>> It's The Cube, covering WTG TRANSFORM 2019. Brought to you by WINSLOW Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusets, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program Mike Berthiaume, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. >> Well as always Stew, it's great to be here. This is number three for us I think, this has become kind a bit of a tradition. >> The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here and as I say, a nice home game after lots of travels around the globe. Talking about lots of technologies. >> For sure, looking forward to it. >> What I've always loved, diggin in, in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have a 189 users, many of them are Nutanix customers. So let's start there, what's top of mind from your customers today? >> A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day it's all about IT, providing the value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we were just speaking about this in our session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So in many of the folks working on the trenches realize, "Oh yeah, public cloud does make sense "for some things but not necessarily everything." The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud, figure out how to make that work. So that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is from our product portfolio Nutanix, and what we're doing. We're really very much in lockstep with that. >> When I think back when that whole wave of hyper-converged infrastructure aged the eye which, Nutanix to its credit never was like, HCI, HCI. It was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it that's software that drives the company. The founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So when you hear, well the promise of public cloud is supposed to be simple and economic. Well public cloud, we understand is neither simple nor cheap. >> That's right. >> Hyper-converged infrastructure did simplify environments, and changes the economics of how we think if it. When I talk to Nutanix customers it's like, "Oh hey, I don't no longer need to do constant care feeding "of this stack of wires and stuff put together, "much of it is much simpler." You talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Gowan in his presentation said something I thought resonated with me, which is, "You don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, "just you ended up there by mistake without plans," And unfortunately that's where IT is, I've got lots of projects that I do, and I do them as I need them and I realize, "Oh wait, somebody's manage, maintain, "and pull all these things together." So help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just where people that might not of looked in a couple a years, know the appliance. >> Yeah sure, and I think from are, and mentioned before our roots come from those big large public cloud environments like Google, and Amazon, and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot a separate silos, right and as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating operational disruption, and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud a, public cloud b, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with different management tools. There's not a ton of value there from a simplicity stand point. So what we strive to do? Is we strive to create that abstraction, that single consistent control plane. That goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud. So I can manage my resources in the public cloud, in the same way I would on premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like cloud-native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to, is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end a the day businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are, it should be whatever most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer? Or you are a executive? Where my application is shouldn't matter, it should be available wherever I am. >> Mike one of the things that's been interesting watching Nutanix is not the growth of the core market, but its got this three-tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally? Any kind a proof points? You can give us that kind a help us understand the strategy a bit more. >> I think the majority of the customers are running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right. And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense. They're getting the simplicity having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities, and the higher level features. In order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation. All right, so that sold core foundation is our core ACI platform, or our cloud like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is, "When you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, "your software to find data center, "it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud." So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture. That's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way, and true hybrid cloud? You've got to follow their playbook, and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe Nutanix is that right choice. >> Yeah and in many ways we're seeing the blurring the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix that's on the Cooper Netty Show, that experience that I have and Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. >> Absolutely, I think the nirvana again if we can imagine, what is this all going to look like five years from now? It's a single portal, single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service, or an application. And when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go? It's going to out it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon? Or it needs to go on Azure? The decision is going to be made based on business logic, as opposed to technology decision, which I think is what matters. >> So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, Winslow Technology's here, is a big Dell partner. >> %100. And they sell the Dell XE solution here. They're people out there, there is well the Dell relationship. Yes, they are one Nutanix biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out into the market and you look at market share? The biggest alternative to a Nutanix agency I-Option is the Dell EMC VxRail. So help us understand that dynamic, and how that's playing out in your world? >> Yeah that's a great question, and I kind of expected the controversial questions, as always on theCube, so thanks Stu. In terms a that I would say that when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. There is pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah combining and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space, and having mobility of applications across hypervisors, and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them? The discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I think our view, our perspective. You mention simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice, we don't want to lock our customers into anymore particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice, we don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization for example, and kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy kubernetes on crime, leveraging the source version in kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on of the hypervisors we support. Right, so that's an important distinction too, it's not like we're telling you have to run one particular hyupervisor to get x feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. >> Yeah that's great, just last thing Mike I got to imagine your customers are asking a lot a questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure stacked, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when the start calling and asking about these technologies? >> Well, if you look at the history? We've been doing this for a long time now, I've been here for over five years, and Nutanix has been doing this sense two, we've released our product back in 2011, after a couple a years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we also really built our platform around a mantra, that we are highly scalable distributed architecture, along enabling choice, and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us sustain that. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix, and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription base business model. It makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past, and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors do. >> All right, Mike Berthiaume always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera, as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much appreciate it Stu. >> All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)