, but the "private cloud" is becoming increasingly more dispersed or distributed. All the way into the remote office branch offices. But also all the way into what we are calling the edge. Part of what we're going to be talking about is a pretty reasonable understanding of how we've seen some of our early customers templatize their different kinds of clouds and then overlay the solution, to say it's not one size fits all, but you need, from an operational perspective, at least, something that can be a single control play. >> You're absolutely right. If you follow the applications and you follow the data, it's becoming even more dispersed. I remember the early days when I first spoke to Dheeraj, it was, oh are we taking a bunch of boxes and collapsing it? And what it came down to is the premise is the challenge of our time is software for distributed architectures. Five years ago we weren't talking about edge computing and IOT and all those things, but that's following along those trends. >> And I think one of the core technical themes you're going to see is that the last ten years of cloud has been about the era of scaling out. And that's proven now and there's more to be done. I think to really fulfill this next ten years, you're going to see this thematic view of scaling in. Especially when you scale small, which is a different art than scaling out, to some extent. Especially if you want to solve problems at the edge, you want to do it consistently, so that you can actually follow the app, as the apps transform. Some of these newer architectural paradigms have to be understood. So that's going to be an underlying theme there. >> And edge computing, we know, is a really hot topic amongst our customers and this year we're going to have an API accelerator lab. So in New Orleans we had a hackathon, now we're going to do it a little bit differently. This is going to be really focused on giving people an opportunity to get their hands involved in our IOT product, along with some nooks as well. So it should be a lot of fun for people. This is a great area and it is a great application for that multi-cloud, distributed edge kind of environment. >> Great, so November 27th through 29th, in London. We're going to have two days of theCUBE, of course go to thecube.net and watch the program. Nextconf has always been the hashtag. I want to give you both the final takeaways, what people should tune into, other than, of course, watching your keynotes and theCUBE coverage. >> I think you'll see a lot on social media, hopefully to stay involved with all of the innovation that we're going to be announcing. You're going to hear a lot from the breakout sessions. People will be tweeting from those sessions. We have more than 60 breakout sessions across a range of topics, for people that are in different phases of their journey with us. Whether it's just hyperconverged infrastructure, whether it's blockchain, whether it's IOT and they're starting to think about the multi-cloud hybrid environment too. So there's going to be a lot of great information coming out of the events. Sunil? >> I think you covered it all, but in general there's going to be a lot of cool stuff, both people-wise, as well as technology-wise. But I think, hopefully, the common theme that every body will participate in is this construct of this whole Nutanix-vibe of dreaming big, acting fast, and having fun. >> Okay, good. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. And also breaking news, we're actually going to have a first on the program. We've got my first European cohost for a multi-day event, Joep Piscaer, who's cube alumn, been on a couple of times. And what I'm actually looking for our audience, I'd like to do my first non-english interview on theCUBE. Joep is fluent in Dutch. He's going to be taking the train into London. I would love to be able to do a short segment, preferably a user, but would welcome a thought leader, a partner, or somebody in there to be able to. As we've expanded our coverage, we did our first Chinese event last year. We've done many in Europe. We did our first Middle East show in Bahrain just a couple of weeks ago. So look for that. Like Nutanix, we're all over the globe with what we've done. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. For Stu Miniman, once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (news theme music)