>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: You're on camera. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier, we are joined by Chris Kaddaras. He is the Senior Vice President Americas at Nutanix, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> Rebecca: Returning to theCUBE I should say. >> Yes, good to be back. >> So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I wanna hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting journey 'cause I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies so I started here in the Americas. You can tell by my accent, and I spent the last nine years in the AMEA business and getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world. So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're gonna get those benefits so it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past, and they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that so it's been fun. >> What accounts for this difference in mindset, you say? >> You know, I think it has to do first off with in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and when you get competition you get pressures that come with that competition. You have to evolve, you have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications, and the business needs to evolve that supports that, so that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of risk taking, a lot of transformation. A lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end-user business sooner. >> That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage Mark Hamill. The Star Wars scene, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic to target there. Everyone loves Star Wars, in fact. But I gotta ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers. Not like the other big shows, your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. You have a chance to sit down with them while they're here, what's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? >> Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. I compare our customers to almost like a religious following, I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations but it's really like that, these customers bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing. They're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational, now what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger, last year we were like five thousand, the year before that we were another two thousand less than that so it's gotten a lot bigger, and our customers are coming back and saying we want you to be a bit more intimate, okay so we've had that in the past, we've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to you development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer because that's gonna give you the true north as to where you need to go, so we're getting that feedback, some of it's hard. Some of it's you're getting too big. You're getting too dispersed, you need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey. But that's part of growing up as a company and that's the reason why we're here. To hear customer feedback. >> And you guys have that true north. Essentials, the enterprise opportunity. Multi-cloud right around the corner on top of your core business which is doing great by the way, got a great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical. Building on that core, and this product risk potential, we talked with Sunil too, the next waves are coming so customers kind of want that assurance. So I gotta ask you, when you go out there and you're selling the customers and you tell them that Nutanix is the bridge to the future, what's the value proposition, I mean obviously we touched on the enablement side. Obviously consolidation's a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that, but what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatest of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? >> I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to a customer is to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build SaaS and compute farms and how they're gonna deal with multiple hypervisors, so let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple. Develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms so let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at, let's forget about infrastructure, let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy, you pick the platform, you're locked in to the entire application set, locked in to the compute set, you're locked in to the storage set, you have no decision on hypervisor, and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications, so the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovator's dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application so that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. >> So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements. How do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? >> Yeah, it's hard, we're not doing a good job there today, just we're not. Now this is a journey of all of these companies like us, it's how do you go through that, I have the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company. Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult, so I understand what we're doing, what you do is come up with a lot of different products. A lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize, right? We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated into the core. All of those things are happening and the nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do, let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more. And then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you're fooling yourself. So that's our direction today. >> Well Chris you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers and the enterprise which is great, you don't have to worry about product leadership. You got it there, as you guys, for you in particular and your customers you're also transitioning to software. You got the full stack, that's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors, you mentioned that. We know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software which by the way is great from economics, the economics and valuations on software business are super high. >> Sure. >> So on the consumption side for customers this is gonna be something that you're gonna be involved in, you gotta bring Nutanix out to the field. You gotta roll it out for the customers. They're gonna consume Nutanix with software. How's that going, can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model, what are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transitional software? >> That's a transition we started about a year ago, and some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some real plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally so the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software and they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be so they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open and when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resale partners and all of our GSI partners it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here, what platform do you wanna consume, so that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve so moving our customers to a term based licensing model was really important. We've done that in the last year and then allowing our customers that consume very easily when you move to those terms so how do I consume a node of software? How does that work, how do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple, you know. Our previous go to market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes. It came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model it becomes a little more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELAs, what they may wanna consume have more agility around their software licensing mechanism. Get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise type purchase agreement society, I wouldn't call it ELAs because ELAs in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things about that our other competitors do around true-ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to so we wanna work with our customers and partners as to how do you wanna buy those new enterprise price purchase agreements moving forward. >> I wanna ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation you're hearing feedback from customers you're getting too big, and I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback you're getting too big, guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's the internal strategy there? >> Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right, because I see it as well, I've only been here for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now , I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, so the things that we're gonna do are a few things. We do have a customer advisory board that meets, right now it only meets once a year in certain markets and we need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voices back into what we're doing, we got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week, big customers that said you need to think about this and it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, we also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right, so our sales reps, our Ses, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day. Out support people, providing that vehicle of feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important, so we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today but we're not getting the message through. They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're gonna start to create and develop that within the company. >> So, growing pains, you have to fix those things. Software model, looking good, so things are clicking right now, net promoter score in the 90s which is pretty much unheard of. You have a great, loyal customer base. Good news there? >> Yeah, I mean great news, we're talking about first world problems here, right? We have a huge market, the market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how we take our fair share and more of that marketplace so these are the discussion that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Any other country >> Well, you're Chris, you're in sales, you're running all the fields. Sales and you guys got a humble culture with a heart, as Dheeraj talked about. You gotta be aggressive, you gotta be competitive, and you gotta go win those deals. You gotta win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah, and it's really from our perspective it's turned a bit into a two horse race at this point in time, we think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace for customers who want flexibility and choice. I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time. Our competitors are strong, and they're good. They're good people, they work hard, they have great people and great technologies. Our entire value proposition around how to provide customers flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in their future and I think if we do that then we'll be in a good place. >> Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years knowing the competition, who could out-muscle you if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just be faster and innovate. >> Yeah, I think we're doing that on technology. We're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean coming out with an amazing product. Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid market company to an enterprise company to a global account company. These things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, it's a scaling problem and those are things that we can easily do. I'm happy to do those and those are things that we are hiring new people that help us through that journey and it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of positive results for our customers. >> Exciting times, well Chris Kaddaras thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California, it's The CUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: Izzy! >> Welcome back, everyone, to The CUBES's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this segment, we have Phil Davis, he is the president of Hybrid IT Hewlett Packard Entrerprise. Thanks so much for coming on The CUBE, Phil? >> Great to be here. >> And we have Chris Kaddaras, he is the SVP America's Nutanix. Thank you so much, Chris. >> Right, thanks for having me. >> So, two weeks, this partnership between Nutanix and HPE, two weeks old, newly announced. Chris, I wanna ask you, explain to our viewers a little bit about it and how it came about. What is the partnership? >> Sure, now I think the way the partnership came about was really around customer and partner demand, right? The marketplace was really looking for two great companies to get together and provide a solution for what they wanted to kind of cure their problems. The two components of the partnership effectively is, one component is the Nutanix sales teams are gonna be selling their Nutanix solutions and appliances with a great HPE computing infrastructure involved in that appliance. So, that's the first big group part, and I'll let Phil talk about the second part of the relationship. >> Yeah, and the second part is really around how do we enable a consumption model for our customers? I mean, if you think about what's going on with the public cloud, customers wanna be able to scale up or scale down and kind of pay as they go. And so, HPE has been leading with an offering we call Green Lake. It's a couple-billion-dollar business growing over 50% a year, so it kind of shows you the interest in it, and we also, therefore, offer the Nutanix solution on our infrastructure and then wrap that with a consumption model service that allows customers that flexibility. So, those are the two elements of the partnership. >> So, you're selling Nutanix with your Green Lake. >> Embedded in the Green Lake offering, that's correct. >> And Nutanix has selling Compute with their sales worth. >> Phil: Exactly right. >> Chris: Yeah, so with our DX solution, yeah with HPE Compute. >> Got it. Now, you guys have indirect and direct sales, both sides, channel play, is it a channel partnership or both, can you just explain the go-to market? >> Yeah, and I think that what you'll see is there's just a lot of alignment, a lot of synergy. Both companies are very, very channel friendly. I mean, HPE's a 75 plus year old company and our very first sale as a company went through the channel, right? So, our whole DNA is wired towards the channel. Over 70% of our business goes through the channel. So, what we've really made sure is that we make this very, very easy for the channel to consume and also, be paid and compensated on. So, it flows through all the standard HPE channel compensation and programs that we have in play. So, absolutely, very friendly for the channel. >> Yeah, and I think this will work really well for both channel communities that we have. We have a lot of Nutanix channel partners that have not been, for whatever reason, have not been selling HPE and now, they have a perfect opportunity to sell HPE Compute platforms with our DX appliance. We also have a lot of great channel partners who want a better consumption model where customers are looking to flex up and down. We have not been able to provide that for Nutanix software solutions. So, to adopt Green Lake for some of these partners will be a fantastic offering for their customers. >> Maybe just a dove-tail on that comment, one of the things we've worked really hard in the last year is to make Green Lake more channel friendly. Channel reps tend to get paid as the margin comes in. So, if you spread that out over time, they don't make the same money. So, we've changed the rebate 17% up front for the channel partners, we've simplified the offering, we made it quicker, so we're doing a lot to make Green Lake much easier for our channel partners and a lot of excitement about being able to offer Nutanix with Green Lake as well. >> What's the timing on the channel rollout? Is it rolling out now? Is it instantly growing out? Is there timing on-- >> Phil: Instantly. >> Instantly? >> So, we've already briefed the channel, we are making it available, we're providing all the quotes, we have a ton of material available online through our online portals and tools for the channel partners, we have FAQs, we have marketing materials, we have, actually, letters already built up for the channel. So, it's now. >> So, I gotta ask the hard question here because I think one of the things I see that's really awesome is the channel's gonna love this because Nutanix has a channel generated opportunity. Their challenge in that opportunity is when they do a POC, they usually win the business. That's kind of a direct sales model that's favored Nutanix for their success. This is gonna bring a lot of mojo to the channel bringing HPE and Nutanix together for this unique solution. I'm sure the reaction's been positive. Are they seeing an up-step in more POCs and more action with customers? >> Phil: You wanna take that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a lot, actually. So, I was just there actually reviewing my team yesterday. We have a list of now starting to get towards 100 customers that we think we can align with together, right? And multiple go to markets. We have Green Lake opportunities, we have DX opportunities, which is Nutanix on HPE. We also have a lot of opportunities around Nutanix software only on HPE Compute that a lot of customers wanna consume as well in a different way. So, we're seeing that really start to scale. We haven't done the first POC of DX because it hasn't released to the market yet, right? We are doing POCs on software only on HPE servers, but the DX solution will be releasing in the next few months. So Phil, I know the HPE channel pretty well and they love services, wrapping services around an offering. Can you talk about how this impacts from the services side because I gotta be looking at my chops if I'm a dealer partner because I can bring this new solution in and I can wrap cloud-like capabilities around it. >> Yeah, and you look at a lot of our partners, the hardware-only business is getting pressure. And so, a lot of our partners are doing exactly what you just described. They're trying to move more and more into services. And you're right, there's a whole sweep of services the partners can wrap around this. Everything from advisory, upfront, because all of these workloads run on some sort of legacy environment. So, when they do bring in a hyperconverged, they need to move the workloads. So partners can help with that, supporting maintenance, implementation, all the way through to kind of day-to-day break fix. So, there's a range on services. Obviously, HPE has a pretty big services capability. We make those available through our channel partner as well, so if they wanna sell to HPE services they can do that, or if they wanna deliver 'em themselves, they can do that as well. >> I wanna ask you about the customers. You made this point on main stage that you, sort of, likened back to the Henry Ford quote where you can have any color, as long as it's black and the current marketplace was anything you want as long as it's in my stack, and this is how we're gonna do it. So, giving them more choice, more flexibility, what are you hearing so far? What was the problem in terms of their workload and why things were stiffeled or stunted, and now what do you hope this is going to do? >> Well, as I mentioned on main stage, everybody wants to make it easy to get on to their stack and really, really hard to move off of their stack, right? Whether you're a public cloud company, you want all your microservices, you want all the data trapped there, so it's not easy to move and some of our joint competitors are actually trying to lock you into the complete top-down stack. So, the feedback, so far, from customers and partners has been very, very, very positive because one of the things, I've been in the industry 29 years. One of the things that I can tell you is no one company is gonna out-innovate the entire industry. And so, what customers want is to be able to pick and choose the solutions that best meet their needs. And that's really what this partnership, I think, really embodies is the ability to give customers choice at multiple levels within that stack. Choice in the public cloud, choice on prem, choice of hypervisors, and that's really resonating. >> Yeah, and that's really Nutanix's design point, right? Is around choice, right? Choice at every level of a stack that you can have. And this provides us with the biggest choice in the marketplace at this point and time that was missing from our portfolio. The other piece that you mentioned that I'd like to point out is that the thing that a lot of people haven't been talking about is the services component. You know, Nutanix is a great company, we've grown a lot. But one place that we haven't grown to an extent is in the services side. We have a small services organization that really helps our customers, but we really need a services organization that can help our customers transform. And help our customers through a transformation of their underlying infrastructure and reduce the risk of change. And this HPE relationship will help us do that as well. >> And the other thing, too, that's interesting with Cloud and you guys are in the middle of demodernizing the data center, HPE's been there forever in the data center, is the private cloud has shown that the data center's still relevant. However, if you start going cloud-based stuff, integration's huge. So integrating, not just packaging our solutions, customers need to integrate all this stuff. This has been a key part of Nutanix and HPE. How do you guys see this going forward from an integration standpoint? Because on the product side, it's gotta integrate, and then in the customer environment you mentioned the consumption piece. Can you guys just expand on what that means? >> Sure. Yeah, we saw Dheeraj's presentation this morning, right? And Sunil's, our entire design point is how do we make everything invisible, right? How do we make those integration points invisible? Now, we all know that there's a traditional architecture you need to migrate from to take advantage of some of these things. And that's where the risk is, how do you get from A to B into these environments? As I mentioned, we do have a services organization that helps there, but we could use, now we have one of the largest partners in the industry that could help us do that. I think that's a key component. We will always try to innovate being Nutanix, we will always try to innovate in software, right? Let's try to figure out how we can make this so much easier, move it up the stack to make sure this is the easiest thing to migrate and have choice for customers. >> Yeah, and I think, maybe, just to add to that, if you think about it from a customer view in, right? A lot of customers moved a lot of things very quickly to the public cloud and the public cloud will continue to grow fast, but they're also learning some things. It's not quite as cheap as they thought it was gonna be, like twice as expensive. Moving data around is very expensive. The public cloud is charging you to get your own data back out. Data sovereignty matters a lot more than it used to with things like GDPR in Europe. More and more of the data's getting created at the edge. It's not in the cloud or the data center. And so, what we're seeing is customers are now thinking about things as you mentioned, we're kind of hybrid, and they're talking about the right mix. What's the right mix of public? What's the right mix of private? Where should the data live? And that's a tough story and that's a tough journey for them to go on, so they want help up front with the advisory services, they want help in being able to architect that, implement it, and then, in many cases, even kind of run that. And with nearly 25,000 services professionals around the globe, we have a unique footprint to help customers along that journey. >> It's an interesting deal, it's very, I think, gonna be pretty big. So, congratulations. >> Phil: Thank you. >> It was great having you both on The Cube, Phil and Chris. >> Thank you very much, thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, we will have so much more from Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California, so stay with us. (electronic dance music)

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT, 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host John Furrier. Here we are, we're at day two, John, this conference, I gotta say it's pretty cool. 6500 people, we're steps away from Disneyland, and, you go to a lot of these things every year. I also do about a dozen or so for theCUBE. So in other words, we're veterans of this kind of thing. This does seem to have a different vibe and I think it really gets to the kind of company Nutanix is, and where it is in its journey. >> Nutanix is still a small company even though they're 10 years old, as Dheeraj talks about. The numbers aren't massive, I mean, we go to a lot of other shows where it's 15,000, Amazon Web Services just had an event in London, Dave Vellante was out there covering, Stu was covering Red Hat summit in Boston this week, tons of events going on. Amazon Web Services' summit in comparison was 12,500 people, 22,000 registered, that's a summit in London. It's not the re:Invent main conferences like 30,000 people. And that's always sold out, so they got a lot, in terms of attendees numbers they're still in the entry level, mid range growth. But I think that's okay, they like that culture and I think the story here at this show is intimacy, they would rather err on the side of better content and more intimate opportunities for their customers to really get the straight scoop. And I think it's less of a conference slash trade show, more of an intimate relationships where they can provide feedback, for customers to give feedback, and for Nutanix to figure out with the customers how to connect to them. So, I think the story here is, Nutanix is growing up as a company, they're 10 years old and they gotta go the next level and the management team has technical chops, and they have a long term view. They have that 20 mile stare, they can see out and they're trying to figure it out. I still think that the numbers are light on their forecast I still think that there's some sandbagging going on there, I'm not saying they're sandbagging, but I mean, I think, you look at Essentials, which is the enterprise and then multi-cloud, the numbers that we're seeing at Wikibon are much bigger, and Amazon reflects that. So I think they're being cautious but smart about how they execute off their success they've had in the first 10 years to go the next 10 to 20 years and I think that's clear in the management team, that they wanna build a durable company. >> Well exactly, and I think that that's what's really coming through, is that this is, as you said, they're growing up. This is a real coming of age moment for them, they've celebrated the 10 years. Okay, so what kind of company are we? Who do we want to be? And what's coming through is that from the technology side, they get it. They say, I'm sort of reminded of the Henry David Thoreau quote, our life is frittered away by detail, simplify simplify simplify, that's what customers want. They want this one click data recovery, they want their credentials to be assumed. You know who I am, I'm safe to be in here. Fixing things, dealing with that. So I think that they get that, that simplicity is key. They also get customer service. I mean their Net Promoter scores, as we've noted, are in the 90s, that's just unheard of. >> It's monster, monster numbers. >> It really is and so they get it. We need to be responsive to customers, we need to have a personal relationship with these, because it's not just organizations, it's people at the other end of these transactions. >> I mean, I think Nutanix, one of the stories that's popping out in the hallways as I walk around and talk to customers and people and the company and partners, is that Nutanix has a lot of headroom in their growth. I think Wall Street is interesting and you heard Dheeraj talk about that yesterday, about having a new customer, you asked him about his management style and he said quote, I have a new customer called Wall Street. And I have to balance that against mainstream enterprise which is his core business. And so he as a CEO and the company are dealing with this new stakeholder called public company customer retail stock buyers. That's a short term cycle and I think, if you look at their stock, they had a big knife edge drop in the past quarter. And I think the shorts are circling, it's a whole nother dynamic, it's a whole nother theater for Nutanix to deal with, and I think that's something that they gotta get used to. And he was clear, he said I'm addressing it, we're gonna balance it, but they gotta be thinking long term because this company has a lot more to do and their customer base are risk takers. Because everyone we talk to has this different style or persona. They're smart, they're usually engineering oriented, they love engineered solutions. And they're taking chances. And everyone who's taken the chance with Nutanix, has paid off. That seems to be the theme. And as we were talking before we came on camera, Mark Hamill, Jedi knight, you know, Star Wars, was on stage giving the keynote, their customer base, is a lot like the Jedi order, right? I mean they see themselves as, elite, technically, they're not afraid to take organizational risks and push that DevOps culture. And we heard that from Sunil, the chief product officer that they're really looking at, this new way to do things, like they did with hyperconvergence, they pioneered that, set the table on that and foundationally built that. They wanna take that same playbook of HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, and apply it to the cloud. And provide an abstraction layer advantage and I think that is clearly their strategy and that's, to me, the top story here. >> I couldn't agree more and I also think that, what is also coming through is this idea of we don't wanna be safe. What's clear is that, consumer technologies have leapfrogged IT enterprise vendors. The things that we hold in our pockets are so much more sophisticated than what businesses and organizations, multi-billion dollar businesses and organizations, are using, what their employees are using on a day to day basis. So we expect a certain kind of design and ease of use, in our personal lives and they're bringing it to enterprises and think that that is really what's exciting and interesting about this company. >> What's interesting about their story is that, the consistent theme about the customers is that it's kind of a consolidation story but that's not the real story because back in the old days of IT, consolidation was the strategy. Consolidate vendors, consolidate footprint to reduce cost, clearly a cost reduction. With Nutanix what they get is they get consolidation, and they enable advantages so the real value of Nutanix is to be positioned for those new kinds of app developers, so. This is like, you get consolidation as a side benefit for enabling the value, and that's the theme that's coming out of all the customer testimonials and interviews is, we gotta do more, we gotta create more enablement for the app developers and we gotta provide more performant storage servers and software for the customers. And that's their main focus and they consolidation as a benefit. That's gonna scare a lot of people and customers that I've talked to said, hey I got all the stuff but I can't just throw it away tomorrow, I gotta move it out over time, so, this is the Nutanix sales challenge, how do you move faster with all that incumbent, legacy stuff in these datacenters, while enabling the multi-cloud capability? >> And we're gonna be talking about that more today with Chris Kaddaras on the show. We have a lot of great guests, we have the CIO, Wendy Pfeiffer, I was reading an article about her today, she answered an ad as a teenager to work for NASA. She had an idea for NASA and so we're gonna hear much more about her story, we've got a lot of great guests. >> Well what's your take? I mean, you've been here, you're getting immersed in. What's your take of the show, what's your analysis? >> Well, what's really interesting to me is that we're having this conversation against this backdrop where, the technology industry is really under fire. I mean, we heard Ayanna Howard here on the show yesterday and then she was up on the main stage today, talking about the good, the bad, and then the really scary elements of AI and how it really has these powers that can do a lot of wonderful things and help children with special needs and help workers be more productive and engaged and collaborate. But yet, there's also this much darker side that AI's really only as good as its creators. And then the other difficulty is that, because we have become so trusting of these machines, we disregard our own intuition. And that is a really scary element, so. What I think is exciting, and it goes back to this risk taking mentality, that Nutanix has, is, we're gonna talk about these things. We're just going to forget about them or they're gonna be a sideshow, this is really on the main stage, let's talk about our values, let's talk about the humanity of technology and this is really an important part of the conversation. >> It's interesting, the culture, we talked about the culture a lot yesterday. And you can see from the mix of the guests we've had here and how they're putting their content together across the show portfolio, it's not just speeds and feeds. There's a lot of tech for good angle but they're not tech for good stories like hey, look, here's a tech for good story. Look how good we are because we promote it. They're authentic people that have a great story that has a tech involvement. But it's not a pure Nutanix messaging kind of thing. >> Right, and it goes to back to their values, the humble, hungry, honest, and have a lot of heart. I mean I think that that is, you really see how important culture is, when it is top down. When Dheeraj embodies certain characteristics and traits, you see that employees then look up and they say okay, this is what we're about, this is who we are. >> You know, we also talked yesterday about our analysis in the keynote, what's interesting about culture is, there's also a culture shift going on inside their customer base. And again, it's back to this kind of Star Wars theme, Jedi knights and the revolution continuing for Nutanix, their opportunity is to continue to stay on the course, and this is gonna be a big bet for them, they gotta make some big bets on the technology side, which they're making, but also they have an opportunity because a lot of their installed base are rebels, right? So you have this rebellion IT guy, generational shift where you have DevOps coming in and Gene Kim who wrote the book on DevOps, runs the biggest DevOps event in the world, series of events, DevOps Enterprise Summit, he's even saying it's about 3% changeover. So I think there's a big tailwind coming for Nutanix. Around DevOps, operating models, in the enterprise and cloud where, the convergence of those two worlds coming together, and it's gonna be a younger generation, it's gonna be a different world. If that happens, I think that's gonna be something that Wall Street might not see. I think that's kind of an area. And that's gonna be a good tailwind for Nutanix. The other notable thing that I would point out from this show is, the presence of VMware visibly in the conversation. And I think Dheeraj was talking about, hey we don't mind talking about VMware because they validate the marketplace, they're the big 800 pound gorilla. And we're gonna continue to innovate around them. We don't need their Hypervisor, customers don't need to pay their vTax, that's his messaging, so that was a key notable. The other one was the challenge that Nutanix has, this is, again, might be a Wall Street insight for some of the Wall Street folks out there is that, their challenge has been getting new logos. Their cost to sales is a little bit high because they require POCs and once they get in there they usually win. And then their cost per sales, cost per order dollar on the sales side once they have a customer, is very low, they get more renewals and they have more net contract value so they have great customer economics on that side. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal for them, could bring them a tsunami of new logos. That could give them a lot of leverage and bring their customer base well above their 12,000 number now. And bring them up into a whole nother level. So I think the HPE deal will be a tell sign on the numbers, and if they can get more new logos in there, the big accounts that HP has through their channel, that's a big story. So VMware, HPE, culture, all the main story here. >> And of course we had HPE on the show yesterday, talking about that very development, so. We have lots more great content, great guests to come today, this has been just a ball hosting with you, so I'm really for another day. >> Very intimate show, I mean, Nutanix are a very intimate show they don't really care about the big numbers, they want the right numbers and that speaks to their culture. >> And they know their people. Because as we talked about many times, Mark Hamill, up on the stage yesterday, so, they know their community. Please stay tuned for more of the coverage from theCUBE of .NEXT here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)