live from Copenhagen Denmark it's the cube covering Nutanix next 2019 bought to you by Nutanix gut morgen cube inators we are here in Copenhagen Nutanix dot next I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-hosts to minimun what what I what a what a beautiful day in Copenhagen it's such a pleasure to be co-hosting dot next with you this is a company that you have really what been watching for a long time we're here celebrating ten years of this company I'd love to just get your first uh flick off the cuff thoughts what do you think about this company how has it changed since its inception ten years ago Chuck Rebecca unfortunately is the only Danish that I know so so hopefully you'll bring that but super excited it's the ninth dot NEX that we've had the qubit which is all of them that's the eighth one I've had the pleasure attending and Rebecca as you said uh you know I've watched this company since early early days first time I went to Newt annexes office that the paint was drying on the wall there and D arrives actually the CEO founder of the company showed me here's actually from a real estate standpoint we're going to expand here and move here and if things go well like we think we will move across the street and we can really build out a corporate headquarters and actually all of that has happened so ten years of celebration here over 5,000 employees there are some things that have not changed at all from the very first interview that John Ferrara and I had with dirige it was talking about the complexity of building distributed architectures and software what what Nutanix has learned from the hyper scale players absolutely impacts what they're doing but this landscape has changed so greatly you know you know this was originally everybody thought about it was you know that that term hyper-converged infrastructure came out it was about appliances and how many boxes you have but at the core it always was software and today we're hear them talking about how you live in that hybrid and multi cloud world all of these software pieces many of which you know seem to have it they're loosely coupled with the the core a OS software which itself has gone through complete revision to be ready for cloud native the latest databases all the new things so we know there is so much change going on in our industry um but but I saw what was built here is a culture and a company not just a product and so it is a celebration I love do they started with some of their early customers and partners especially here in Europe so very international flavor of course over 50 companies countries represented at this show we can see the the energy behind us with the expo hall here and yeah you know Nutanix have been public now for about three years going through a lot of transitions and lots of stuff for us to dig into over the next absolutely we're gonna we're gonna get into all that one at one of your tweets from this morning words where you were watching the mainstage and you said Nutanix is finally starting to answer that question what is the value of Nutanix in the data center you have a devoted Twitter followings do so we're all dying to hear what it was how do you see them answering that question it isn't enough well it's actually how they fit into the hyper scale data center because we know where Nutanix fits in the on-premises data center that's where they've lived but as customers are figuring out and you know the you know the thing that gets talked about a bunch here is you know the technologies that you know most of the customers use here is virtualization in VMware of courses that still has a dominant position in this environment while almost half of all new tannic snows that shipped in the last year use ahv the Acropolis hypervisor which is free it's by Nutanix it's based off of the KVM open source the rest of them are using pregnant predominantly VMware it's a little bit of hyper-v in there but when you go to that cloud environment I want some of the same software stack I want to be able to be able to put there so right there's one of the Nuggets that they showed towards the end of the keynote today and they've teased it out a little bit over the last year it's what they calls AI clusters so that is their stack or what they call X in some of those clouds the first one interestingly enough is is AWS and I say interesting because Google has been a solution that Nutanix has been working on but AWS is actually opening up bare-metal instances so it doesn't mean you know we take our stack and we put it on the side and we have specialized hardware it's the ec2 bare-metal instances that we're going to be able to run the new Tannis software and we've seen a number of companies out there pure storages one-day Volante and Lisa Martin were at that show not that long ago talking about you know if I am truly software and I'm independent of location how can i integrate into some of these environments so that's where we see Nutanix looking to go it's in tech preview with AWS GCP something they can do for demo environments but it's not yet open to be able to put in production environments you know the hope from Nutanix and others is that Google will open that up Google is position themselves in the open cloud and then azure will be there too so other clouds so when customers choose their environments and their own data centers they're hosted environment the public clouds we know there's going to be a lot of moves and changes and it's not going to be a one-way or a one-time thing so I want to get this as solutions that give flexibility and allow me to place where I want to and then move things as my strategy needs to adjust so the really interesting stuff definitely something what will geek out with talking about the competitive landscape this is a company that is that is a solid number two of you you've talked about this a lot in your analysts reports and at these various shows too VMware if this is a this is a two horse race there's a lot of money to be made in this market where do you see this is a company somewhat under pressure but where do you see Nutanix strengths and where do you see its biggest obstacles to overcome especially as it as it goes head-to-head with VMware yes so from the early discussion about hyper-converged infrastructure it is down to two companies and it doesn't get talked as as much as it might have a couple of years ago um there were some of my peers in the industry you know three four years ago there were like 30 companies out there there were a few acquisitions Cisco made an acquisition HPE made an acquisition you know VMware has their offerings out there but really it is to you know lead horses out there if you talk from a revenue and a dollar standpoint it is VMware and their partner ships their Dell of course has did the leading offering from VMware and then Nutanix is strong and Nutanix is growing customers they've got over 14,000 customers they added over 3,500 in the last 12 months so growing strong good growth the transition from being both you know soft soft rose at the core but really kind of ridding themselves of the hard we're going to full subscription and software model has been increasing their gross margin they're up to about 80 points of gross margin up if I remember right about three three and a half from from a year ago it has moderated their revenue because if you look traditionally and say okay what's their bookings and what's their Billings it is flat even down a little bit but that is because you're shifting from well I'm pulling along a whole bunch of stuff that I'm really not taking margin on to pure software so they believe they're past the toughest piece of that transition and I'm sure Dee Ridge will be talking about that they've done the faster transition of any company that's done this he sits on the board of Adobe Adobe went to that subscription model from this software subscription so they're doing that on but the big change is really if you talk about okay you know Nutanix is number two well that's the hyper-converged market that's what we were talking about a couple years ago when we're talking the multi cloud market you're talking about companies like Microsoft in Google and Cisco and of course VMware competing there and Nutanix would not be one of the first ones that I would mention but they do have their well positioned to help their customers and what we need in cloud is the simplicity that hyper-converged solutions like Nutanix brought to the data center so Nutanix has that opportunity to reach a much broader audience and a much broader market to go from the 14,000 customers they have to literally hundreds of thousands of companies out there that need these types of solutions and if they are to be 10 years from now at they're 20 years looking back and saying where do they fit in cloud where are they as you know a true you know technology software company for businesses that is the mark that they will need to make you're what you're saying about the simplicity that is what that is the message that we are given here today is that this is all about simplicity choice and delight make computing invisible and do you think I mean that that's so that's their message that's that's the that's the marketing gambit here altogether now do you think that is it is it going to work I mean this it is it is clearly what you say that the market needs but is does Nutanix have the staying power so Rebecca I I think you'll agree what's nice is when you hear the customers out on stage you know they actually give you the reality and it is you know in the early days of these shows it was I loved Nutanix it gave me my weekends back the quote that I had from a customer that I spoke to getting ready for this show is what I loved about this they actually had a customer that the main IT staff was not really in favor of going Nutanix they were certified and knew how to use the existing hardware and software and it spent years working on that um and they followed the rules and he said I don't want IT to follow the rules I want them to try things I want them to break things um you know I want them to be able to get ahead of the business and not just meet the requirements so he said we're spending we're ramping up our spending on training and education than sending them to events like this and Nutanix is an enabler because it doesn't just work it exceeds their expectations it is better performance they have Headroom to be able to try things and throw things at it and that is exciting so it's not just as I said oh this interesting box that I stick in a corner and I don't worry about it it is changing that that culture something I've been looking at you know can some of these technologies actually drive some of that cultural changes because traditionally it's you know executive mandate you put something new in and everybody fights against it so some of this can actually be from the ground level up is I get into these tools and solutions and it changes my workflow it changes how I work between groups how do I get the developers involved there was a lot of talk about the applications the messaging that they unveiled here all together now that that resonates with I can't just have my database my apps and my data itself in siloed as to who can access it and who can use it and have to worry about oh I need nine months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anything I want to be able to you know IT needs to be not no or slow but go I shout out you know Cuba Lum Alan Cohen who actually interviewed at the first dot next so he was you know early supporter of Nutanix and you know that that's what the kind of the developer driven mantra is you know IT very much working with the business and if it can drive innovation I mean Rebecca we've been talking important female leader at the moment but exactly talking about how technology can drive cultural change within a large organization because Nutanix is a large organization now it's it's only ten years old but it is it is not a start-up it is it as large complex exceedingly complicated organization and so how do you drive innovation creativity change collaboration communication between different silos these are all these are all topics that we were going to delve into today another word we keep hearing a sort of a cultural buzzword at this conference is resilience and we're going to on the main stage we're going to hear from Caroline Wozniacki who is a very famous tennis player we're gonna hear from the CEO of Noma who was of course Copenhagen's famous kuelen Airy delight and of course Kit Harington yeah so anybody that watch Game of Thrones um you know Jon Snow was definitely resilient to be able to last the eight seasons and everything that happened across it so Andy rich you know one thing we really respect you know we've watched him since the early days he is very thoughtful as to how he goes and when he actually said to me yesterday's it's do you know we are you're going to hear some of the same words that some of the other vendors but the you know the why and the how underneath that for us is different and that's very important and especially in the technology space that that nuance and the you know really how's that work in how does that put together and not just that we can do it but is this the right way it doesn't make sense so they are thoughtful about how they do it and and they're moving forward so you know they definitely believe they're positioned well for the next phase of their journey and always it's been a pleasure to you know watch this and you know to talk to all the the builders the dreamers and yeah dreamers believers and builders is what they came out this morning so well we're gonna be we have a lot of great guests on the show today I'm so excited to be hosting here with you in Copenhagen at this next dot dot next so we have dirige Pandey coming up next i'm rebecca night force two minimun please keep tuned to the cube you're watching the cube