>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the Q covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of dot. Next here in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are joined by Sammy Zog LaMi. He is the SVP sales Europe, Nutanix and Sylvan CU. He is the senior director systems engineer for EMEA at Newtanics. Thank you so much for coming on the cube for you for returning. And this is your first time. >>First time. Absolutely. >>Well I want to, I want to start with you. You were on the main stage this morning and you were describing being one of the first few employees in France, working out of hotel lobbies, keeping all the promotional materials in your house and people not even knowing how to pronounce Nutanix. Now here you are for you six years later. Describe, describe a little bit what it, what, what this journey has been like for you. Being at Nutanix >>for this journey. Um, you know, is a, is a successful journey obviously, uh, where we started from scratch in Eva, uh, where we built a lot of relationship with the channel. We started to have our first stories with customers and, uh, you know, the only thing we could not, uh, you know, focus was the speed of growth. And I, if you told me six years ago that we would be four and a half thousand, you know, in this conference, I wouldn't have believed it. And I think the, you know, overall journey is a, you know, an accelerated journey of development and that we have, >>yeah, Sam, Sammy, prednisone side, a little bit about, uh, you know, we sometimes call it nation building, but, uh, you know, the channel of course, a very important, uh, you know, talked about some of the, kind of, the challenges in, uh, some of the successes as to what, what has made Nutanix so successful, uh, in, in your time. Yeah. I think, uh, >>you know, the technology is for sure a big element in this that is solving business problems. But when you think about it, there's many stories of great technologies that didn't make it or didn't make it big. So I think the openness of this company from day one, uh, to work with partners to work with an ecosystem of Alliance partners. Uh, we were also very open to share how the Nutanix technology is built and is working. So there's a lot of openness around your Hasise works. It's not a black box. Uh, and we integrate with the ecosystem. So for our positioning, which is mainly initially the data center, the large environments we have to integrate into customer environment, we have to integrate with existing technologies and uh, the fact that we are open from day one and we keep that line is helping a lot in the traction. >>I want to get into that strategy in a little bit, but I want to bring you into this conversation to Sylvan and, and just to have you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in the competitive landscaping, what, what are some of the things that Nutanix needs to focus on? Because the competitors are a really edging in. We are focused to deliver >>our vision and continue to build the pieces that are still under construction there right now. And to be back on the question about the partners, the adoption also come first from the partners before their customers. And really working with them on engaging with them was the result of the success was not just signing contract enabled them, but really engaging with them at customer sites. And as soon as they see the reaction of the customer, they can be believe in it. And we scaled very fast because of them. I'm wondering, get both of your comments. Talk about the, uh, the competition for talent. Also, when you talk about Nutanix over 5,000, the channel is very strong. It makes it a little bit tougher, uh, to kind of pull those pieces in. If you're Silicon Valley, Oh, there's this startup, I want to join, things like that, but have to imagine things are a little bit different. And I'm in Mia, >>I would say. Well, competition for talent is definitely here in Emir, especially on the topics that we are tackling in the cloud, the DevOps, big data, et cetera. Um, now, you know, we are not attractive brand, uh, you know, there's a demonstrated pass of development for our employees. So I think on top of being a successful company, we have a lot of proof points of building careers. So people want to join for the fun for the success. We are also to be able to fast career. That's helps now saying that it's still not an easy task. You know, there's a, especially the volume of recruitment we are doing, uh, so we have organized ourselves very well, uh, to onboard people, enable people and maybe be in a position to hire people that don't have all the skills but have the right DNA and then we can, you know, always teach the skills. That's the way we are. >>and on a technical side, uh, all the user's previous it vendor let's say, was looking for specialists of complexity. You know, what is the behind the scene and we are in different situation, meaning that we can start small first and we talk about the project of the customer. And until this project works, we cannot move forward. We cannot obsessive. So our situation is more consultative and being a trusted advisor of what they tried to achieve and not anymore on what we tried to build our own our side. >>That's a very important point. The mindset of successful employees are the ones that are focused on the outcomes. You know, they're not here to sell a product, they focus on project and the outcome of customers. >>So how do you find that person when you are, when you're interviewing your pool of applicants? I mean that, that is, that is such an important part of the culture here, this people first attitude and really being all hands on deck if a customer has an issue. So how do you, how do you know when you're interviewing someone that, that, that they have got their, the right DNA to be here? >>Well, first we knew before they, during the interview, because we are well connected on the market and we have sources of information about how they operate on day to day. Now, of course, of hiring so many people over the years helps. And there's a lot of small details that, you know, we can notice, uh, in, uh, in our recruitment process. I think we've gotten very professional in the way we recruit. We still have a lot of refills as well from employees, which helps in terms of, uh, you know, making sure we hiring the right DNA, but we want to diversify. We don't want people coming from the same background. We're doing a pretty good job on diversity, on every topic, you know, gender, ethnicity, background, uh, this is a, you know, pretty good success. Alright, so >>semi you, you've got a new role. So it gives us a little bit of insight as to your vision. What should we should expect to see as a strategy for Nutanix and EMEA? >>I would say first, uh, you know, three months on the job and I have no intent to break anything that works. Uh, I think there's a successful recipe in anemia, which is a legacy of Chris Keller Ross. Uh, lots of good methodologies, verse of good principles of working, no intention to change that and maybe the phase after that for MEA, but for the whole company is to focus on Australia. And we see that, you know, our technology is well suited for mission critical environment is well suited for strategic projects for customers. And maybe we should become the default, uh, you know, uh, vendor that you think about when you go for mission critical projects and you know, trust formation. Uh, I think today we do a very broad set of projects with customers. Um, tomorrow I would like customers to think first about Nutanix when they think about something that is critical to their business. >>And in the same way for partners, uh, if we can move from being a vendor with high grows, great margin to a vendor that is helping them transform, you know, their business model or the way they attack different segments, you know, then we will have achieved a good phase two. What do you see as the biggest challenges facing you right now? Well, the biggest challenge is inside clearly is growth. We see that in every area, every time we grow fast, then suddenly you need to change organization processes, your principle of working and you, you need to reassess yourself and your way of doing things. Even at pesonal level. Uh, that's the biggest challenge. I think we, if we are not constantly paranoid about re re assessing that uh, growth can break a lot of quality, uh, in the relationship we have with customers but also in our velocity. >>Oh, I wonder if you could bring us inside the customers a little bit. What are some of the key roles that you find in, you know, where does Nutanix has the best engagement with and you know, strategically where would Nutanix may be a change over time as to where they're, where they're engaging with a customer. >>So now there is no more question about the fact that part of the, it will be in the cloud part will be internally, some people will go more one side or the other side because Nutanix both technology >>on both sides, we can take care of old school application and be sure that can still run in the cloud. And on this society, if you develop an application totally distributed and so on, meaning a cloud native, we can run it on a Nutanix and all the platform looks like the pubic cloud for this application. So we are the unique situation where we can, we don't need to be in the cloud or outside of the cloud, meaning that we can give a strategy with the customers or what it can do. What is the good point, what is the most difficult to achieve on both sides. And also we provide a way to package application to deploy everywhere. We have all these governance tools on top of it because we know the new way of consuming the cloud is more open bar, which you need some way of controlling the situation and we are really trusted advisor on their strategy to define what will be their it in two, three or four years. >>Okay. So sounds like not just the infrastructure owner but talking to the application owner or some of the C suite that might make some of those broader strategic decisions. >>Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Uh, the platform works, meaning that there is no more cushion on that at scale. You get all the benefits that you can see on the, on the public cloud. Now it's more the way you consume it, you organize the consumption and also you've have those, the same of urine Mount whatever is the application, uh, to, to find the, to have the best place for this application. >>What would you say your, your, your here as you said, uh, at in Copenhagen, thousands of European customers all here under one roof. What are you getting out of this? What kind of conversations are you hearing? What's most surprising to you? Just to, I mean we're, I know we're only in the beginning of day one, but what, what do you, what are you hearing right now? >>Well, we talked to a few customers already and what's a very common pattern? Most of the customers I took so far, they really accelerating on becoming a service organization. So enterprise companies, they really want to organize themselves to be cloud ops. And even though we were talking about automation before, now they really are doing it and they are actually focusing on changing the skills of their teams, their organizations and of course the technology afterwards. >>Yeah. Uh, any, any particular is on automation. Cause I think back, we've been talking about automation my entire career. I agree with you today. It is a, you know, more substantial conversation on automation. Are there any particular as either in Newtanics portfolio where some of the kind of partner tooling out there that are kicking things along? >>So, uh, we talk about automation since a long time, but most of the time that was, you have an orchestrator, it's like a Swiss knife and you can orchestrate what you want, but at the end of the day, nothing was done. We believe that the platform must be automated by design, right? And everything need to be by design. So it's a, it's the difference between the, between the previous way of thinking, automation and now where the platform is totally it. >>I believe Leber GF said autonomous is what >>we were looking for. Yes. You got to the point. If it's not autonomous, why? Why bother? Yeah. Or we had examples of customers who launched private cloud projects and they had like 8,000 Mondays to build the orchestration of the private cloud. And honestly, if you don't have a a hundred thousand VMs to run, it makes no sense. So the fact that no, it's built in and it's not a project to have automation, you know, that makes sense economically as well. Great. Well semi and see you. Thank you so much for coming on the cube. It's a pleasure having you later, Rebecca. Thanks a lot. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Mittleman. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of.next.