(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's The Cube! Covering .NEXT conference, 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage here of Nutanix .NEXT 2018, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Sherry Lautenbach who's the SVP of America Sales with Nutanix and Inder Sidhu who is the EVP of Global Customer Success, also with Nutanix. Sherry and Inder, thanks for joining us. >> Sherry: Thank you. >> Alright, so Sherry, first of all, you were up on stage this morning celebrating customers, we actually had the chance yesterday to nominate one of the, to interview one of the, nominees there and talked about what that meant to them and it was really talked about, you know, it's validation, where you know, we're trying something, we think we went out beyond what other people are doing and getting that validation back was just, they were really excited just to be nominated, so, you know, take us inside. >> Yeah, so first of all, we had hundreds of nominations, so it was super hard to choose and break it down to the finalists and then of course the winners, but for us, it was about innovation about cloud trailblazers, you know, dev ops, lots of different types of awards this year, and recognizing things that customers are doing to innovate with Nutanix. The best award we did have was Art.Heart give-back award and that, you know, it says a lot about our company that we focus on what companies are doing to better the communities they live in and the world in general, so. >> Yeah, and JetBlue is the winner there. >> Absolutely. >> Have to say, it makes me even happier to talk about, I have status with JetBlue, cause I fly to a lot of shows. >> Yeah, I can imagine Doug, they've been a great partner of ours, a great spokesperson, and they've really leveraged our technology to innovate with their company, so it's been a, it was a great morning. >> Alright, Inder, we watched Nutanix since the early days, discussion about NPS scores, and when you can't, when you come to an event like this, you can't help but feel the passion of the customers - over 5500 people here. Talk to us about what your role is, your engagement with customers, that whole customer success, and what that means. >> Yeah, customer success in my mind, Stu, is probably the single most important thing that we do at Nutanix, and the reason is because customers drive everything that the company does; it drives our employee behavior, it drives our partner behavior, it drives our product roadmaps. We're an outside-in company, fundamentally, and therefore, driving the customer success holistically, not just in terms of support after they might have an issue, but holistically, end-to-end over the entire life cycle is very very important for us. So, we're creating an organization, an investment, reporting all the way to the CEO to drive exactly that and we're very excited about that. >> Right, and I call it customer obsession, so I've been at Nutanix six months, the first day I showed up to headquarters, they gave me my laptop, and then they brought me up to the customer support area and said, "This is why we're so successful, because we are maniacally focused on ensuring our customers are being delivered value every day." And with a focus on our NPS four daily. So, for me, that was super impressive, and we don't let up on it. >> Stu: You know, Sherry, and I love some of the pieces. You were talking about innovation, talking about developers-- >> Sherry: Yes. >> We've been talking to a lot of customers about their digital transformation. It's not just, "Oh, okay, I'm re-platforming," it's more than that, talking about, what one of the customers said is, you know, "Business as IT." >> Right, no absolutely. So, digital transformation is clearly the buzzword, but it is all about what are companies doing to transform their businesses to become digital. And, Dheeraj always says, you know, "To be in that digital transformation journey is all about what you do to transform not only your IT operations, but the business." And the business drives what digital transformation does, absolutely. And it's not just creating things online or creating a presence, but its actually innovating yourself to differentiate yourself from your competition. We've seen that time and time again on what Amazon did to bookstores or what Netflix did to Blockbuster. And those types of things are the innovation that drives the change. >> Keith: So, Inder, speaking of innovation-- >> Inder: Mmhmm. >> Nutanix digitally transformed themselves into a software company. You guys made a lot of announcements, a lot of new products in the pipeline, a lot of new features available: GA as of the show. Nutanix has become a bigger company, valuation over nine billion dollars, as you get bigger, it's hard to keep that NPS score over 90. Where's the focus and how do you do it as Nutanix grows? >> You know one of the things, I think, as we become a big company in terms of size and scale, in terms of our heart and in terms of our spirit, we're very much a small company. I go tell customers, there is going to be times when we'll screw up. But you'll never find any company that's going to work harder than us to drive your success. And that's where the intent is, that's where the focus is. We're going to do whatever it takes from an holistic end-to-end customer perspective. We're assigning customer success managers to some of our largest customers so we can proactively engage with them, especially along three dimensions. We're not like a lot of other technology companies, where you just try to sell them technology, we're around three things: we want to make sure make sure that our customers can be organizationally proficient, we want to make sure they're operationally efficient and we want to make sure that they're financially accountable. All three of those dimensions have to do with stuff that's important to them. As we make them successful along those dimensions, automatically the technology starts to get adopted and they start seeing some benefits. >> So, Sherry, let's talk about that customer success manager. What are they empowered to do, like, if there's a problem, how do they make it right? >> Well that's a great question, they're empowered to do whatever it takes on behalf of the customer to ensure that one, they're deploying our technology well and they're finding great value in it. It's interesting, I've spoken to many customers at this conference and so many of them have said, you know, using Nutanix has changed my career, my career trajectory, and the business value I provide the organization, not just from an IT standpoint, but on the business side. And so for me, there's no greater compliment when our customers, they're cheering for us, they're rooting for us cause we're helping to transform what they do every day. So the customer success manager is just going to be an overlap in terms of ensuring and driving that success as we get deeper and deeper into these customers. >> And what we're going to do is we're going to start out with customer success managers more at the top of the pyramid, some of the largest accounts, but remember, we still have hundreds and hundreds of account team members from Sherry's team and others; SEs, all of whom provide an even greater leverage, and then extending all the way through our partners. So we have a high-touch model at the top with CSMs, we have a medium-touch model with SEs and account teams and insight sales reps and partners in the middle, and on the bottom of the pyramid, we've got a tech-touch model, where we're going to actually leverage our technology with self-service portals and so on with emails and webinars and training and material that can actually drive their end-to-end success, very focused on that. >> Stu: Sherry, I'm wondering if you can dig in some of the organizational pieces that Inder was talking about. From your customers as you move up the food chain with the products, what are you hearing from your various constituencies inside of companies? >> Inside of our customers? >> Stu: Inside of the customers, yes. >> Right, so, well we cover, in terms of an organizational size, we cover all different types of customers in various ways. We have dedicated account people to our largest accounts alongside with SEs of course. And we leverage our partners, though, in our channel and everything we do, so they're considered an extension of our sales force, which I think is truly valuable and really important that we ensure that they drive success with our customers. >> Anything special you're hearing when you get up to the C-Suite, pain points, that they're hearing more than you heard in the architect or admin standpoint? >> Yeah, no, they're looking for more of, you know, helping to rationalize cloud: how do I get to cloud, what's the right balance in terms of hybrid, on-prem, off-prem, and really, understanding the business value and drivers around it, not just cost efficiency. It's about transforming different areas of their business and many of the C-Suite customers that I speak to really are approaching it many different ways, dependent on what is the key pain point and business problem they're trying to solve. >> Inder: So, two things I'd say to add to Sherry's answer there is that what we see is customers wanting to engage more architecturally rather than an individual point product through a consultative process that is more around business outcomes. So it's not something necessarily new, but it's a little bit new for Nutanix, cause we've historically engaged at the technology level, and now you're finding more and more. Of the Fortune 50, we have 33. Of the Fortune 100, we have 66. So we're actually starting to get to really large customers in a big way. They want a deeper, architectural, all-in engagement, and as our portfolio starts to expand from just HCI to Flow and Beam and Xi and all of those, they're saying gosh, I mean I just literally ran into a CIO in the elevator, coming down this morning, and he said gosh, we were thinking about doing NSX but now that I came here and I heard about Flow and I heard about Xi, I think I'm going to go all-in with you guys, I'm going to put that thing on ice, and really work with you guys on this. Literally, unsolicited, in the elevator, this morning. >> Keith: That's impressive. So as we, on all those lines of growth, you guys have a huge user community: 70,000 participants, and this morning, Dr. Brennan, I'm sorry, Dr. Brené Brown talked about having difficult conversations around diversity. I want to first give you guys kudos, this is from an optics perspective been one of the most diverse technology conferences I've attended from an entertainment to the onstage presence to the keynote speakers, awesome job. As you guys are working towards having a more diverse user set, how are you helping your user community be successful along with their careers from a diversity perspective and whereas a career development perspective. >> Great question, and yes, I'm super proud of the diversity, things we're doing in the company. Just yesterday, I hosted a women's IT luncheon, so we celebrated the women around Nutanix so that was all about building a network of all of our customers: female and male, they were included too in this luncheon. And we had over 130 people, spent time, I said let's exchange business cards, let's talk about some of the challenges you face. We had one of our board members, Sue Bostrom share some very personal stories about challenges she's faced and opportunities to help advance her career, gave a great perspective on that. We also had the CEO of FlyWheel, she talked about failing fast and pivoting, and that to me was great little lessons and tidbits that we can provide our customers to say let's empower you to be even better and to build your network even more effectively. >> And if I can add to that, I think, what we're always looking for is a diversity of ideas, and those diversity of ideas is not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have because it actually drives positive business outcomes from us when we start to represent what our community of users and what our community of customers is. And that diversity of ideas comes from people who have had a diversity of backgrounds, across a wide range of dimensions of diversity, and that's what we're really looking for. We're not necessarily solving for outcomes, we want to solve for opportunity, and make sure that everybody has that equal opportunity to engage and participate, and the more we do that, the richer we get, the more powerful we get, the more alive we become, I think, with diversity. >> Right, I mean, you think about that, you know, our traditional influencer was in the data center side, but we've found now in terms of diversity of our portfolio, the developer is going to be just as important of an influencer for Nutanix, so we're looking at it from not only our customers and who but what they do. >> Stu: Inder, I was wondering if you could get some colla rosso on the vertical side of things, we know you started early very much in the public sector phase, had a lot of strength there, so speak to how else you're growing in the vertical space. >> Inder: Yeah, one of the things we're doing is as we get into bigger and larger customers, as you know, we have 9000 customers, adding a thousand every quarter, we have about 642 after global 2000 customers and so, as we get into those, those customers want us to be able to talk to them in their language, around their issue. So I'll give you a great example, you know, recently, we hired a guy, his name is Don Mims out of Baylor Scott & White as a Customer Success Manager. Here's a guy who's done everything the Nutanix products, implemented them all through Baylor Scott & White, 7000 beds, 48 hospitals, and here's a guy who's implemented Nutanix, he's implemented AHV, he's implemented Epic. I got 40 other customers in the US alone who want to implement Epic and AHV in the healthcare sector among the provider community, and we're going to go towards those customers with that kind of verticalized expertise. Same thing around financial services, same thing around retail. I mean, when you look at retail, Walmart, Home Depot, Tractor Supply Company, Nordstrom, Target, you know, Best Buy, Kohls, we've got a wide range of customers who give us insight into their operations, and when we engage with them, when you're talking to a retailer, you're talking about dollars per square foot, you're talking about same store sales, you're talking about a flexible workforce and then you translate that into IT, which translates into a hybrid public-private flexible infrastructure. So as we have these conversations, they're very engaging, and we are starting to verticalize if you will, in terms of our overlay expertise. Sales force of course is going to be geographic first, because of the proximity that's required, but we're going to have overlay both in the services and in the sales organization that's going to be very noticeable as well. >> And we have found that there are certain geographies and areas that we can verticalize in the field, so, for example, Tennessee or in California, we can build healthcare verticals which has been very effective cause customers want us to talk in their language, understand what critical business applications they can leverage with Nutanix. So we're trying to mirror, as best we can, the vertical point of view in the field. >> Public sector of course is the first vertical that gets carved out for many companies, service providers, the second, we've already got public sector carved out, and one of the things, great kudos to Sherry and her team, you were proactive, Sherry, with Brad Rhodes in kind of carving out healthcare as a dedicated sales region in the West where people have nowhere to hide, you just live and die by the healthcare success, customer success. >> Well, and also, the familiarity on the use cases, right, cause a lot of the use cases are repeatable, so it just makes a lot of sense for us to bring teams together that can go to market that way. >> Keith: So, let's talk about the speed of Nutanix. I love the story, the impromptu meeting, CIO in an elevator, you guys are wowing me with the technologies in ways I never thought of. Let's talk about the other end of it. Where are customers pushing you, saying, "You know what, you guys need to move faster." You have one customer that's on NSX, you have a bunch that are looking way past that. >> Sherry: Right, no that's a great question, and the great thing about Nutanix is we really don't say no a lot, I mean, we've got to be very thoughtful in what we sign up for, but we will innovate and collaborate with customers in every instance. So what is it that you need, you need a support on a platform? We'll give you the right timeframe to do it, but yeah, we're going to do what we can to deliver on that, so, there is a lot that's coming at us from a speed standpoint with our customers and the demands that they have but I think that's a testament to the adoption and the delight that they have of using Nutanix and wanting to expand that in their enterprise. >> Inder: And I think, to some extent, Keith, I think your question is more about where are we perhaps falling short a little bit, and I'll tell you one area where perhaps we could do better, which is for support of a wider array of platforms. So for example, when we go to Asia Pacific, a lot of our customers are telling us, gosh you got support for Dell or Lenovo or IBM, etc., but what about other platforms that are local, Hitachi or Fujitsu or Inspira or Avia, etc.? So we're going to get very disciplined and structured around it, we don't want to over commit and let anybody down, because extending support to multiple platforms is not trivial, but we want to make sure that when we commit, we say what we'll do and we do what we say. And that's a guarantee that we'd like to provide to our customers. >> Stu: Inder and Sherry, I want to give you both an opportunity: just final takeaways you want your customers to know about Nutanix as they leave the show this year. >> Well, we'd love for more customers to come onboard, one thing I've seen with our customers that are here is that they love our technology, they're delighted. We've helped change jobs and careers with many of our customers and for me that's a huge privilege. >> I'd just say that customer success is the single most important thing for us, for our customers, we might make a mistake every once in a while, but you will never find anybody who works harder on your behalf. We've got the energy, we've got the fire in the belly, we've got the agility, and we're going to do everything that it takes to make you successful, no matter what. Period, end of story. So we're all in, we hope you can be all in with us as well. >> Alright, Inder and Sherry, obviously the passion is here from you, from your customers and the team. Thanks so much for joining us today. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here coming from Nutanix.NEXT, New Orleans, 2018. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Thank you. (electronic music)