>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, Ben Gibson, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Nutanix. Ben, nice to have you on your third time now on theCUBE. Couple more, you got one of those VIP badges on our website. (Ben laughs) >> It's getting to be a really good habit. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks for having me here. >> Well, thank you. And You and Keith share something in common. This is the first time you've been to a .NEXT conference. >> Indeed. >> So, I've had the pleasure of actually being at every single one of the US and Europeans. Haven't done the .NEXT On Tours. But give us your impression so far as to, you're heavily involved, but of the show. >> You know, I have to say it's lived up to all my expectations and more. I talked about this, this morning. The first .NEXT back in 2015. You were there, it was in Miami. We had a little over 800 people. Today, we had 5,500 registered to be here. And it's a thrill to see that many of our best customers and partners come together. And for me too being new to this company, I've been here almost six months now. It really brings home the level of energy, and loyalty in excitement that we've engendered within our customer base. It's palpable. And what better way to experience that live than here in New Orleans? >> Yeah, as we say, a lot of shows like this, there sometimes it's like well, I've got all the true believers here. But, you know, there's good customers here. They're poking, they're prodding, they're trying. But they are big fans of the product. Any kind of key things, interactions, you've had so far? >> Yeah, I've had a lot of conversations with customers here. And I am picking up on some common themes. One of them is moving more and more of tier-one applications onto Nutanix. And that's very exciting for us. You know, in our early days, it was all about VDI and that was the sweet spot workload. And now, we're starting to see more and more Oracle and SAP, and other major tier-one applications, being deployed over Nutanix. And customers are excited to do that because we've made things so much radically simple for them in terms of the infrastructure that is being run upon, (laughs), so to speak right? And so that's certainly a key theme that we're hearing. >> Yeah, one of the things that I took out of your opening at the keynote is that we talk about how much change there is in the industry, but in some ways it's a challenge, but another way it's really an opportunity for customers to go through their transformations, change their businesses, and prove their careers. What's Nutanix's positioning? >> Yeah, first of all, my first and Nutanix's first position on this is .NEXT. We see as a place where IT professionals can come, they can learn, they can share, get certified; but also help them position themselves for all this change that's happening in the industry. Public cloud, right? If you're managing and building infrastructure or you're renting it. And we think there's a really interesting opportunity for those who have built, to become those who have advise and lead. As everything moves to be a more hybrid cloud scenario out there. And so, I think that's the opportunity that we have and this show is about how do we empower our attendees to go back out and be that strategic counselor. To build the right type of data center the way they've always wanted to do. And, be that broker almost, between different clouds. And that's a lot about, what you heard Sunil talk about today. >> So Ben, one of the things that I've heard consistently from customers over the past couple of days: Nutanix, humble. Nutanix, not entitled. You're the chief storyteller at Nutanix. How did you get that message out, without eliminating the core of that message? I mean, that's great to hear when I'm here at the show. But how do you expand that message out to the greater audience and future customers? >> That's a great question. It's something I think about every day and every night (chuckles). And for us, you know, we talk about our core values, about being hungry, humble, and honest. And I really think we live up to that. I think, how do we get out that persona of who we are as a company out to the broader marketplace? We have a lot of great early adoptive customers. And now as we move and as hyperconvergence and everything we're doing moves more into mainstream with candidly more conservative customers that may not be ready to try the brand new, then we do have to get that story out there more. So one big way we do it, just this week we've launched our new brand campaign around freedom: Freedom to build. Freedom to run the applications where you want to run them. Freedom to choose the right cloud platform that suit your needs. And so, a big thing we're doing this week is we're rolling out this campaign. And who better to unveil that to you first, than our best and brightest and most loyal customers here at .NEXT? >> Yeah, expand on that, that freedom campaign. It definitely, it struck me when I landed in the airport, here in New Orleans. And I believe it's: "Build, run, cloud, invent, and play." >> Ben: Yeah. >> Some of those themes, I've heard in the past. I remember the first .NEXT conference, it was, "Nutanix gave me my weekends back." And then, you know went a little bit, "Nutanix enabled me to go to "that security project that I couldn't do before." So, why the freedom brand? what have you heard from customers that resonated with that? >> We chose to go down this path, because we wanted to make sure we connected, everything that's wonderful about Nutanix. And, I'm going to brag about my marketing team. What I inherited here is an amazing marketing team. And, we've all recognized that what this team has built in terms of the voice of the company, in terms of the story that we created. A category how, maybe not quite so humbly, say we created with hyperconvergence. We want to connect the past to the present and into the future. And so, yes, give us your weekends back. That's something in common, we have heard from customers. Freedom to play is about building all for that. Freedom to build, is about building on the early success we've had. Now it's freedom to run, Freedom to cloud. As we've moved into multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud management automation and control. These are new elements to our portfolio. So these are new storylines that we need to open up. So, the way I like to think about it, this campaign is connecting everything that's been great about Nutanix to today and then also taking us into a new direction. >> So, Nuich talked earlier about the importance of being able to just go to that website, download Nutanix CE version, kick the tires; A promise Angelo Luciani, who runs the community program-- >> They did a wonderful job. >> Wonderful program, tie that together to their freedom program. How important is your community program? Which gave some big numbers today on stage. How important is that in helping customers discover Nutanix and move their careers in help digital transformation? >> Keith I'm glad you brought this up. Our next community, yeah, so the number I gave today was close to 70,000 active members. And we've drawn almost 20,000 to all of our .NEXT conferences over the past year. The online community to me is fundamental to how we continue to grow and deepen the connection and affinity we have with our customers. And what you going to see us do is really bet on driving more curriculum that's easy to consume, that helps our community members expand their knowledge base in the areas like multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud management. We introduced Nutanix Era today bringing new database services to the floor starting with copy data management. That community needs to be step number one for where our best customers go and learn more about the roadmap. Learn about best tips in trades to be able to embrace this new capabilities and then weed down into the fabric of they are doing with their data center builds. So community, I'm a big believer in it. We are lucky enough to have a vibrant and strong community already. So, now it's like how do we add more to that experience. This place, is kind of like coming to Mecca, it's like coming to-- (laughing) For us, right? It's coming to the event to have a touchstone. But then for the other 51 weeks to the year, that's what NEXT community is all about. >> Yeah, Ben, what type of roles are you trying to reach with your message? We've talked traditionally. We're talking kind of the infrastructure, getting out of the silos, going to the architect, But then we have a product like Beam which doesn't even. It started in the public clouds and working there. Who are you trying to reach with your freedom messaging and as you expand the portfolio to SaaS and beyond. >> You know it's interesting. Our business is diversifying and the audience and the personas that we have reach is definitely diversifying. So, obviously we have great affinity with servers, store admins, infrastructure managers. We are increasingly engaging up the IT stacks so to speak. Application owners and developers, is a significant audience for us. In fact yesterday for the first time in .NEXT, we had our inaugural Hackathon. And we had lot of folks that come from DevOps practices, within their organization, and this is a huge growth area within enterprises, and they came yesterday, they sat down, they had six hours, we fed them cookies, we gave them drink. All sorts of drink, and they came up with some really cool new apps where they developed to our APIs. And that's just one representation of a new audience and building that bridge between whose building an architect in the infrastructure And who's developing these new apps, which by the way need to get to market immediately. Which is why you need such radically simplified infrastructure to make that happen. App developers move up the stack. Before I came here to join you, I was with a room full of CIOs, and we talked a lot about some of the business pressures they're feeling. We talked a lot about governance and cloud. So there's a lot of new topics there, that under the freedom campaign, we talk about freedom to cloud. But then the meat underneath that is really around some of these topics we covered earlier today. >> So, still we've been at other infrastructure shows that have tried to do DevOps and Hackathons and they haven't been successful or they've been successful for a limited amount, you guys actually, quote unquote, sold out the space. What is the message that's resonating with that crowd that's bringing them to a DevOps Hackathon at what is essentially still, an infrastructure-focused audience? >> You know, the way I'll answer that question, one of my favorite early stories since I've joined Nutanix; major retail or customer. The infrastructure team without telling the app dev folks, moved some of their early apps onto Nutanix and didn't tell them. All the sudden, they started getting all these phone calls, and it's like, "what did you do?" "My apps are performing beautifully. "Oh, my Gosh it's so simple." Then they provided them with the portal that we offer through our software, So they could see how everything is moving. Are the SLAs there? Are these Apps humming? And they said, "what did you do?" "Well, we moved it onto Nutanix." And so then all of a sudden this new audience for us started saying we want the Nutanix. (Keith laughs) Which I think is a brilliant tagline, I love it. >> Keith: The Nutanix. We're trying to capture that spirit. So to me it's about. In the past there's been a lot of frustration, candidly, between these app developers who are under extreme pressure to get their new app to market. Customer facing, business facing, or what have you. And it's been so slow to get it done and so then often a crazy CMO of an organization, may work around IT and go throw something out in the public cloud. Well that could still be the model, but with the tools and HCI as a simplified infrastructure. Now there's a big answer, hey, we can move, we can sprint at your speed. And I think that's the key message. And so we're starting to attract that self-fulfilling prophecy to help make that possible. >> All right so, Ben, you are talking about your teams built a really impressive show here. Got the Hackathon as a new thing, one of the things I noticed here in the Expo Hall, there's now a whole area with some of the channel providers. There's always been channel providers here but they've got booths and speaking gigs. What other aspects for those people that didn't attend, in person here would you want to call out, give a little bit of color to what's happening? >> Yeah, Stu thanks for pointing out channel partners. This year over 1,200 representatives from Nutanix's channel are here. And Lou Attanasio, my esteemed colleague and global head of sales, and Rodney Foreman, our head of channels, they are both with me very focused on how do we go bigger and deeper with our channel community. If you think about it, we've moved to a software choice strategy. You can consume Nutanix on our own appliance, you can consume it on our OEM, great OEM partner Dell, but we also have ways that you consume our software with Cisco infrastructure, with HPE servers and the like. Channels is a wonderful way for us to be able to gage and find that new elasticity, candidly, in the market where they have customer relationships we may not have yet, but we have to invest in that, we have to invest in technical enablement, we have to invest in co-marketing with them, and I'd say we've done some on this front in the past. The time is now for us to really go deeper on that front. And that one's a big message we delivered during our partner exchange event just yesterday here in beautiful New Orleans. >> All right, so Ben do we have to wait to the closing keynote till we know where Nutanix .NEXT US is next year? >> Yes, you cannot get it out of me. The announcement will come tomorrow end of day. >> Camera's will lie for their all asking. >> No, I'm not going to betray any body language or anything, but we're looking forward to seeing you there next year. >> All right, well, Ben Gibson, pleasure to catch up with you again. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> And welcome back here on theCUBE, we continue our live coverage at Dell Technologies 2018. We are in Las Vegas, and we are in the Sands right now. 14,000 people strong attended this year's show. And great energy, great buzz here on the show floor. Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're joined now by Ben Gibson, who's the CMO at Nutanix, and Dan McConnell, Vice President over at Dell EMC. Gentlemen, thank you for being with us. Good to have you here on theCUBE. >> Great to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> A lot of conversation about hyper, right, and hyper-converged and about some numbers that we've heard, that Dell's been talking about, that 60-plus percent of inquiries, discussions here from the customer is all about HCI. So how does that stack up with what you're hearing, first off, Ben or Dan, in the marketplace, and what's the driving force right now behind all that discussion? >> Absolutely, yeah, it's been, HCI, I guess the Nutanix partnership, we've been about four years, right? I'll jokingly say, back before HCI was cool. And more and more, what we've seen is in the early days it was, pick an application, okay, it's VDI. And that's kind of its starting point. But now, more and more, these discussions, it's not what app or what workload works for HCI. It's really which one doesn't work. I'm trying to throw everything I can on HCI. Which one should I park over here? So the interest has really, really flipped. And it's the ease of use, it's the flexibility, it's the incremental scale. So it's something that we've seen huge traction in on the Dell side. Obviously it's where our partnership with Nutanix, as well as some of our own solutions. It's tremendous growth. And year over year, we've seen stronger and stronger growth. So definitely getting traction. It's moving out of what is test and dev, and it's in core of the data center right now. >> And what's driving that, you think, in the marketplace? I mean, how's it responding, I guess to performance that it's seen from other early adopters, basically, and what's that motivation there? >> Yeah, John, you know, as Dan just said, there's a lot of growth in this space. And the market for hyper-converged in general, it's probably among, if not the top IT growth segment that we're seeing out there across the whole IT landscape. Analysts are pegging this as 60% or above year on year growth business, and the multi-billions of dollars. So I think what's motivating that interest, I think there's a huge surge that I think together we're seeing around data center modernization initiatives. There's a lot of need for application traffic growth and how our customers modernize their data center environments to keep up with that demand they're seeing, with the workloads that they're running on premise and those that they may be developing off prem and bringing it on prem or the like, it's really driving a lot of this hyper-convergence growth story that we're seeing out there in the market. >> So let's talk about some of the myths out in the market. Hyper-convergence, not enterprise-ready from a couple of different areas. One, let's talk about the relationship that Nutanix has with Dell. Global reach and scalability. Nutanix, not a hardware company. Nutanix is a software company. But the product is sold in a box. Those boxes have to be supported. How does Nutanix support global companies when you're a software company? >> Yeah, for us it is about software choice. But it's also about very strategic partnerships. And I count the Dell partnership we have as one that's been, in our history and moving forward, our most fruitful. It's about delivering different offerings in different ways for our customers to consume our joint hyper-convergent solutions. Just recently, we announced what we call XC Core, which now another option for Dell customers to take advantage of Nutanix HCI with Dell hardware and be able to consume via software license from Nutanix, buy and continue to buy their hardware platform from Dell, bring that all together in solution. So we have a real freedom of choice here that we drive out locally. It's a great combination with go-to-market reach with Dell, combined with innovation that we bring to the table together. And I think it's working really well, and promising. >> And even our services teams, to your point, have worked very closely together. Depending on which consumption model you choose, on the appliance side, we'll take L1, L2 support, on the Dell side. So as the products scale, we help that services aspect, that scalability, that reach. >> Yeah, so for a practical perspective, I'm a global company, I have retail shops in Germany, based out of the US, drive those out, who do I call in, how do I get support for that? >> The great news with this relationship is it's really the customer's choice and what their preference is. We have many customers where Dell is providing that global support model. We now have a new offering that allows the customer to choose whether they get their software support for HCI from Nutanix and continue their existing service relationships with Dell. The nice thing is we're not forcing customers in any one decision on this front, whatever suits their interests and their needs the best. >> So, next myth. HCI isn't ready for mission critical applications. Dell yesterday brought a customer that went head first and everything their mission critical systems, it's Celtic, a global hotelier, their reservation system, their big Oracle apps. Talk to me about the mission critical story, Nutanix, Dell together. >> One of the key, I don't know, just to exemplify this, we continue to get customer demand for four socket, recently, just released a four socket version of the XE Series. Four socket, that's database, what do you mean database on HCI? So yeah, it is continuing to grow into mission critical, exact status like 45 or 50% of HCI is deployed in the data center, all right. So, mission critical workloads, databases, there's no more mission critical than that. And the majority of them sitting right in the data center. So it's, that myth of non-data center, to the side project or VDI only, that might have been where it was two years ago, no longer. >> Yeah, I love myths because it makes for good marketing. We're seeing this trend. So obviously VDI was one of the first sweet spot workloads for HCI in it's infancy. We're seeing across our customer base now, and we talked about this in our New York Investor Day a few weeks ago, now we're seeing 60% plus of all workloads are tier one applications. Databases, other mission critical applications, that are running on HCI infrastructure, with Dell and Nutanix together. We've seen that really start to quickly shift over into that front. I think what the market should keep an eye out for is more and more not only customers running those tier one applications on HCI but you're going to start to see more and more of these major ISVs start to certify their major applications on HCI infrastructure. >> Poke at SAP Hana, I would love to see SAP Hana on Nutanix, that would be awesome. >> Ben Gibson: No comment at present >> Well you're kind of talking about trends in a way here, in terms of adoption, people wanting to do, I'm always kind of interested in the chicken and the egg. You're developing product, you're listening to customers, you're hearing their demands, and you're also trying to, perhaps develop in a vacuum, and give them new capabilities that they haven't dreamed up yet. So you do you work that in terms of that give and take and in your development responding to what the market wants and also driving the market to what you think it needs? >> I think what's proven to be very successful for Nutanix is, obviously we're very customer centric, we also have a strong opinion. Dheeraj our CEO talks about having a real strong opinion on architecture and vision for how do we innovate, how do we solve some problems that maybe our customers haven't faced yet? So I think it's a good balancing act. So we come to the table, we listen very carefully to our customers, we understand what their key challenges are but we come with an opinion as well. And so, conventional wisdom would say go down a certain direction architecturally well what if you collapse those three tier data center architectures, what if you move towards this hyper converged offering, how to you manage and automate and bring together more glue, if you will, across multi-cloud environments? That combines having a vision and a strong conviction of opinion about where it's headed combined with making sure there's always a check and balance what are our customers thinking, where are they seeing their challenges? >> No, absolutely. As customers step in to HCI we're seeing more and more people testing in different areas people looking to solve different problems with it. Typically, all around the agility, the scalability, the ease of use, but it is, like you said, there's a combination between opinionated and listening. Some of our best innovations have come directly from the customers. These are people who are using it in the field and are tripping over the new cases. So it's a balance. >> So Michael Dell on stage just talked about the ability of Dell to be able to run workloads wherever customers wanted run their workloads. So far we've talked about HCI, which is interesting, however we're going into a model where we need to run workloads in a data center, we need to run workloads outside a data center, and we need to manage that infrastructure. What's the Nutanix Dell story around managing workloads across hybrid clouds? >> I would say this is a big trend we're seeing in the market there's different terminology for it multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, right workload on right cloud platform at right time. When you start throwing those vectors in place it creates a lot of potential confusion and complexity, right? How do you determine what's the best cloud platform in terms of cost, in terms of the laws of phycics, in terms of latency, with SLAs with these workloads? In terms of laws of the land from governance and overall legal perspective. So you start to bring in, as the market moves towards multi-cloud, there's this vacuum that needs to be filled that we can fill here together. It's like how do you determine, what's the context, what's the right cost model for a particular workload that makes perfect sense to run on a public cloud platform, like an AWS or an Azure or a Google cloud? What other highly predictable workloads absolutely need to be run in a modernized data center environment powered by Nutanix plus Dell HCI? To me there's a lot of vacuum that can be filled by innovation with management, automation, context around making those decisions. And the last thing I will say, it's not just about technology innovation, it's an opportunity for our customers, I believe, to really evolve their careers to the next step. If you're an infrastructure manager and all of a sudden there's different platforms where the infrastructure resides, what better opportunity than to become that strategic consultant within your own enterprise to help make those decision with context and with good smarts behind it? >> I think you hit some good points. When you look at it, there's going to be multiple clouds and it's about enabling the choice and integrating with whatever the right cloud is for your needs. We've got virtue stream capabilities for tier one type cloud stuff all the way to Azure on the XE series we just integrated with OMS on the Azure side so we'll actually upload all of the stats and metrics into their log analytics solutions. It's enabling choice, enabling which cloud, there's going to be multiple clouds and different clouds are going to be optimized for different things so I think you'll see us embrace hybrid, embrace it across multiple clouds on the back end. I don't know if there's one size fits all. >> So opinionation, I think, is a great segue into what's important I think as IT managers are looking at solutions, there's no one vendor today that can that an end to end solution and say, you know, we're your one stop shop for hybrid cloud. So this is where opinion matters. What is Nutanix's opinion when it comes to how to deliver hybrid cloud? So this is what you will be judged on, can't be judged on the technology because the technology isn't there yet, but where's the vision? >> I think it starts and ends with make complexity, make the complexity with multiple cloud environments, with complicated legacy data center environments, make that all invisible. How do you radically reduce that complexity and we talk all about one click, one OS, any cloud. It's not just a nice marketing tag line I think it really stands for a principle and a vision around how do you make a lot of that complexity go away? So you can redirect a lot of these IT man hours over towards inventing more. We just launched a new campaign you're talking about freedom to invent, freedom to build the data center that you want to build. So it's about coming with that opinion that everything that was so complicated and the next big horizon is multi-cloud environments, how do you make that essentially disappear, go away, so you can reapply your IT resource to new things that can really impact the business. The last thing I'll say too, spiraling cloud cost, and so if you have a teenager at home and maybe you're brave enough to give that teenager the credit card and they're online gaming or doing something, so it's kind of that shock bill you get at the end of the month, depending on what workload you're running on what cloud platform you could have this teenager with the runaway credit card syndrome. So how do you simplify, or bring that context and visibility to the forefront to help make some of those smarter decisions? So that's some of the things that we like to think about in terms of removing barriers and empowering the customers to take back control of what could potentially become a rapidly disaggregated, chaotic environment. >> You just threw every parent off their mark right there. Oh my God the credit card! >> I've lived it. >> Are we going to hear some of this next week? I mean we've got your big show, you guys almost flip rolls, right? Dan you're hosting this week and for you Ben it's next week down in New Orleans. Give us a little sneak peak. >> We're really excited about next week. So Dan has been kind enough to host us here this week in Las Vegas, so it's a rough life next week >> New Orleans >> We go to New Orleans. We have our user conference we call .NEXT and Keith you're going to be joining us >> Keith: I will be there. >> theCube will be there >> Looking forward to theCube being there. So this is about bringing together it's a lot of early adopters, but increasingly it's about more and more customers that I would call more the early majority as you see hyper-converge start to surge, multi-cloud start to surge in terms of how do you fill that vacuum that's out there? That's what this conference is going to be all about. We'll have new announcements, we'll have innovations that we'll be demoing, and most importantly we're really about openness and this is about strategic partnerships. To the earlier point, show me a one stop shop that solve all this complexity and I'll show you unfulfilled promise. And so I think the work we're doing with Dell will be at the forefront talking about, hey, how are we working together to solve some pretty snarly issues here that we have to solve for our customers. >> Well, you're going to go home both of you and say it's been tough, two weeks on the road. You get no sympathy though, Las Vegas and New Orleans back to back. >> Not bad. >> It's a good way to go Dan and Ben thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you next week >> Thank you very much >> down in New Orleans theCube continues here, we are live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018.

(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a CUBEConversation at SiliconANGLE's, Palo Alto studio, happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest and and new to Nutanix, the Chief Marketing Officer, Ben Gibson. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu thanks for having me here. I love the studio and love the chance to chat with you. >> Alright, so our audience know Nutanix really well, so let's introduce them to you first of all. Give our audience a little bit about your background and, you know, we know Nutanix IPO'd not that long ago. Exciting. Growing real fast so, you know, I'm sure it makes sense but why for Ben? >> Yeah. For me, firs and foremost, it's such an exciting company. We're going through a lot of fairly strong growth right now. We've really created a category in the Space Realm Hyperconvergence and now we're really expanding from that position and to be in the middle of that, I think is really exciting. >> So your background is mostly in the networking space and it's one of those things, I'm a networking guy by background. >> Yeah. >> Networking is changing a lot, lately, but not nearly as fast as some of the other parts so, you know, tell us a little bit about your background, where you've been, what your skillset is going to bring to Nutanix, in that ecosystem. >> Yeah, you know, I did, like you, I hailed from the networking industry. I spent a good portion of my career at Sisco, I spent part of my career at Aruba Networks, which is in the Wi-Fi, wireless space, but I think you're right. I think the acceleration of innovation in Nutanix's industry a lot of stuff has changed so quickly in that space, so networking hasn't quite kept up with that level of change of things and for me it's kind of getting on a much faster train and moving forward with it. >> Alright, so we've had theCUBE at every single one of the DotNext conferences >> Ben: Thank you. >> They're fun. Your predecessor Howard Ting had a certain flair so let's talk a little bit about the show and, you know are there things that your going to be putting your stamp on at this show, coming up in New Orleans? >> Yeah, I mean first of all it great to succeed Howard, in the role. I used to be an advisor for the company and so Howard and I used to have periodic pancake breakfasts and I told him what I thought and he shared with me a lot about how exciting things were. What was happening at Nutanix and how they really move forward. And I knew about DotNext, I've seen DotNext I know what an exciting show it is. For a company like Nutanix to draw, this year, over 5000, attendees to this show, that's notable. And, what, to me, that signals is the level of intensity and the level of loyalty that we enjoy in our customer base, they're believers and they're coming to the show to learn from us, to connect with each other and really to accelerate some of their plans on how they continue to innovate. >> Yeah, you know, we travel to so many different shows and absolutely, it is at it's core, it's a user conference, it's users there wanting to learn how to use what they have even better. Learn about the cool net technologies. Dave Valente and I have talked about Nutanix is up there with companies like Service Now, that have, just, people that come and are just, you know, kind of fanatically supported. It reminds me of, you know, Vmware's a great company, doing well today. Many years ago everybody had the I love VMware bumper stickers. Vmware is a great show. We'll be there this year >> Ben: Yeah, so will we. >> And your company will too, so ah, what, what do people what brings them to that show from your standpoint and give us a little insight as to, kind of, some of the special things they'll be seeing this year in New Orleans. >> Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest attractions of coming to this show is if you think about the role of an infrastructure professional, someone who's looking at hybrid Cloud environments and how do you manage those. Thinking about what applications run on what cloud platform. There's a lot of change and fluidity to that and I think the nature or the role of an IT or an Infrastructure professional is changing. Server Store J-Admin is quickly evolving because that's converging, just like the technology has and so, for me this show is about how do you get ahead of those trends. How do you position yourself to be as strategic as possible, within your own organization? And that's the way I like to think of Dotnext, it's a place that a professional can come to learn and to grow their career and their technology expertise. >> Yeah it's a great point, one of the things I've loved on theCUBE is there are speakers that aren't just from the tech industry, so everyone from Deepak Malhotra, who is from Harvard, um, thought leaders in the space to onstage at one of the shows it was David Blaine doing a magic trick while one of your engineers was configuring stuff. So there's some great speakers that'll be at the event this year to, not only learn the tech but as you said, you're thinking about the persons career and how do they embrace change and how do they help become more valuable to their company. >> Yeah, you know, there's two in particular that are going to be joining this year that I'm very excited about. One is Dr. Brene Brown. If you haven't seen her TED talk on YouTube I highly recommend you go and check it out. It's something different. It's about how do you be vulnerable, with yourself, with your career. How do you take chances? How do you take risk, and that's a lot of what's going on in our in our industry right now. The second one I think is going to be really fun and that's Anthony Bourdain. Known for his show, Parts Unknown and he's going to have colorful language, right, noted, some colorful language but also he's just a riot. He's the one I think is going to bring his special kind of flair to the show and get everyone really excited, laughing and maybe a little bit of gasping, in terms of what he's going to be sharing with us. >> Yeah, absolutely I mean, New Orleans is a great culinary destination and so I know everybody that's going there you'll want to check out the music, the culture and a lot going in there. So, excited about the show. We're going to have theCUBE there for two days. Last thing I want to talk to you about, Ben, just, Nutanix as a company, when I registered for the show there was one of the questions I thought was pretty interesting. They said, "What do you think Nutanix is?" You know, how do you, what's your relationship with Nutanix? And I'm trying to remember, I know one of the options was M: Is Nutanix a hypercovergence infrastructure player? Are they a cloud player? I think storage might even be in there, it's been one of those things as to, who is Nutanix? What are you today and what do you want to be in the next phase of growth? >> You know, it's a great question Stu, "Who is Nutanix?" We are focused on helping our customers build their enterprise cloud. Our taglines could be Your Enterprise Cloud. Enterprise Cloud is not only how you modernize your own data center but it's also, how do you embrace? How do you have a strategy? How do you govern? How do you bring together the right workload, for the right cloud platform at the right time? And that's the direction we're taking with our innovation. This is what more and more of our customers are looking to do. Not every application's going to a public cloud provider. Not every application is staying on premise. We're going to be living in the hybrid world, Enterprise Cloud is about how do you take the ingredients of hyperconvergent infrastructure? Take the ingredients for automation and management, over these different workloads, across these different environments and do so in a way that makes the complexity of infrastructure and multiple cloud management and make that all invisible. So for us that's our mission. It's building that Enterprise Cloud and making all that complexity go away. And that's the vision we're going to be talking about and that's what we think our attendees are really looking to get the guidance and, kind of the vision of how they move their careers forward and flourish in that space >> Ben, it's the barometer that I've been using for probably the last two years. If I spend a lot more time in kind of the Dev/Op Cloud native, you know, worlds these days. We were at an Amazon summit yesterday but, absolutely. It's heterogeneous world. IT has never, you know, let's throw out the old and start the new. Sure there's some new companies that might do that but it's a heterogeneous world, it's a multi-cloud world and big struggle for people is how do they get their arms around it? So if I look at a company that has started mostly on premises, it's like, oh how are you evolving? How are you working with the public Cloud? You know, Nutanix has been working very closely with Google over the last year or so. A new acquisition recently that I know plays into this whole story. Tell us a little bit about the acquisition and, you know, how does Nutanix look at itself, which is now, I mean, if you read the Wall Street reports, Nutanix is a software company. And you're getting great multiples on that and it's helping and you know I've been pretty vocal on this from it's early days, is Nutanix was never a hardware company. It, you know, building an appliance was a go to market choice to simplify and make it easy for customers but as the company matured, >> Yep. >> It made a lot more options and today it makes perfect sense that really software is where it goes, so you talked about a bunch of things there but specifically, kind of the multi-cloud and the acquisition first. >> You know Stu, we're really excited about this recent acquisition we made. It's a company called Minjar and the offering is essentially it's going to be integrated into our broader software platform, that allows customers to be able to assess on a realtime basis. What's the right Cloud platform for a particular workload from a costing perspective? From reliability standpoint. Derish talks about the law of the land. The laws of physics and the like, you need to apply these all to determine what you're going to run where. And what we got with this Minjar acquisition, is a really sophisticated way that our customers can embrace and is part of their enterprise cloud. Because part of this is taking back control over all this disaggregation of workloads running everywhere. You're losing control. Losing governance of your data and your applications if you don't really keep on top of it, this acquisition, I believe, is going to be a really key part of helping IT organizations regain that control. Yet still enjoy all the benefits of hybrid-cloud environments. Whether it be with an AWS an Azure a Google Cloud platform, like we're partnering very closely with, as well as what they're building with their Enterprise Cloud on premise. Whether it be, you know, with Nutanix. >> Yeah, it reminds me of, was it Progressive Insurance, I think has the, you know >> Yeah. >> We're going to give you quote on all of the things there. Cloud is complicated these days. Is there bias towards it, pushing towards, you know, Nutanix closer partners in the technology itself. >> Yeah, I mean it certainly has. There's a lot of complexity around that and to me the industry hasn't solved a lot of new complexity that has come out of the emerging trend of a different line of businesses starting to develop a new application now, on a certain Cloud platform and the like. And as you're seeing this demand for more application mobility between clouds, so all of a sudden the partners that are coming to us and the partners we're seeing and are demanded of that we work with in the market our players are looking at application automation. Players that are looking at dev/ops tools and the like and it both guides how we innovate on our Calm platform, which we introduced last year at DotNext as well it helps us expand our reach. So, we talked to our traditional buyers but there's a lot of new buyers now that are building those apps and managing those environments and we're going to start to see some of those come into the DotNext show. >> Alright. Ben I want to give you the final word. DotNext is one of the many events that I know you do lots of regional shows and the like, what should we expect to see from Nutanix through 2018? >> Yeah, you know the first thing is that the dialogue, the narrative for the company, that we're going out with we've moved to be a software only company and I think our customers tell us and I heard this from one of our largest retail industry customers just a few weeks ago, by moving to a software only model, it's given them freedom to take advantage of Nutanix, regardless of their hardware platforms. And like you said we've never been a hardware company, it's all been about software value and what you're going to see from us is a new narrative. An expansion of the branded Nutanix talking about the freedom we give for customers to build the data center they've always wanted to build. Freedom to run their application or the workload that they've wanted to run, where they choose to run it based on that insight I talked about. And in another realm, the freedom to play. Freedom to get their weekends back. A lot of our value proposition is because of all the complexity we've taken out of the equation, is that we give our customers their weekends back. This is a story that our DotNext attendees, I think, know better than other but we want to spread the word and so part of that is harnessing that freedom concept to build, to run, to play to invent and tell the world. And DotNext, whether is be in New Orleans, which I think is going to be a blast. When we take it to Europe, London and we do this all around the world, to me that's kind of ground zero for that story. For the community of what we've built together with our customers and partners and that what we take out to the world. >> Alright, well Ben Gibson, I'm glad we could introduce you to our community today because we're going to be seeing you at lots of other events, you and your team, of course, theCUBE will be at Nutanix, DotNext in New Orleans. Nutanix and you will be at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Google Cloud Next happening this summer in San Fransisco. Lots of other shows so be sure to tune in to theCUBE.net, get the list of all the upcoming shows, Ben, Nutanix and of course lots of the Cloud and infrastructure ecosystem. Check it all out. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (uplifting music)

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering new Tanex. Dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Nutanix dot. Next we are here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We are joined by Dhiraj Penn day. He is the CEO and founder of Nutanix. Thank you so much for returning to our program. You are a Cuba. Thank you. So I want to talk to you about what we're here to do is celebrate 10 years of Nutanix. Ben Gibson, when he was up there on the main stage, he's the head of marketing. He was talking about watching you backstage, saying that I saw in him a lot of pride and emotion because this is really your baby. You started 10 years ago. There's been a lot of nostalgia, uh, bringing up some of your first employees. There's even a picture of you poised with a ping pong ball ready to play a little beer pong back in the early days. So talk a little bit about what this means to you to be here 10 years after you founded this couple. >>Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to come here. Um, err, it looks like an era, 10 years as an error. We've built a family of customers and employees and partners and uh, yet it feels like a, we haven't achieved a thing. So, you know, to me the more I make it look like it's 2010 back again, you can go back to being like a startup again and you know, growing from here because you know, growth is a very relative term. You know, it's a, it's a mindset thing and um, I think the new day and age of multicloud and what we have to do to virtualize all these different silos that have been merged and to virtualize, simplify and integrate, you know, virtualize, simplify, integrate clouds is going to be a journey of a lifetime actually. >>Yeah. Deer Ridge. I think back to some of our earliest discussions, uh, you know, you would bring us in and talking about, you know, the, the, the challenge of our era is building software for the distributed architecture that we need. And that was as relevant in 2010 or 2012 as it is here in 2019. Um, HCI helps simplify that deployment of virtualization. We are definitely a point that we need to simplify. Cloud. Cloud is here, it's growing. The hybrid pieces are there. So maybe prednisone side, you know, kind of what's the same about the journey and some of it is, you know, making one click upgrades in today's environment is way more complex, uh, than, than it would have been back when it was just a, you know, an appliance. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think talking >>about the whole concept of hyperconvergence initially started out as converging compute with storage. How do you keep them close together? Because, uh, machines need a locality, you know, applications need a local data because the network is the real enemy. And uh, the same was true of human performance. You know, like lots of teams, lots bureaucracy, very little autonomy. So when you brought data close to applications, application, people became autonomous, you know, they could do things on their own and that was the power of hyperconvergence. You know, you're able to provide performance to data and machines and you're able to provide performance to people because they became autonomous. I think that is not changing even in the hyperscaler data center environment and anything, the fact that you have to hop multiple switches to get to data. Uh, I think it's recreating the same problems that we started out this company with, you know, almost 10 years ago. >>In fact, if anything, the hyperscaler networks are worse than the networks that private clouds actually had or even on prem data centers had. So keeping data close to applications is, is relevant and it's fashionable one more time. And the fact that you can provide that autonomy to application folks to go launch their apps in the public cloud through this new architecture, using the bare metal service offerings to the public cloud where the bare metal offerings look like HP server or Dell server to us, I think recreates the same. So I think I'm a big proponent of the saying that says the more things change, the more they remain the same. And they actually look very much the same as 10 years ago. >>So how do you think that you describing the technolog technology, technological changes that have taken place, but really we're sort of back to where we started from, but how would you describe the ways, the differences in the ways that people work together, talking about the human beings who are actually using this technology? >>Well, uh, for one, uh, this notion of uh, converging teams and people is similar to the notion of converging, uh, machines, you know, hardware to pure software. I think, you know, what ever happened in our personal lives with the iPhone and the Android, uh, O S it's exactly what hyperconvergence data is. You know, we had all these gadgets and they were special special purpose, single purpose gadgets and we made them as apps and they were all together in this one, uh, sort of device. And then the device connected to cloud services. I think that's what happened in the enterprise computing as well. You know, compute, storage, networking, security, everything coming together as pure software is running the apps. And I think that has created the notion of generalists in it as well. Because as it matures, you can't have so many specialists. And just like in healthcare, you know, you can't have so many uh, specialist doctors when you need like a ton of primary care physicians and generalist practitioners and that's what it is going through as well. >>And so that's changing the skills that are in demand too from employers because you are looking for people who are sort of a mile wide and inch deep. >>Yeah. And in fact a, the inch deep is actually not a pejorative. I would say that it's a good thing because with automation and a lot of layering of software, you don't need to get deeper into the details. The weeds, especially if infrastructure computing goes, you know, what's our, is to really elevate it to go figure out things that really matter to the business, you know, which is applications and services as opposed to going and stitching together stuff that really can be done with pure software and a standardization. I know the level of standardization that operating models can bring with a commodity servers and fewer software select people go and do things that really are more relevant in this age actually. Yup. >>I was wondering if he did the close of the keynote, there was discussion of the tech preview of XY clusters. You and I've spoken a little bit off camera, uh, about this, but there is a lot of interest out there. You know, everything when you know, uh, Azure first announced Azure stack, it got everyone excited. Uh, to be honest, Rebecca and I were at the Microsoft, uh, one of the Microsoft shows last year and most of the attendees, we're really talking about it. So it's that kind of the buzz versus the reality of what customers are actually using. Where do you see, where are we with kind of that, that hybrid discussion and you know, why is Nutanix taking a slightly different approach, uh, than, than some of the others out there? >>Yeah, I mean, you know, this a hybrid cloud is another word for hyperconverged clouds and whatever HCI was in 2010 is what hybrid is today. So imagine 10 years from 2010 we're still talking about HCI, especially in the large enterprise as they won't barely begun to say look, private cloud equals at CA. I think that's been a sort of an epiphany moment for most of the CEOs of the global 2000 companies just in the last three years. You've been talking about it for 10 years now. So there's a bell curve of technology adoption. We are in the very early stages of what hyperconverged clouds will mean or what hybrid cloud should mean. I think doing it right is important because the market is large, you know, the ability to really move, uh, applications and infrastructure. I call them apps now, you know, the hypervisor is now in half because it can run in the Amazon platform, it can run in the Azure platform and that platform that they provided, billing identity, you know, recommendations and things of that nature. >>So on top of that, back from how do you go and in a put your app in the catalog, I think that's the overall, uh, sort of metaphor that I use. So in that sense, I don't look at the platform as a zero sum game for us. We just have to look at it as a platform where our apps can actually go and run. how does a company, you've grown quite a bit, but if you look at the overall market, you're still a small player compared to a Microsoft or Cisco or a Google out there. So we definitely think you have that opportunity to help simplify that, that cloud hyperconverged cloud experience as you said. Um, but uh, you know, how, how does the Nutanix, uh, get there? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, um, and I say this to people who followed virtualization, the history of virtualization. >>Uh, when VMware was building virtualization, silver market was $55 billion. Storage was 30 billion, networking was 25 billion and not $110 billion market. When they meant to $4 billion, they just had to think about what does it mean to put a layer of software on top of all this stuff so people can drag and drop experience from one server to another from one storage array to another and so on. So there's enough value to add on top of that 110 billion with your own 4 billion in 2012 there are $4 billion company. Actually not right now. We're thinking about, okay, these things are the new platform. Where is the value in going and virtualizing simplifying and integrating the mall with a layer of software that becomes the new integration software for all things multi cloud. Yeah. So it's interesting when I connect the dots with that to Nutanix is going to be going through its own transformation and you've talked publicly a lot about, you know, you sit on the board of Adobe that moved from software scripted is challenging. >>What I want to understand is what does that end result of these subscription model? What does that mean for your customers and how they can, you know, change that relationship. Okay. I talked about this in my keynote as well. The why of subscription. I think the very fact that we've decoupled the entitlement, uh, from hardware was the first change for us. You know, the fact that software can live anywhere. And on top of that, what subscription delivers is this notion of residual value where you can say, look, if I have unused products and unused, uh, terms on, on some of these products, can I use them for other things? Actually. So it provides a very agile procurement framework that is very new to the world of infrastructure actually. And yet we've had a ton of shelfware in infrastructure in general and a on-prem software in general, even in the public cloud that a lot of shelfware do. I think the ability to really go and repurpose stuff for new things that you want to buy provides a lot of optionality to our customers. You know, subscription also is about bite sizing thing so you don't have to buy big things, you know, and delivering it in real time. So I think, uh, you will see more and more of a consumption model change towards subscription in the coming years. >>It talking about the value of Nutanix in this multi-cloud world and you're, and you're talking about how customers really want that optionality. We're here in Copenhagen. How would you say the U S customers are different from the European customers in terms of what they're looking for or are they different? You >>know, uh, they're very similar because there's ton of global companies out there who have local offices and such in the global 2000 has tentacles everywhere. Uh, I think in some ways where they do differ is when it comes to the partner community and the channel and the system integrators, they're actually more influential here in Europe and Asia Pacific than in the U S because most of the talent in the U S goes and works for companies like us. And, uh, most of the talent in Europe, in Asia Pacific, they work for the channel and the system integrators. So how we actually work with them and learn from them and educate them on the, on the transformation I think is basically the only thing that's different. All right. Steerage, uh, w one of the feedback I got from customers is something that I hear at the Amazon show. I'm inundated with so much new stuff, you know, I can't keep up with it. >>Um, what might you explain a little bit kind of the portfolio and also if you can just organizationally how you think of this. You know, when we hear, you know, Amazon does their two pizza teams and they scale is very different from a traditional software infrastructure companies. So it's a great, uh, a point in, one of my favorite sort of things to think about these days is how do you not sell things that sell an experience. It's very, very important to differentiate the two because you know, you can build a ton of things. And then the question is if you've left the integration as an exercise to the reader or to the customer and you're basically telling them, look, you can as well buy best of breed from other companies in integrated on your own. So the job of integration and to really sell an experiences has to be left, shifted to companies like us. >>And that's what we've been doing with our products. You know, we are really bringing them together. When you say all together now it's also about our products actually it's the portfolio around data, making sure that we are really bringing them all together. They can leverage each other. One sits on top of the other one tiers to the other. They can share common policy policy engines and things like that. I mean what we're doing with security for example, is bringing multicloud with the old world of micro segmentation. Actually, you know, there's a lot of integration that's going on yet we want to provide each of these GMs autonomy because you know, at some level, uh, they are all looking for individual use cases and workflows and they're looking for mastery, which is like how do I master, uh, what I do well with my customers, but in the purpose has to be more than their own actually know. >>And like you think about autonomy, mastery, purpose, you know, one of Dan Pink's philosophies of motivation are general managers. They're motivated if you give them amp, you know, autonomy, mastery and purpose. But at the end of the day, the purpose is customer driven. It's not driven by products is driven by customers. It's during my customer's experience rather than the general managers, things they're actually building to the customers. Just one followup. When I think about, you know, one of the challenges I hear inside customers and I thought we'd made more progress is still a lot of silos. I talked to customers that are like, well, you know, I, I've deployed Nutanix and I love it, but there's this group over here and they're doing something different and they're certified or they're starting to use it, or Oh my God, this developer team spun something up and didn't pay any attention. So, you know, it was supposed to get everything back under control and, and manage it and work with the business. >>But, you know, I feel like the customers haven't made a lot of progress on that journey in the last 10 years. What's your feedback from customers? It's very true. Look, I think, uh, what you just said is also about autonomy for the developers and autonomy for that other team and such. So you can't force fit everything into single size. You know, this one size fits all kind of a philosophy. That's where there's a bell curve of adoption in any technology. I mean, even today, if you think of the hyperscalers, you know, you might think that they have it all. They have 2% of the market, you know, and that's how big this market really is. So I think going back to understanding that each of these groups actually has skill sets that are different. They're used to doing things a certain way and unless you go and weave it with them, you know what I tell people is you want to walk to where the customer is before you walk with them to where you want them to be actually. >>So walking to where the customer is not going to the private cloud. You know, we could easily have said, look, let's banish all this. Let's build everything as an off prem cloud service 10 years ago. But he said, the market is not there yet. Similarly, we said we got to build appliances because right now the white box market is not there yet for the enterprise. Then when we came out of it, we said, look, the market is already there. Let's walk with them with pure software now subscription. We did the same with the underlying marginalization software below Nutanix. We said, let's walk the world where the customers, let's run on top of VMware if that's what it takes, and then walk with them to where we want them to be, which is an invisible hypervisor and such. So I think we've got to keep doing this. You know, where, let's remove the hubris from a innovation in Silicon Valley and a lot of hubris about these things that we know it all. I think when you try to go and understand and have the entity for the customer is when magical things happening. >>That's a fantastic note to end on a dear AJ, thank you so much for coming back on the cube. It's always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more from Nutanix dot. Next.

whether you're just getting started in terms of transforming your data center modernizing looking at hyperconvergence infrastructure or whether you're building out your cloud strategy thinking about private public distributed clouds Nutanix and the partners that you met here are committed to helping you on that journey I am very excited and proud to share that together we have made quite an impact on the four organizations that were here at dot next is part of our dot heart initiative girls intact the women's Sports Foundation move the foundation for hospital art and workforce opportunity services we have thanks to your generosity donated more than 7,500 dollars now we have a couple more hours to go to get to ten thousand and I know that we can do it so thank you so much for your generosity and be sure to take advantage of the last couple of hours I'm a solutions Expo to grab some tokens and get us to ten thousand dollars it is also my pleasure in the spirit of giving to award this tricked-out Nutanix colored Trek bicycle to one lucky winner from our social contest trek has been a customer of newt annexes since 2014 and like Nutanix they share a number of business values around giving back into the community creating positive change building things that last memories relationships products and so I'd like to take a moment to please welcome back out to stage Nutanix CMO Ben Gibson to help me do the honors [Music] [Applause] welcome back hey Julie that's a gorgeous bike yeah lights it's very like carbon fiber frame look at this thing Wow sleek can you tell me a little bit about it you know Julie this bike I mentioned before I'm a cyclist this is not only in beautiful Nutanix brand color it's got top-of-the-line component REE Shimano El Tigre this thing all comes together I'd like to think of this as hyperconvergence for the cyclist just as beautiful the same impute value it does have a Nutanix monkey on the front all right so we ready to unveil our winner let's do it all right so the winner of the trek social contest is Rob chlorine are you here yeah now Rob yeah come on up you got to come you know check this out we're not gonna ask you to clip in well actually maybe you should clip in I'm not sure we can ship it home for you so maybe you just ride it all the way home where you from New York from New York it's just a short ride back up there congratulations Rob we'll get this ship to you awesome thank you I think we have someone help you out done okay been in the spirit of giving I think I'm just gonna continue let the good times roll yeah in the beginning yesterday you also put out a challenge to our next audience trying to find the Easter eggs that were in the brand video yeah so we got some good responses people were hunting watching the video if you look carefully you could see some of these Easter eggs that were popping up on this video you look carefully you see some Nutanix logo you see prism up on the screen for someone who's showing freedom to get a lot of work done the one my favorite actually is number three there that's artistic the Nutanix acts in the sky so Julie we had a lot of people that tweet it in to try to identify and we have a winner don't worry yeah it was a little bit harder than I think people thought but there was one lucky winner who was one of the first people to find the Nutanix Easter eggs and that is Chad door are you here dad or are you here so you'll recall Chad gets to join us at dot next 2019 all expenses paid airfare hotel and pass very good we also intrude on X fashion like to reward the person who's been the most active on our mobile app so this is someone who's been giving us feedback being part of the community very prolific with the dot next app so congratulations to Faizal Joe waves if you are here you also will be joining us at Sonic's 2019 on us and then how many people are interested in the Nook anyone understand if we were given away all right congratulations to Mike Gellar nice job Mike so we have given away two prizes all expenses paid to dot next 2019 however we haven't mentioned where that's going to be Julie where is dot next 2019 well I think maybe in the spirit of the the culinary theme that we've been on we had Anthony Bourdain on stage we could make us a challenge we will throw out three culinary hints to you Nutanix employers you may not play and I think I have oh I do I have one more science cookbook for whoever gets it right all right so everything you get it right shout it out we've got people in the audience you're gonna be listening and then why don't you do the honors of the first clue all right first hint we're going to a place that's going undergoing a culinary revolution there's a famous chef named Jimmy Martinez just opened up a new restaurant renowned for handcrafted tacos I'm not sure with mr. Modine would say about that but handcrafted they sound delicious to me no I'm here too a few coming out let me give you a second I don't I'm not hearing it this city is also renowned the city is also renowned for celebrating the medieval era so you can enjoy a four-course meal while you're watching nice just for their honor I haven't yet say it again Anaheim yes so you will be joining us dot next 2019 in the sunny Southern California area of Anaheim so please mark your calendars May 7 through 9 and then of course if you really enjoyed the learning and the fun that we had this week and maybe some of your teammates weren't able to join you we will be out on dot next on tour coming to a city near you and if you enjoy the conference experience and would like to participate six months from now across the pond please feel free to join us at Dominic's conference in London from November 27th through 29 and I think maybe one of the the high notes to end on then might be to circle back on freedom yeah you know like I said when I opened our show this week this is a community we talked about enterprise cloud we explored a lot around what invisibility means and what we're achieving together on that front and we talked about why why are we together on it's about realizing new freedoms freedoms to build the data so do you want to build all the way through to freedom to play and I was at the party last night and I saw a good deal play last night too you know we were thrilled to have you join us here this week as a continuation of this growing community I want to thank you for your time and your energy and your engagement to make this what it is and I thought also I wanted to mention a couple things first of all thank you to all the wonderful Nutanix engineers and employees that worked so hard to bring this all together and there's two people in particular I want to acknowledge as part of our Newt annex family and broader community here that really put their heart and soul into making this experience what it is the first is Aaron Alonso and her wonderful team who create this entire event thank you very much Aaron amazing there's another gentleman named Rohit Goyal and he's not the only one but Rohit more than anyone else and his colleagues spend immeasurable amounts of time creating the wonderful content that showed up in all of our breakout sessions Rohit thank you so much and as a reminder those breakout sessions actually continue our last said right after this session here we'll go to our last set of breakout sessions and then we're going to depart for home so again Julie and I both thank you so much for being a part of this week hope to see you in London and if not London I heard a yes and if not London certainly we'll see you in Southern California beautiful Anaheim next year thank you so much baby thank you Jordao free [Applause] ladies and gentlemen this concludes our afternoon keynote breakout sessions will begin in 20 minutes

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