>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short attention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short retention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Nutants. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broadening, enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Nutant forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Newtons. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broad and enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Newton forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCube! Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, And their ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here, in Las Vegas, Amazon Web Services AWS re:Invent 2018. 52,000 people here. Two days. Second day of three days of wall to wall coverage here at theCUBE. I'm John, with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years, we've been doing theCUBE. We've been to all re:Invents except for the first year. We've been a customer, we've been following these guys. >> Plus the summits! >> Plus the summits. Great ecosystem. And VMware and VMworld, similar dynamic. I want to talk about that now, obviously the new announcement, on-premise, is huge. Want to dig in to it with our guest, Sanjay Poonen, who's the Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Sanjay, great to see you. Cube alumni, many times, thanks for coming back again. >> John and Dave, pleasure to be on your show. >> Thanks for coming on, great to see you. >> Congratulations on all this success, you've got a wonderful booth and presence here, and I think this is becoming like the Mecca of all IT events. >> You know, we have our new video cloud service on AWS, we're ingesting over 110 videos, we'll have 500 short video clips behind it. Tons of blog posts, tons of coverage. There's an insatiable appetite for Amazon Web Services content as Andy pointed out in my interview with him. And it's just the beginning. You guys at VMware really, I mean, talk about a seminal moment in the history of the computer industry, and VMware was, when you guys recognized the sea change of operators on IT and cloud developers coming together, you guys were very proactive two years ago. Raghu, yourself, and the team, Pat. We're going to, hey you know what? Let's just align. Culture's a fit with Amazon. Let's co-develop. Let's ride the wave together, and let's see where the chips fall. Which is basically, I'm oversimplifying, but that's kind of what's happened. So much has happened. I saw Raghu last night at the Greylock partner event. This is a historic moment. Good outcome so far, deep partnership, meaningful partnership. A lot of resonance in the marketplace, you guys are iterating and raising the bar. That's Amazon talk for success. How do you feel? >> Yeah, no, I think it's, absolutely, John. We, if you think about how this has evolved, you know five years ago when I joined VMware, I felt like cloud and containers, the two C's, were our big headwinds. We've turned those headwinds now into tailwinds, but it took some catharsis from us. We had vCloud Air, our own public cloud. We had to divest that. And I think the Amazon VMware coming together, when we announced it two and a half years ago, was like a Berlin Wall moment, where you had the US and the Soviet Union getting together. That was good for world peace. People were surprised, because these are two purported enemies now, and it really built trust. And step by step, launching VMware on AWS, announcing RDS on VMware, the beginning of on-premise, and then today, announcing Outposts, it's just an example of not just the validity of VMware as a hybrid cloud leader, but the strength of this partnership. We have a very special relationship with Andy, Pat, myself, Raghu, spent a lot of time together. Often, you can't tell, when our engineering teams meet, when an Amazon engineer and a VMware apart from each other. They're like finishing each other's sentences. That, we don't do, like, Mickey Mouse, Barney, you know press releases. It's real stuff. >> And the culture of, the engineering culture of VMware, which has been a core, cultural thing, the DNA of VMware is technical. Very community oriented. Amazon, technical, very operationally efficient, good community. This is good fit there. I got to get your perspective, though, on how that is going to evolve, specifically around on-premise. Because certainly Andy Jassy validates on-premises with the announcement that VMworld, which you guys covered, Pat Gelsinger uses words like dial tone, Kubernetes, you mentioned containers. Andy, when I asked him, "Andy, you know you told me "in theCUBE, five years ago, "that everything's going to the public cloud. "Change of tune? "You mind if I pin you down?" "No, John, you can pin me down all you want." He says good leaders are self-aware. He said "Our customers wanted this." And he's cool to it. And the partnership with VMware highlights that this is not going to happen overnight, he recognizes the duration, the role of on-premise. And then he also says that the data center's like a big Edge. So, if everything's cloud, what you guys basically announced with Outpost is, cloud, public cloud everywhere. So, just, there's no public, private, it's just cloud. This is a game changer, because-- >> Absolutely. >> Just, why wouldn't I want to buy this product? >> I mean, first off, congratulations on scoring that interview. Not many people have access to Andy that way, and you guys have built a very good relationship. I thought that interview you did with him was phenomenal. There was a special point in that, John, where you tried to get him to talk about Outposts, this was before he announced it, which is will Amazon go on-premise. So a couple of months ago, when Andy called us, and Matt Garman, to talk about this project under NDA, it was a continuation of those RDS type discussions where we basically said, if you want to do anything on-premise, you should do it with VMware, because you're going to have to go through this door called VMware. We are the de facto king of the on-premise private cloud world. Many of these customers are used to our tooling, vSphere, vMotion. They want anything to run on VMware. So from that became a sequence of discussions that really really evolved very quickly, and well, so we can announce this together. I mean, you know, Andy had three guests on stage, and only one partner, and that was VMware. And that's an indication of the strength of this partnership. Vice versa, of the 50,000 people here, probably all of them have VMware on-premise. So if Amazon's going to do more on premise, why not do it with the leader in that area, VMware. And we want to be in the software industry. The de facto standard for software-defined infrastructure. Right? And that's a special space that we can fill. >> Well, the amazing thing to me, is, here's VMware, no public cloud, Amazon wouldn't even say the word hybrid, or private cloud, doesn't use private cloud, but it wouldn't say hybrid before. You've now emerged as the tandem, de facto leader in hybrid cloud. Overnight. With an ecosystem that all wants to connect and partner with VMware and all wants to partner with AWS. Overnight. I mean, it feels that way anyway, 24 months. >> I think that's absolutely right. I mean, we were the first to start using the term hybrid, three or four years ago. As we did, then it took a while, because I think a lot of customers, and some of the public cloud vendors, felt it was going to be binary, all public cloud and no private cloud, but they began to realize you need both. But your point on the ecosystem, also surrounding, I just came back from meeting one of the top SIs in the world. They're betting big with us because they see this as the place for both of them, and they're also betting big with AWS. The System Integrators are all over this. The security vendors, all over this. Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, want to see. Often, many of these companies come to us and say, "You have cracked something special "in your relationship with Amazon. "How did you do that and how can we follow that model?" We're happy to share our playbook of how we think about ecosystems. So, we want to create a platform, just like Amazon's a platform, where everybody, SIs, tech vendors, software vendors, can all plug in to. >> And the other observation I make is, you know, previously the distance between infrastructure players and the guys who really are driving application value, the application developers, was quite a distance. And now it's closing, with infrastructure as code. And it's just so transformative for organizations. >> I think, and one of the things that's making that is microservices and containers. And as you know, since we last talked, we acquired Heptio. If you think about Heptio, they are the founders of Kubernetes, okay? They left Google, started their own company, Craig and Joe, and we're excited about that. That platform will augment PKS, which was our big bet in containers, and become something that could run on-premise, or in a public cloud environment like this. We acquired CloudHealth. CloudHealth is a multi-cloud management tool for costing resource management. That becomes something that could send, a lot of Amazon reps actually refer CloudHealth as the preferred way to get your insights. So we're beginning to see this now a lot more clearly than we did two years ago, thanks to this partnership. >> So, Sanjay, I know that Outposts, super exciting, it's been covered on Silicon Angle, there's a zillion stories on our site on this whole event. But, it's not going to be shipping for about a year. But you guys already have some working products now. What's the current track to that shipping because when that comes out, that'll be a game changer. Why would anyone want to buy hardware again? Michael Dell wins either way because he's got VMware. But others who sell hardware, this is a real, it could be a killer blow. But, I don't want to (laughs), you can comment on that if you want, but what's in-between that one year, you've got a product now, how do customers move along? >> Yeah, I think there's some very tangible things that, first off, VMware Cloud on AWS is, as you've described Dave, the best hybrid cloud option. You get the best of the on-premise world and the public cloud. You know, we announced hundreds of customers, we have a goal to get to thousands of customers, and then tens of thousands of customers. We're going to continue down that march. I want to have a significant number, over 500,000 customers. If Amazon has 40, 50 percent market share, based on some of the numbers that Andy shared today, a significant number of our customers have Amazon, we should get them onto VMC. VMware Cloud and AWS. Secondly, we do have, we announced Project Dimension, some Edge computing capabilities running on existing hardware players, so we are beginning this journey ourselves, in terms of cloud managed on-premise environment. Right? Project Dimension was announced before this, and that will run on Dell and Lenovo hardware, and that's well and good to go. They will have Edge IOT use cases. And then when Amazon comes and gets us ready, we would have learned a lot about this market. Which is really kind of this Edge computing market, cloud-managed. So we're not going to be, we're going to plan and do the other pieces. Much of the software components that VMware is building is not completely from scratch code. We're taking NSX. One of the most important components that VMware is adding to Outposts is NSX. We're not rewriting NSX, we're taking the NSX and applying this now, to a use case that's very much like that because we've adapted NSX now to be container-friendly, cloud-friendly. We've added NSX into the branch, VeloCloud. So those are the things that we're, you know, there's no rest for the weary anymore. >> And that gives you a consistent networking model, which is not trivial, as we've talked about. >> One of the things that I'm excited by, intrigued by, is, I know it's nuanced, but I see it as a key point, containers sometimes don't meet the security boundary issue. So, you guys can run a VM around a container, and run it under the covers. With Lambda. At super lightning speeds. It's not like a ten second instance to stand up. So that means there's more opportunities to create more abstractions around Kubernetes. And maintain security. There's so many benefits from this integrated kind of concept of consistency of operations for the software developer. >> John, you're absolutely right. Part of what we're trying to do is that word you talked about. Consistent infrastructure and operations. Consistent infrastructure and operations. And the container, if you've been seeing some of the ads in the San Francisco airport, we have some in London, and a few of the airports in New York, you'll see an ad that says "Containerware." It's playing on the word "ware", VMware. We want to be everyWARE, W-A-R-E. And if you think about the container being as pervasive as the vm in the future, I'm not going to say we're going to change the name of the company to be Containerware, but we want to be as pervasive as vm has been in VMware. So we have tens of millions of vms, in the twenty years we've had, maybe there'll be ten times as many containers. We want to become that de facto platform and containerware starts to take over. Right? What is that? Kubernetes-based. And we'll partner with the best. We've partnered with Google, we've partnered with Pivotal. Some of it would land on AWS, some of it will land on Azure. And you get a lot of the flexibility you have with that microservices platform. >> So, since you guys are on more of the software side, obviously Amazon's got software, but you guys actually are going to be much more broader, multiple clouds, as Amazon moves up the stack, I would imagine that as customers, I'm not going to buy in to only one cloud, there's other clouds out there, you guys should become a real strategic, traversal between clouds. So, we were debating, will customers have certain instances in, say, different clouds for specific, unique things, but yet run still horizontally, scalable on-premises, with VMware across multiple clouds. >> I think, you know John, it's going to be a lot like the hardware market was 20 years ago. It started to evolve into two or three major players. What's today Dell, HPE, Lenovo, at the time it was IBM, they divested to Lenovo, Cisco. In the storage place, two or three. I think the public cloud is not going to be three, five, ten. It's going to be two or three. Maybe four. And then maybe, in like China, Alibaba. So already, we have certain tools. Like CloudHealth's proposition is to manage costs and resources across multiple clouds. So we began to be already thinking about what is a multi-cloud world do? That said, in areas like this, which is a data center offer, we felt it was good for us to focus and get VMware Cloud and AWS to be the best hybrid cloud option. Give that a couple years, rather than trying to do everything and do it poorly, when you peanut butter your approach and try to do a lot of things with various different, so this is why we put a lot of special attention on VMware Cloud and AWS. We have an offering with IBM. We announced something with Alibaba. In due course VMware will need to have multiple cloud offerings. But I feel like this partnership and the specialness of this has really benefited both sides. >> Well, it's going to be very interesting, because IBM just made a 34 billion dollar validation of multi-cloud, so, and we talk about competition all the time. And it's evolving. >> We have a very good relationship with IBM. And listen, you have to be reasonably nuanced in your partnerships. So we're going to partner very heavily with IBM Global Services. We're going to partner very well with IBM Cloud. We're going to compete really hard with Red Hat! That's okay! Well, we'll compliment Linux. The bulk of their revenue's Linux. >> Of course, yeah. >> But make no mistake, we're going to compete hard with OpenShift. That's okay! That doesn't mean our IBM relationship is competitive. There's one piece of that, a very small part of the Red Hat revenue, OpenShift, that we overlap. The rest of it is complementary. We can be nuanced. It's sort of like walking and chewing gum. We can do both. And that's how we play. >> Before you wrap, now you know what we think of you, we think very highly of you, you're a superstar in our minds. However, you got to interview Sushmita, in India-- >> You know who Sushmita is? >> a true Bollywood superstar. Yes, an amazing actress, beautiful, talented. That must have been quite an experience. >> Well I got to tell ya, I was very intimidated. I opened-- >> I'll bet. >> Cause somehow I get assigned all these interviews to do. Malala, I'm usually on the opposite end. Your end. Malala, and Condoleezza Rice, and I told her I was really intimidated by her, and she said "Why?" I said, it's the first time that, I'm usually not tongue tied, but I did not know how to explain to my wife that I was going to be interviewing Ms. Universe. Okay, and she's like "What do you guys do at VMware? What the heck does Sushmita Sen have to do" But it was a good interview, I mean listen, for the India audience, we were celebrating our 20 year anniversary. She is an amazing woman who has achieved something that very few Indians have. And we wanted our Indian audience there to see that women can be successful. She's a big supporter of more women in business, fairness, equality, no prejudice, equal pay, all those things that we stand for. Which is part of our values. And if it weren't for the India audience she probably, I don't know if she would have worked at a Vmworld. We had Malala there, we had Condoleezza Rice at our last sales kickoff. We do these because we want to both teach our employees something, but also inspire them. And sometimes these speakers help with that cause. >> Sanjay, great to see you, thanks for coming on. I know you got to catch a flight. Big day today for you guys at VMware, congratulations. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Thanks for all your support, great to see you. Great commentary, great insight. Sanjay Poonen, COO at VMware breaking down the announcement of Outposts, its relevance and impact on the market, and more importantly, the VMware AWS relationship. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets, hundreds of video assets coming, tons of posts on siliconangle.com, where all the coverage is. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix! >> Welcome back to theCUBE! This is SiliconANGLE Media's live production of Nutanix .NEXT 2018. If you've eaten a lot of the cuisine here in New Orleans, you might want to do something to help burn those calories, and joining us for this segment, happy to welcome Sarah Robb O'Hagan, who's the CEO of Flywheel Sports and also the author of Extreme You. Sarah, welcome to our program. >> Thanks for having me! >> Tell us a little bit about your company and what brings your group to the show? >> Yeah, we're very excited to be here, this is a whole new experience for us. Flywheel is an indoor cycling business We started off as basically bricks and mortar, indoor cycling classes, and we were the first company to put technology on the bike, so have either of you done spinning before ever? >> I've seen them in a gym. >> Seen them in a gym. >> I take my bike out on the trails and get my kids out a bunch, but not indoors so much. >> So in the old days if you did a spinning class and the instructor was like turn up your resistance, you'd maybe kind of pretend but you didn't do it, whereas we put tech on the bike so it's like, oh, you have to hit this number and you've got to get this output, and so it makes it much more athletic and accountable, and then we just recently launched a streaming platform, so now you can stream the classes into one of our bikes in your home, it's for flight anywhere, so we ended up coming here 'cause I was speaking at the conference with regards to my book and we were like these are fun people, they're going to want to check out our bikes and our techs, so let's do it. >> Wait, so the tech people, do they get engaged, are they trying it out? >> Oh it's amazing, yeah. We've seen people riding to the leaderboard wearing jeans, it's fantastic. >> I'm a runner, so-- >> Yeah, me too! >> But, you know there's certain runners and there's certain cyclists that there's this built-in competition like, you know, cycling is for the hardcore folks that really like the workout, and then you have guys like me. I can't stream a app to say, hey, you know what, you need to pick up your pace and keep it moving. That is an amazing kind of innovation, especially for that market, there's an awful lot of competition. How are you differentiating yourself between the competition? >> That's a great question. So it starts with who we're serving, who we're doing it for, right, so if there's about a hundred million in America that work out maybe between zero and six times a week. Our consumers are the ones that are like five to six times a week, they are hardcore, they're intense, they like competition, they are, like, I can't let the kids win at Monopoly kind of people, and so how we differentiate is everything in the product has been designed with them in mind, so allowing them to really push their own performance in a big way and the metrics, every time you do a ride, particularly on the streaming platform, you can pace against yourself last time you rode, so you can see am I keeping up, am I doing better, so it's basically about really focusing on one kind of athlete, as we call them, and meeting their needs as best as we can. >> Digital transformation is hitting your industry hard. >> Totally. >> You're streaming now, you've been through some big brands in the past, how's this impacting? How does your company deal with the pace of change? >> Well, you know, it's funny. I have been lucky in that my career, I've journeyed through some very big iconic brands. I was at Virgin Megastores when we used to buy music, do you remember on things that went round and round from retail store, right? And then along came Napster and totally disrupted that industry. I was at Gatorade when we had to transform that, and what I've learned along the way is that you just have to commit yourself to constantly innovating and disrupting yourself. If you let the environment do it to you it's too late, and so I think that's how we think about it, like we soar not so much from the market, because certainly streaming is taking off, like health and fitness apps in the app store are always the top category on both Android and iPhone. Also boutique fitness was exploding, so that's where you do one kind of modality as opposed to going to a full service gym, and so we saw these trends happening, but then you speak to the consumer, it's like what are you looking for? And what we kept hearing was I love being at Flywheel, but I wish I could get it when I was on the road, when I'm in the hotel, when I'm, you know, and so we're like how do we bring out content to you wherever you need it at any time? So that was really what led to it. >> So, I would like to talk to you about discoverability, like as you said, go to the app store, Google fitness app, going to get 10,000 results. How do you guys rise to the top? How do you find new customers? >> Interestingly enough, we, I think, are lucky because of our existing business, so we have a footprint of 42 studios, we have 600,000 people that have ridden with Flywheel over the years, and what's neat about having that in-person experience is you really build brand evangelists, so a lot of our early sales of the streaming platform have come from those people who are telling their friends about it, who are not in communities where our studios exist, and then from obviously a paid digital ad standpoint, we can get very very specific in to look-alike types to the kinds of consumer we have because they have pretty standard typical behaviors, in terms of they happen to do a lot of marathons, they happen to do Tough Mudders and stuff like that. They're runners, they're doing strength workouts, so we can see what these kinds of people are online to really be focused on how we target them. >> So what about the monetization? You know there's the freemium models, there's all different things, how is this move impacted that? >> That's a great question. We're doing our streaming as a subscription model and actually we look for a one year commitment, 'cause we really believe that, particularly 'cause we're going after someone who's very engaged in the category. We want them to sign up and be with the program and basically get that loyalty to, not only the programming, the instructors they love, but the data, like once they've got data in the system that becomes a method of loyalty, because it keeps them wanting to know what their previous results were, so for us we're not really doing free leading in. I mean, certainly we do trial classes in our studios, but we know that people, basically, if they make a commitment, that's how they become really loyal to our brand and our category. >> So talk to us as a leader and someone who's, you know there's probably nothing more personal, more critical to me than my running data, like I completely trust it to my cloud provider, and if it was to ever go away I'd be devastated if I have a big running goal. As you pick technology partners and you have that weight like someone may look at it from the outside, oh, what's the big deal if you're cycling data is gone? That's very serious. How do you pick technology partners that help you to extend the trust that your users put in to you, to your technology partner? >> It's so profoundly important to the relationship with our consumer, that when we're picking technology partners we're always going to go for best in class, and we're always going to make sure those are the people that we know are treating the data with the same kind of importance, I guess, that we are. For example, we're actually doing a lot with Apple right now, not surprisingly with the Apple Watch because that's the kind of partner we see so many of our riders are using Apple Watches in the experience anyway, and we want to be able to take the data that's coming through that device, add it to what we're getting off the bike, and make it more meaningful for that particular consumer. It's very important to us, we would not ever go with some fly-by-night tech partner if they didn't have the kind of credentials that we were looking for. >> Alright. So Sarah, tell us about the book. Step Up, Stand Out, Kick Ass, Repeat? >> Kick ass, people. That's what it's about. So I wrote the book about a couple years ago, it's interesting how it came about, you're a runner so I think you'll appreciate this. I have three kids, and my kids were going and playing new sports, and coming home with participation trophies, and I'm like what the hell is that? Like why did you get a trophy just for showing up, you know? And then at the same time I noticed in the workforce, younger employees that were coming in who were like, where's my promotion? I'm here. It's connected, right? And so I started to do a lot of research, and I realized that for 20, 30 years we have been raising kids from a self-empowerment standpoint, to not expose them to risks and failing and all of these things, yet the most successful people in the world have gone through really tough times to get there, and so I went down this journey of interviewing some really incredible people, like from Condoleezza Rice through to Bode Miller, the skier, through to Mister Cartoon who's a tattoo artist, like all people who are top of their game at what they do. To basically weave together what were the commonalities that got them there to help educate another generation of how to do the same for themselves, and then also applied it to business, so take those themes and how do you bring that to life as a leader within your team to get the most results out of your organization. >> Well it was surprising, well I guess it's not surprising how many people in our industry that are high performers, executives, that are also extreme athletes, whether they're extreme cyclists. Ran into a group of people the other day, one of the cycler's says, "You know what "my biggest complaint about the iPhone is? "It only lasts three hours." >> Yeah, yeah, I get that. >> That same attitude extends out. One question about innovation. How do you guys consider or approach innovation in a market that, like cycling is pretty straight forward, get on a bike and you run, or if you're not directly creating equipment, how do you guys consider innovation, is it just physical, is it data, is it services, what's the approach? >> All of the above, right? And what I love about being in this category, I've been in sports and fitness for 20 years. I was at Nike, I was at Gatorade, and now I'm at Flywheel, and what I love is innovation is all about are we making the athlete better, period. And so it's such a clear filter and that may be through data that gives you insights of how you rode today versus yesterday, what did you eat, did that make the ride better or worse, or it may be, in the case of Nike and Gatorade, the products you put on your body, in your body, like they're all in service of helping you be better and I think it enables us to sort of not get distracted by the sort of, oh, this is the cool hip thing right now that everyone's doing in every category, and instead go is that helping to make an athlete better, is it motivating them, is it helping them physically, is it essentially getting them better results? >> Alright. Sarah Robb O'Hagan, thank you so much for joining us. >> It's been fun. >> We definitely have to check out your area before we wrap up. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NET's 2018 in New Orleans, for Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE! (light electro music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. Its the Cube, covering .Next Conference 2017, Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching, Silicon Angle Medias production of the Cube. World Wide leader in live tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Anja Manuel, who's a Co-founder and partner at, Rice Hadley Gates. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Anja: Thank you for having me, Stu. >> So, I've attended all five of the Nutanix conferences. And definitely, when we get a speaker at the Key Note from R.H.G. is one of the highlights. So, Condoleezza Rice, everybody's like, how does Nutanix get Condie Rice to come in? Robert Gates, we've actually had the pleasure of having him on the Cube. We've had Stephen Hadley on in D.C. also. And a little bit different conversation than some of the, kind of, in the weeds technical discussion. So, Anja for our audience that's not familiar, give us a little bit about your background, what you led you in to be one of the founders. >> Absolutely. Well, I've done a bit of everything. I've been an investment banker, a lawyer doing international cases. I have worked at the State Department for Condie Rice, mostly on Asia issues. And, then at the very end of 2008, Condie, Steve and I founded this firm. And we feel very lucky to be working with each other and some of the great, young and already, some already large, some fast growing tech companies in the Valley. And helping them expand around the world. And it's been a particular pleasure to work with Dheeraj and his team at Nutanix. When we started with them, they were a couple hundred people. And now look around, you've got 2,000 people at this conference. So, we're very proud of them. >> Yeah, absolutely. Great growth for Nutanix, their eco-system's blossoming. One of the jokes I always have here on the Cube is, when I talk to any end user customers, its like, well your industry's not changing that much, right? And of course, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. Digital disruption is more than just what it's affecting. Globalization is just a fact of life. It brings, especially for a lot our audiences, USA based, we reach a global audience. But when we come to some of these international events, it really puts a point on some of the things going on globally. What're you talking to, when you speak to the CIOs and you're talking to Nutanix customers and partners, what are some of the big challenges? What are the things that they need to be looking at? >> Sure, globalization is happening and of course, it's more pronounced in tech. This is the first industry that really shows no sectoral boundaries. The big platform companies can basically go into any industry sector and no geographic boundaries. It's very easy to expand internationally. So, what I'm going to be talking about today on the main stage is just globalization and its backlash. As you know we've seen, after decades of evermore, open boarders, increase trade, easier immigration, and the last year or two, you've seen really the West in sort of, what I would call a defensive crouch. And there are real reasons for it in the US where you and I both live. If you are a white male, who has a high school education or less, you live on average, 10 years less than all of the very highly educated people in this room. And there is a real issue of people being left behind. And you can see that impact politically. You see it in the US, with Trump, and I would also argue on the left with Bernie Sanders. You see it with Brexit. You see it in the impact that Marine Le Pen and Aten a Tiva for Deutschland and others have had on European politics. And I would say that impact is strong, even though those right wing parties in Europe didn't win, they're setting the agenda much more than you would've seen 10 years ago. So it's something for the tech companies to consider as they keep expanding. >> Yeah, it's a trade. On the one hand, you said that there's no boundaries for tech, but one of the things a lot of the tech community, we look at, is some of those fragments that are happening. So, like, the internet. Is the internet a global internet or does China have their own internet? Will Germany just create their own internet? And how much is governance, and having data something we look and Nutanix looks at a lot, require that you have it within those boarders, and the boundaries between government and corporations now? There's certain countries where governments are heavily involved and certain ones where it almost feels that they're fighting. In the US, it's, is the government actually helping business or stopping business? >> That's right. >> Is something that we ask a lot. So I'm curious, your thoughts. >> Well, right now, we still have one global interoperable internet and that has been a huge boon to economies all around the world. Not just the American one. And it's this little known organization called ICANN, which was started in the 1990s. It has a convoluted thing called the multi stake holder model, where they say, we're going to get people, the technologists who are working on this and GOs and governments and everyone talking about how do we actually manage this thing and make sure that it stays interoperable and global. And I'm quite happy that that system of internet governance still stands and that it hasn't been taken over by individual governments or by the United Nations. You talked about data localization. It's a real issue. We see this with a lot of the tech companies that we work with out in California. More and more. You see the Russians doing it. You see the Chinese doing it. And I worry that if that trend really continues, you will have less interaction, for example, between Chinese and Americans, which is something we so dramatically need, now that our governments seem to be more and more at odds with each other. It's more important than ever that the companies and the people are talking to each other. >> Yeah, I actually, we interviewed the former president of ICANN, Fadi Chehade, a couple of years ago and he was raising red flags as to concern about would the US step back. Cause really, it put that in place, and had a very strong connection there. So would the US, kind of, advocate from some of this or how would that be involved? So you're happy with the way ICANN's going and kind of the global discussion? >> I was very happy to see that the United States allowed it to be privatized. Which is something that'd been planned for a long time. So we're quite happy that it happened the way it did. And that even the new Trump administration didn't stop that from going through, yeah. >> All right, you've written a lot about India, some of the others. How do companies, even in the global market place? Do they have to specialize in what they're doing? Certain regionalizations, that they need to do or how do they, global company, interact in some of the more emerging markets? >> Yeah, they do have to specialize. And I think sometimes, in Silicon Valley, we're so confident in our own abilities that sometimes we think, well if it's invented here, naturally the world will love it. That worked for Facebook. It worked for Google. It doesn't necessarily work for every technology company. And so, yes, of course you have to tailor it to the local market. And there are some innovations coming out of China and India that are, frankly, really impressive and we should adopt some of them. And China, the web payments infrastructure is much more advanced than what you see in the US. Lots of people do everything through their WeChat account. They pay, they interact, they talk. It's not just texting. It's a whole echo system in a way that we haven't really seen as much in the US and Europe. So we can learn from them as well. >> Yeah so another interesting topic is, Silicon Valley prides itself on being the center of innovation. What're you seeing globally, are there certain areas or pockets? Can there be other Silicon Valleys for different technologies or is Silicon Valley going to be the Silicon Valley for all of these waves? >> Well, we are the biggest Silicon Valley. And it is a very unique eco-system. I'm lucky enough to teach at Stanford and to work with some of these tech companies. The idea that a university and a venture capital eco-system and entrepreneurs all work together in something that isn't directed by the state is very very important. And you do see these springing up everywhere. You have it in Bangalore. You have it in Boston, where you're from. You have it outside of London. You're seeing a little bit in Berlin happening. You're seeing it in China in a much bigger way than I think people appreciate. I'll give you one story. I was at the Chinese World Internet Forums, sort of their vision of the world internet, a year and a half ago. And I get back to my hotel at midnight, ready to just go to bed, and there are a thousand people in the lobby. All with their phones out. And I'm wondering, who's coming? Is it Xi Xin Ping? Is it some rock star? In walks Jack Ma and the CEO of Xiaomi phones. And a huge shout goes up as if it's the Beatles. So if you're a young millennial Chinese person, you want to be Jack Ma. So innovation fever has captured them as well. >> Yeah, what about companies being global versus being based in a country? What advice do you give to how they balance that headquarters versus being a global company? >> Yeah, this is one of the ironies and all the protectionist talk you see from governments because I think the cat is out of the bag. So to speak. Every company we work with, even the very young ones, they're global from the very beginning. Even if you think your headquarters are in New York or in California, you're supply chain most likely, incorporates 10 different countries. Your customers are somewhere else. Maybe you don't advertise it because you try to be an all American company or all European company, but there's actually no such thing as a domestic company anymore. >> I want to give you the final word. Nutanix, you give some advice. I'm sure there's things we can't talk about. But how are they doing as being a global company? What are some of the things a company like Nutanix that they'll face as they expand globally? >> Yeah, Nutanix is very impressive. First of all, if you look at Dheeraj and Sudheesh and their senior management team, what I love about working with them, is that they are good technically, they're great at the people to people skills and they are instantly global just like we just talked about. If you look at their management team, they're from all over the world. And they very quickly got people out into all the different regions. I think they try to be sensitive to how their product would be used in different places around the world. So I'm quite optimistic about what they're going to be able to achieve. >> Okay, I do have one last question for you. I was just thinking about that globalization. One of the concerns we have these days is getting enough women in tech and with your global viewpoint, just women in the workforce is still something that we're challenged with in many parts of the globe. What's your take? >> Yeah, strangely, women in the workforce are doing better in China, for example, than in the US, Europe, India, other places. I love living and working in Silicon Valley. We really have a problem. And we need to do more. And it's on the stem side. It's on the investor side. You've seen all of the news coming out about how it's so much harder for a woman entrepreneurs to get funded. There's no reason. There's actually a recent study done saying that women who get funded, their companies do, on average, far better than companies founded by men. So clearly there's some problem going on here and I'm happy that Silicon Valley's finally paying attention. >> Well Anju Manuel, really appreciate you joining us for this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and we will be back with more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. You're watching the Cube.