>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC it's The Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Good morning everybody. In 2009, infrastructure professionals, and the vendors who supplied products to them, started to realize that the cloud was real. They began to try to replicate that cloud on site. The first instantiation was what we call converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure was essentially the combination of storage, server, and networking kind of bolted on together but prepackaged, pretested, and engineered to be installed and delivered in a more seamless fashion to minimize the amount of labor that had to go into the management of infrastructure. That was around 2009 and in that same year, Nutanix was born with a slightly different vision, to actually develop a solution that was truly cloud-like for on prem. Welcome everybody to Nutanix .NEXT 2017. This is The Cube, the leader, in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman from SiliconANGLE Wikibon, who is an expert on Nutanix, on hyper-converged infrastructure, which was the next instantiation of converged infrastructure. And now, Stu, we see this going into the cloud era. Nutanix is a company that's probably going to do close to a billion dollars this year, if not a billion. They got a two and a half billion dollar market cap. They got a gross margin model in the high fifties. They're growing at 65, 66% per year. The stock, when they did their IPO, was a meteoric rise, sort of flattened out since. It's up today, on some news that was broken by CNBC. They're doing a deal with Google. This is our, let's see, fourth? Third or fourth .NEXT >> Third year of the US show, The fourth >> Fourth overall. >> Nutanix conference overall >> we did some in Europe. >> Stu, great to be working with you. We've been together a lot this month at a number of shows. This is sort of the capstone of what we call true private cloud and a great instantiation and example of it. What are your thoughts, early thoughts, on what to hear. >> Steve, great to be with you as always, and excited to be here at this show. One of the things I love in our role as analysts is when you see something in some of the early stages. So, I first got introduced to Nutanix when they were about 20 people. Little bit smaller than say, when I first met VMware, when they were about 100 people. And to watch this company and this wave grow I remember John Furrier and I interviewed Dheeraj, CEO of Nutanix, back at VMworld 2012. And, right, infrastructure and converged infrastructure, I mean, I worked on some of the original Vblock architectures when I worked at EMC, and we're saying "Take my storage, take my network, "take my compute, put 'em together, "package 'em, integrate 'em, try to make it simpler." But when we talked to Dheeraj, it wasn't about the infrastructure, he really posited that the challenge of our day is building distributed systems, and it's really a software challenge, and that is at the core of what Nutanix's IP, what their engineering mentality is, and they've kept that going forward. We always talk about, oh, okay, in our infrastructure silos, Nutanix's vision from day one was to go beyond that, we talk about hybrid cloud or multicloud, today, that's what Nutanix is starting to deliver in their vision. When they first launched themselves as an enterprise cloud, as their marketing, everybody was like "What are you talking about? They're an HCI player, what's their cloud mission?" Making an announcement with Google shows that they are going to have some partnerships there to live in that hybrid or multicloud world. And Dave, I want to clarify, when I You know, we throw around these terms, hybrid and multi for me these days, I look at it as, hybrid is a lot of what I know you used to call federated, so how do I have a model that really looks the same whether that's just the application layer or even going down to the infrastructure layer, spreading between environments, typically my private cloud and my public cloud service writers can be in the mix there, multicloud means I've got data and I've got applications that are going to live in multiple public clouds in multiple data centers, of course we've got SaaS, so that differentiates a little differently. Things like Kubernetes are really helping that explosion and that discussion of multicloud, kind of replacing what we used to talk, with PAS, the platform as the service, where I could really be independent of the cloud, so there's a lot of nuance and detail which I'm looking forward to digging into. >> It's nuance >> Over the next two days >> But it's important nuance, because basically you're saying it's not just a bunch of hybrid, it's not just a bunch of clouds, >> Stu: Yeah. >> It's some kind of federated >> Stu: Yeah, we had >> It's a data plane and a control plane that spans multiple physical locations, essentially. >> Yeah, I worry about things like identity, I worry about things as to how to security SPAN these environments, governance of course plays in a lot, but I'm sure we'll hear things about consumption model because one of the things cloud consumption model used to be like, oh well some business guy just swipes a credit card and goes and does it, well shouldn't all infrastructure be as easy to buy as we did, I mean, you remember a decade ago we always talked about the consumerization of IT, now it's really that cloudification of IT with companies like Amazon really driving forth the model that everyone wants to copy. >> So since we've started researching Nutanix and talking to some of it's customers two years ago at the initial .NEXT conference, at the Fontainebleau in Miami. Really talked to a number of customers and you could see the enthusiasm for simplicity, you could see the desire to reduce their reliance of VMware and the vTax that was hanging over their heads, and at that time, a couple years ago Nutanix introduced Acropolis, which is essentially a hypervisor inside of what they call now the cloud operating system. But that is a strategic move by a company that's basically saying, "hey, we're not just hyper converged, "cause everybody's now pivoting "to hyper converged, we're cloud," so it's a message to the financial world, to the industry analysts, and to customers that, we have a vision and to the financial world, we have a large TAM. Financial guys are more worried about, they're always worried about TAM expansion, that's their TAM expansion plane. Now, bringing it back to some of their financials, just briefly, Nutanix essentially loses 37 cents from an operating basis, on every dollar of revenue it makes. Okay, that's I guess in vogue these days, but it's funny accounting, because they don't recognize the full value of their OEM deals, like the Dell deal, again some nuance, and there are some accounting changes that are occurring which should be a tailwind for this company from just from the optics of the income statement. So you're going to see, and I think the street's finally starting to understand this, again, stocks up today on the Google news, there's no press release yet, but CNBC broke that news, what do we know about that? >> Yeah, so first of all, right. The accounting changes coming this summer, if I remember right, I believe it's August, >> Dave: Yep. >> So that means that rather than taking the three year subscription and only taking a small piece of that today and pushing most of it out into the future, there will be a restatement of all of Nutanix's number, which, right, will be a tailwind as you said and push all that in. Google, number one, is you look at one of the most interesting dynamics of Nutanix is, been the relationship with VMware. I did an interview with Dheeraj right after the IPO, I was at the headquarters, sitting with him in this beautiful library that they have there, and he turns to me and he's like, you know, on camera, he says, "Stu, if VMware hadn't been so negative on us, and not allowing us to OEM or ship their product, I don't know if we would have launched our own hypervisor." It was not an initial plan. It was something that he's talked to the analyst community and said, this is something that was not simple, it was not something that was done lightly, it was something that, their hand was really forced because customers say, "I want the simplicity, "I want to be able to just stand it up, "I need that to come pre installed," and there was additional value that Nutanix felt they could bring. The DNA that they had, as they said, from companies like Facebook, from Google, and the like, where they understand the underlying code that they need to build to be able to build this distributor architecture. So, building off of KVM, they built the Acropolis hypervisor. One of the next big shifts coming is containerization, and this is where Google fits in. They should be able to accelerate that move, which is the thing I worried about with hyper converged, is we took our virtualized SAN environment and we just put them in slightly different form factor. It's simpler, yes, it's great, it's going to be, hopefully, a better economic environment, but how do we move the company forward faster? Two years ago, the customers were really excited cause they said, "I got my weekends back." What you want from an IT department is not to say, "hey, I'm no longer just overworked," but "I'm driving the business forward." But Dave, you've always said the role of the CIO is not just to maintain the business, but to transform and grow the business. So that's where we need things like containerization to help companies be more agile and move faster, and to have IT turn into a force that can help code, create new business lines, leverage our data more. The thing that we've heard at every storage show we've been at recently, Dave, is, NetApp actually say that "storing is boring" and that is something that we hear, is "I need to leverage our data, "we need to get it out there" and that's what I'm looking for this week, is to hear more of that cloud native piece. I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit a couple weeks ago, I can sit that on top of Nutanix. So how does partnerships like Google and some of these environments help with application modernization, analytics where I can get new, you know, take my data and create new business value, cause that's where we're going to really transform and grow companies into new revenue streams, and Nutanix is a platform to help deliver on that. >> So, Stu, since the spring when we released our latest true private cloud report, the Wikibon team, there's been a lot of talk about that report, it's implications, we had, there was a blog post today from Yaron Haviv at Iguazio saying, "you guys needs to rethink your definition of true private cloud, because the on prem guys have no chance against the cloud guys," we don't agree with that, by the way. But the notion of true private cloud, is this this on prem infrastructure that substantially mimics the public cloud, and as I said before, has a control plane that spans multiple physical locations. That's a concept that we've kind of put forth, and started to quantify, because there was so much cloud washing going on. And it really is, frankly, the savior of the existing infrastructure guys, or could be. Because their legacy business is not growing, in fact it's declining, and this is a very high growth market opportunity for these folks. So, my question to you is, can Nutanix participate in that high growth market? You know, there seems to be an aspiration, maybe I'm overstating this, but to be the next VMware, of sorts. >> Stu: Yeah, no, no. >> Can they do it? >> Exactly, and Dave you're not overstating it, I've heard people from Nutanix say that was their target. Their target wasn't to replace a flexpod, their overall vision was right, to be the next VMware. They want to be a platform to be able to grow on that. And the thing I've been looking at, at every show when we go to infrastructures, how do you live in that multicloud world? Because, you can't put blinders on and say, "Right, well, Amazon's in a corner." No, we know Amazon customers are using them. Right, as you said, Dave, I want that operational model in my own environment to build what we called a true private cloud, absolutely Nutanix is a player there. There's still work to be done for all of these infrastructure players, but what are they doing? How does their control plane span beyond that? And why should Nutanix be more than just a piece of the infrastructure? Because, there are lots and lots of players, not only the infrastructure players, lots of software companies, and the cloud companies themselves, that are going to say "I'm going to own that piece." I mean, Microsoft, identity is one of their greatest strengths. Google and Amazon, have been going after that, I mean, Amazon's eating everything, Dave. So, why should Nutanix not just eat some of the old guys, but be a player that lasts into the new world? Is looking forward to the announcements later tonight, we've got a lot of their partners and customers on here to be able to deliver proof points. And Nutanix is still growing, still doing real well, and you know, exciting stuff. >> Yeah, so we're going to be covering this, wall to wall coverage of two days. We've got some great outside guests coming in, we got Diane Greene's speaking at this event, Bill McDurmott's speaking at the event, and word is Peter McKay from Veeam is going to make another appearance, he's like The Cube, he's everywhere. (Stu chuckles) And then some really interesting outside speakers. Malhotra is here again, so really excellent line up that we have for you guys this week, two days, wall to wall coverage, this is The Cube, we'll be back from the district, live in Washington, D.C., this is Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (relaxed futuristic music) >> Announcer: Robert Herjavec