>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents... theCUBE! Covering AlibabaCloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to Silicon Angle's theCUBE here on the ground, in Hangzhou, China. We're here at the Intel Booth as part of our coverage, exclusive coverage of Alibaba Cloud Conference here in the cloud city. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE, Wikibon and theCUBE. And I'm here with CJ Bruno, who is the Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts of the sales and marketing group at Intel. That's a mouthful but basically you run a lot of the major accounts, you bring a lot of value to Intel Supplier to these big clouds. >> I do, John. We look after our top 20 or so largest partners and customers around the world. Amazing like Alibaba, edge to cloud enterprises, deep rich engagements, just an exciting, exciting time to be in the business with these big customers. >> And there's no borders to the cloud so its not as easy as saying PC, like people might think of Intel in the old days. You guys have these major cloud providers, there's a lot of intel inside so to speak but that value is enabling a new kind of functionality. We're hearing it here at the show. >> You are. We work together with partners like Ali, in the area of such big artificial intelligence development, big data analytics and of course, the cloud. We've been working with them for over 12 years now and you can see the advancements and the services that they're providing to their customers, not only domestically, here in China but on a global stage as well. >> Its interesting, Intel, you've been working with these guys for 12 years, what a journey, from an entrepreneurial 12 guys in a dorm room, or an apartment for Jackie Ma, that he talks about all the time, to now the powerhouse. What's it like, because these guys have an interesting formula going on here. They're bringing culture and art, with science, kind of sounds like Steve Jobs, technology meets liberal arts, bringing a cultural aspect. How far have they come? Give us some insight into where they've come from and where you think they're going. >> Its amazing, Jack Ma, yesterday in his keynote, talked about this event eight years ago. 120 people, John, we're standing amongst 60,000 or so, in this event today, just eight short years later. Its amazing what they've been able to do. They're driving innovation, this is not a copy economy, it's an innovation economy. They invest, very high-degree of technical acumen. Willingness to break barriers, try things people have not. Fail fast and correct. Take risks. They're entrepreneurs at heart, they're technologists in their bloodstream and they really invest to win. >> You guys are supplying. We talked to people who talk about Photonics, Deeraj Malik, who's really going deep on these pathways around. Some of the Intel innovations, some of it's like wow, mind-blowing. The other end is just practical stuff, making it easier, faster, simpler to run things. IoT, their big use case, I mean you can't get any more sexier than looking at a city cloud that's actually running the city with traffic and all those IoT devices, so what is the big thing that you guys do for Alibaba? Talk about that journey because its not one thing, what is it? What is the magical formula? >> Sure, of course, first off we deliver, we think, world-class ingredients to their world-class cloud. And enable them to deliver amazing services to their customer, at the base level. But we really work together to solve societal problems. Look at the precision medical cloud that we announced last April together, John. Genome sequencing, solving people's cancer problems, in a matter of days, instead of months. Just one example of the real use case that we bring these technologies to bear on and have an amazing influence. We work on them with the Tenatchi Medical Imaging Competition. 3,000 entrants competing to see who can identify lung cancer quickest, and we have some winners selected, just this week. So these things are real, taking this technology, solving real life problems, and business problems, around the globe. >> And its not just the big, heaving lifting technology that moves the needle, like you were mentioning but its also the micro technologies, like FPGA, you guys have got lot of things. This is like the new Intel, so I'd love to get your thoughts, if you can just take a moment to share the journey that Intel is on right now because you gave a talk yesterday, a kind of a keynote, onstage. What is the Intel journey right now look like? >> We're transforming ourselves from a PC centric company to a company that runs the cloud and powers countless numbers, billions and billions of smart-connected devices. That's a big journey we're on. We've diversified our business significantly in a five year period, John. Driving our data-center business, our IoT business, our programmable logic business as you said, our friends from former Alterra are now two years inside Intel. Our memory business, our NSG technologies, 3D NAND Optane, driving breakthroughs in SSDs and of course new technologies that we're exploring, like drones and neuromorphic computing, making sure we never miss the next big thing. >> I've been following Intel for 30 years of my career and life, as an initial user-developer and now in the media. It's interesting, Intel has never done it alone, it's always been part of the ecosystem. You have brought a lot of goods to the party, so to speak, in technology, Moore's law and the list is endless. Now is an end to end game but you look at 5G for instance, you kind of connect the dots, put a radio frequency cloud over a city and you got to run the IoT devices like a city brain, they're showing here. You got to tie it together with programmable arrays, it's a hardware thing but now the software guys are doing it. You've got cloud native with the Linux Foundation, that's DevOps. You've got data centers that are 10 to one silicon to the edge, this is a wide opportunity, how do you guys make sense of it to customers? Because its a complex story. >> It is John, look, we're the ultimate ingredient supplier. We're bringing forward technologies in artificial intelligence, in 5G, in VR and AR, areas that are just autonomous everything. Autonomous driving in particular. These are big investment areas we're driving into that require an enormous amount to compute, storage, networking, connectivity and we're making the investments to make sure we're critical partners with our customers, in all those huge growth areas. Making us a big growth company now. >> I had a great conversation with Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud, he's on the Technology Steering Committee for Alibaba Group and yesterday they just announced a 15 billion dollar investment over three years for FinTech, across the board IoT, AI, collaborate with scientists as well as artisans. This is a big deal. >> It is John, this is exactly an example of what I mentioned earlier. These guys invest to win and they have a will to win. And they want to pioneer and they want to innovate and they put their money where their mouth is, in that announcement, its pretty exciting. >> So the cloud serves quite a market, doing really well. Your global accounts are doing well, certainly in Asia and People's Republic of China, PRC, as you guys call it, extremely well but now there's a Renaissance in cloud in general, so we're expecting to see a lot more cloud service providers, maybe not as big as Alibaba but Alibaba is going to start getting customers that become SaaS companies, that's technically a cloud service provider if you think about it, if they have an application, how do you look at that mark? >> We see what is known as the super seven in the industry, the large folks, both US based and China based but then we've identified the next 60-70 next wave CSPs that are growing vibrantly around the globe and there's a long tail of another 120 that we're interacting with. You're absolutely on point, an exploding area. Significant double-digit growth for years to come and just solving, big, big life and business problems. >> So at SiliconANGLE also silicon is in the name and Wikibon Research is really big in China, here, interesting dynamic that's happening here with the data and the software and was brought up with Dr. Wong about the IoTs, kind of a nuanced point but I want to get it out for the folks watching that you're going to start to see new compute at the edge because data is now the currency of the future. It needs to flow, it's like water but at the edge it can be expensive, low latency that table stakes that everyone wants to get to. You're going to see a lot more compute or silicon at the edge of network. Internet of things coming, your view on that? >> There's no question John, that's exactly the way we see it. The time to get the data back to the long-haul data center, is very expensive and very challenging and requires an absolute redo of the network. We're moving to compute closer and closer to the data, of course, the cloud remains a vital, vital part of that but we move that compute capability closer to where the data is sensed, you can analyze it quicker, you can make faster decisions and you can implement those decisions at the edge. >> CJ, final question for you, obviously Alibaba, big part of their growth strategy is going outside mainland China, obviously doing very well here, not to knock them there but great opportunity to go into the global marketplace, specifically North America. That's going to put more competition, competition was good but it's also going to require more growth. How are you helping Alibaba and how does your relationship at Intel expand with Alibaba? >> We work with Alibaba, not only on the technical front of course but on their go-to-market plans, on ecosystem development plans and even some business models. We do that across our entire customer and partner base, John. We're seeing this explosive growth in cloud and being able to work with our partners on all four of those fronts; technology development, ecosystem development, business model development, are obviously a benefit to both of us. >> Alibaba is going to need some help because you know its competitive, Amazon had a nice run for a while, Microsoft nibbling at the heels, Google and now Alibaba coming in. Competition is good. >> We're proud to call all those innovators our customers and we work hard everyday to earn their business. >> Final, final question, this one just popped in my head. What should folks in America know about this PRC market or China market that they may not know about? Obviously they read what they read in the paper. They see the security hacks, they see the crypto-currency temporarily on hold but blockchain certainly has a lot of promise, but it's a dynamic market here. A lot of of opportunities. What should that audience know about the China market? >> I think the first thing they should know is that if they haven't come to experience it themselves they should. The scale of the opportunity, the scale of the country is like nothing people have ever seen before. As I said, the investments they're making-to innovate, to drive an innovation economy is breakthrough. You take that scale and that investment and this is a market to be reckoned with. >> Congratulations on the 12 year run with Alibaba, and now Alibaba Cloud. Looking really, really, strong, love the culture, got to unique twist; artistry and scientific cultures coming together, looking good. >> Absolutely John, thanks for letting us tell our story. >> CJ Bruno, Group Vice President, General Manager Global Accounts for Intel. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, thanks for watching.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're live here in Las Vegas from VMworld 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage three days wall to wall. On our third day, I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Next guest Pai, who's the Vice President of Alliances and Business Development at Nutanix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, happy to be here. >> We cover you user conference, but we're here at VMworld, which is VM ware's conference. >> Yes. >> You guys have a relationship, this is multiple years here. Just give a history, you guys are now a public company, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> You're doing well. Almost a year now. >> Tell us about the history with VMware and VMworld. >> Absolutely. I think our company was built on the fact that virtualization is going to be the future of the data center. Right? And if you look at the evolution over the last few years, that's been validated. We've been a partner with VMware since almost the inception of the company when we came out in 2010 2011. And in 2011, and we've now been in, this is our the seventh year. And we continue to see great momentum with our customers, and our partners, for that matter. As the seventh year, we are very much aligned with how the world is going. You know, hybrid cloud, in our multi-cloud world, and if you look at what we've done with our platform be it hyper-converge or the evolution of where that's going on with our role as Enterprise Cloud OS, we see a lot of synergy in terms of how VMware's approach to a software designed data center. And where we see the world going, "Hey everything needs "to be software defined. "And the architecture that's underneath that, needs to be invisible to customers. I think that's aligning very well, so it's happy to be here and our customers are very happy to see us here, and see both of us working closer together. >> And it's certainly been interesting to see the evolution of the partnership with VMware. When you guys first came out, I was like, "Wow "hot new company, come on in, infrastructure company." And then people realized, "Wow, this hyper-converged infrastructure thing, is really hot. "We should be doing that too." We remember we had Dheeraj on, right after there was a VxRack announcement, and he was welcoming it in, validation of course. First of all it's true, and that's what any smart CEO would say. But then it got very interesting when you guys announced Acropolis. And when everyone was pivoting to hyper-converge, you were pivoting to cloud. So what's behind that trend? How is that going? What are customers telling you? >> Sure. It's a great analogy of how we see the world. If you look how Nutanix germinated early in 2009, there where a couple of key trends in the market. When a public cloud was trying to become a very, very strong direction of where our customers wanted to go. Right? And if you look at what that direction meant, it was simplicity, so I can transmit through a single API, I can make infrastructure invisible, so I can therefore focus on the business and the business application that drives my business. And that's been the direction that we've taken. How do you make things simple for customers? And hyper-converge is an element of driving that simplicity. At an infrastructure level, we would drive that simplicity. And we've taken that theme and driven that all the way though, where we believe that, if you look at our fundamental team, as a Company (mumbles) cloud OS. Which is customers like cloud, but at the same time the direction they want to go is, "Take my applications, "Take it off premise in to a public cloud, "but the benefits of what public clouds mean. "I want it in my data center. "I can start small, grow at my space, have everything "simple to deploy." And that's been the direction we have continued to focus on. And that directionally has provided the true north of how we build our operating system stack. >> So on the customers side, I want to get your take on somethings. You guys have been very customer focused. First of all, you've been great technology, had a unique thing that no one saw, by the way. When we first interviewed Dheeraj, we're like, "This is going to be big." And just like my conversation with Andy Jassy at Amazon, the big winners are the ones who are misunderstood at the beginning. And then it becomes clear, "Why didn't we think of that?" Well, he did all the work. But you guys have to be customer focused. >> Absolutely. The success of VMware the success of Amazon, the success of you guys is to be customer focused. So I've got to ask you. "What are the VMware customers asking you, Nutanix, "to do for them?" What are some of the use cases? Where are you winning? And what does it mean for their customers? >> That's a great question. I think for us, the fundamental driver, what we try to do for customers, is, "How do we make things simple for them?" By simplicity, if you look at what we do is, for example, I'll give a simple analogy. One of the ways that we help our customers simplify infrastructure deployment, is make it a simple upgrade. So we have this concept of one-click upgrade. So what does that mean? What that means is, if a customers has an ESX running at say five dot five, and wants to move to six dot zero, the ability for them therefore to do that non destructively, so with a one click upgrade at a 3:00 p.m on a Wednesday afternoon, they can now upgrade the infrastructure. It upgrades the hypervisor, upgrades our software stack, upgrades the flash drives inside the system, and that ability to simplify a deployment of a VMware infrastructure becomes very easy for them. When they're running Vserv, they say we can more enable them at stacks. That ability to therefore make that simpler is a direction we want to make. Make go. So how do you make things simpler when they're running VMware environment? How do you make it simple to deploy in the EC application? Which is why, if a customer is running Horizon View and they want to deploy Nutanix, our deploy hyper-converge, we make it extremely simple to do that. So you can start small and still go from 300 to 3,000 to 30,000 with just a plug and play architecture, and the one click upgrade of the software stack that sits on top of the infrastructure. So that is simplicity we want to bring to our customers. >> So Pai, we had an interesting, Stu and I, John, we were at Dot Next, interesting conversation with Sunil Polepalli. >> Yeah. >> He had said at the time ... go back. You guys were doing really well and you could've exited the market, he said. We chose not to. We said, "Let's roll the dice and really go for it." That puts pressure on you and your colleagues, you in particular, as a business development executive For TAM expansion, of course the CEO as well. Very important that you now, if you're really going to go for the next level, you got to expand your TAM. And that took several forms. There was the Acropolis piece that got you into the cloud and multi-cloud business, that's clear. There were also an increased number of partnerships. Obviously the Dell partnership, Lenovo partnership, IBM with Picciano's group, very strategic relationships. And then of course, other go to market activities. >> Absolutely. >> I wonder if you could talk about that TAM expansion strategy as an individual who is at the heart of that. And take us through that and the process. >> Sure. Nobody can do this alone nowadays. It's a league of nations methodology, you have to leave in a cooperative world. You have to find a way to grow your market in a way that you can't do it alone. And we recognized that early on. And Deeraj, with the way he's built the business, it's about you can't do it alone. We were a small company back in 2010,. Yeah, we have the vision, but how do you execute in a way that we can take that vision, deliver it to thousands and thousands of customers. We have a multi-faceted go to market strategy, if you want to call it that. We depend very heavily on our partners to make us successful. Be that channel partners that have built up business on Nutanix. Be that the Sirius's of the four sides of the world, or companies like that. Be that as a segment, a part of our OEM strategy. When you have a software that simplifies customer's lives, you want to get it to them as quickly as possible. And I think Dell was early on in seeing that vision and saying, "Okay, I want to bring "that value to the customers." And Dell and Lenovo jumped on early on. Dell about four years ago almost, I'm thinking about how long it's been. And Lenovo a couple of years ago. And really, it allows us to reach a larger swath of customers globally much earlier. And give them the technology allowing them to differentiate themselves over the other, who receives as them, so that they're competitors. It gives them that differentiating factor. So it's a marriage of equals from a technology perspective and from a distribution perspective. If you look at what we did in terms of our technology partnership ecosystem, customers recognize that we're not the only game in town. They want us to partner with their strategic vendors and technology partners. So we built a very strong technology ecosystem. I think a couple of months you interviewed Laura Padilla on my team, on what the technology of the ecosystem does for our customers. Every customer conversation is less about, "Gee, "I like Nutanix, and here's what I want you to do more of." Which is obviously what they would love to do, but at the same time they respect what we do with VMware. Well what are we doing with >> It's a multi vendor world. No one company will dominate anymore. >> Correct. Correct. Exactly. >> Tell of the channel how you guys distribute, you rely on partners. >> Absolutely. >> On the sales side, is it direct? Indirect? What's the mix of business? >> So we don't sell direct. We only go through our channel partners. We have a strong channel partner ecosystem. >> So no direct sales. No one takes orders direct. >> No. Our sales guys work very closely with the channel partners, and they work very closely both with OEM's, and our channel partners. And both of them, for all of our OEM partners, they need to work with us when they're engage us in to a customer conversation, so that they can provide the best solution possible. So they don't go in rogue and say, "Here's Nutanix." And that creates conflict with the customer. >> This channel conflict is a disaster. >> Absolutely. So we maintain that >> How about professional services? Do you push that out to the partners as well? >> As much as possible. We have our own. So we have a services arm. Because at the same time, customers say, "Look. If I've got "Nutanix who's the best leader in understanding what "a technology is." We also have a services arm that allows us to lead with our conversation, but we train our channel partners with that same enablement technology. Saying, "You know what? "We can do it on our own, but we want you to lead that charge." As you know, channel partners lead a lot on services to drive their revenue. So it's not just about product and market, more it's about services, revenue; they can drive it at annuity level. We try the balancing act where we can lead the charge in technology for our customers, but at the same time lean on our channel partners to take that burden on, and therefore drive value for them as well. >> So while it's a multi vendor world, we certainly recognize that, again I come back to the decision that you guys made to be a leader. We sort of had a similar conversation with Robin Matlock, if you look at VMware, they want to be a leader. You have a particular opinion and point of view in the marketplace. And you're putting that forth. You really want to be the center point of management for multi clouds, from a data management perspective. >> Yes. >> And you're certainly growing from the point of your core customer base. That's a big ambition. >> It is a big ambition. >> Maybe we can talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely. Our ambition is, if you look at the public cloud, you know five seven years ago, you just brought it up earlier. The ambition is very aggressive. And similarly, if you look at our ambition, we believe that methodology of making things simple for our customers. That does not stop at the hyper-converged world. It starts bleeding in to all the things that make operational complexity a burden for our customers, so they can focus on the business. When you start beating in to what that means, it means addressing some of the layers that make things complex for customers. So if you take your smart phone, all these hundreds of applications you may load on, those are all individual components that make your life easier. But how you bring that simplicity where you one click and you do things. So that's the germination of our methodology of the public cloud is transacted through a single API, but in the world of enterprise, you have hundreds of different vendors that need to work together to deliver the single API. Some of the new technologies we've learned, some of the new products we've launched, Is to bring that simplicity back into light. Be it on an application level. Be at an orchestration level. Or be it an infrastructure level. All those elements need to work together, through a single API for example, to make that simple. So customer's can't say, "I've got Nutanix, but Nutanix "is not the only infrastructure I have. Nutanix "is not just only ... "VMware is not the only hypervisor, I have." So how do I now bring that bridge together, so back to the multi vendor world, I can transact through Dell but I want to buy VMware, but run it on Nutanix, and use this orchestration layer, and go to the public cloud in a hybrid cloud world. And I've offices on oil rigs that need to be treated the same level as someone sitting in a data center. It's a complex world and you need to bring and have an opinionated design at some level, to bring that simplicity in and then diverge outside from that through an API based approach, to say, "You know what? We're not the only game in town." It needs to make sure that other companies can inter-operate, but make thing simple when you are in an opinionated world. >> And let the customer decide. Bringing your simplicity mantra to that world and say, "We think we're the best, here's why, "try it and see for yourself." >> Exactly. Right. So if you look at the new world, the new inner tagline is (mumbles) one OS, one click. That one click drives a lot of our methodology, making things simple. And one OS drives the ability for us to make that simple across the infrastructure stack, which bleeds from the public cloud approach, of what people are starting to like. >> Well Pai, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, appreciate the insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Great conversation with the time we got. >> It's great to see you again. Of course Nutanix, there's a lot of coverage on SiliconANGLE dot com, and Wikibon dot com, on YouTube a lot of great content from the next conference. >> Big plug for your show in Nice this fall. >> Yes. >> You guys will have the international conference >> Thank you for bringing that up. DotNext Nice. It's our second year in Europe and our third conference. It's in Nice, November 6th through the 9th, we look forward to having all of our customers there, and learn more about Nutanix and where we're going. >> And Stu will be there to cover it. >> Yes. >> And you guys just a plug on for that. You guys do a good job, great content, and nice digs. You always have it in a great place. >> Thank you. Thank you very much. >> Customer or want to be a customer they have a good deal going on there. We're out of time. Thanks, Pai, for coming on. >> Thank you for being part of that journey, as well. >> That's theCUBE coverage of VMworld 2017. Nutanix, a great pioneer in the space, under the great entrepreneurial leader, Dheeraj Pandey. More CUBE coverage, after this short break. >> Thank you very much. (upbeat electronic music)