>> Narrator: Live, from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in Nice, France, with Nutanix.Next. Happy to welcome back to the program two return guests, Binny Gill and Aaditya Sood, both with Nutanix. As I said, Binny is the Chief Architect. Aaditya is Senior Director of Engineering. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. My pleasure. All right, so, for about the last year, we've been looking at Nutanix, you talk about enterprise cloud. What does that really mean? How do you, as Dheera said, the goal was to become an iconic software company. Audacious goal. Started with a couple of acquisitions. Really, this week it feels like we're kind of expanding a little bit on what kind of the Nutanix Cloud portfolio if you will, is going to look like. So first, Aaditya, pretty busy, since you came into the Nutanix fold. Bring us up to speed on what you've been up to since the last time we talked. Sure, thank you Stu. The last year or so we have spent integrating Calm into the Nutanix platform. And also just enhancing it so that the true multi-cloud capability of the current platforms come together. And I think this is one of the fundamental building blocks for the modern next generation enterprise clouds. On services, as well as on a service-centric life cycle approach and that is what we have been up to. Yeah, so to dig in for one second here. Because Calm, absolutely seems central, kind of cloud and (mumble), the two things we have been talking about. I've talked to a couple of customers that have had kind of that early, limited access really happy. A lot of customers I've talked to they're like, ah, I've seen the slides. I'm hoping to see some demos. But, you know, they can't wait to get their hands on it 'cause as Nutanix has done in the past, you know, some bold claims, but will the product deliver? So were are we? When does everyone get their hands on it and, you know, get beating on it? Sure, we have been running some early access betas with customers for the last two or three months and the response for us has been phenomenal. Our partners are very excited, our customers are excited. And well as all of Nutanix is very excited. And I think that sometime later this month is when we will push this thing out there to see how it works out, but so far, looking pretty good. All right, excellent. All right, Binny, lot of new announcements. I mean we had Sunil on. We went through, there's all the five-five stuff. But you know, we bring you on stage to talk about some of the future things as I said, expanding out kind of the cloud's stack. Give us a little bit, kind of the architect's view as to how you're deciding, you know, what to build and then you give us the thumbnails as to what's coming. Yeah, so, essentially what we're trying to build is, as you talked about earlier, an enterprise cloud OS, let me put some more meat to that statement. Essentially, an operating system is something where we run applications, right? Back in the old days, operating systems were run on my desktop, like it could be a Linux operating system or Windows operating system and my app would just run on one host. Today, apps run on clouds, right? So the cloud is the new operating system. Now there are multiple operating systems out there. There's AWS, there's Azure, there's GCP. What does the enterprise have, right? Enterprise doesn't have a good operating system and that's our goal. So what were are saying is we need to build all the aspects of an operating system that means starting from a marketplace, you know, from where you download an application to Calm which can deploy an application to a run time like AHV where the application runs to the networking, the storage and security, all these aspects is what we are building and if you can see how we are progressing over the last two, three, years on this, we have made tremendous progress on a lot of these fronts. And if you look at the announcements that we are making, these are very strategic in that direction, how can we make the right components fit into the picture at the right time. All right and speak a little bit to some of the announcements made-- Yeah, so, if you look at so far what we have done, we have had a (mumble) block services and file services and services that allow you to run your mobile apps better, right? Now you're looking at the next generation cloud native applications. One of the first, key things to have is an objects store. If you look at how the public cloud evolved. It started with an object store for multiple applications. We announced that the objects store service. And again, in true Nutanix fashion, it's going to be highly scalable, elastic. We are looking at global scale and how can you build an object store, not only to reside in one cloud and sort of be lock a lock-in, but rather, have it inter-distributed dispersed cloud fashion with the odd capabilities, back-up snap shot. The old constructs of mobility are still needed in this next generation disperse cloud. So that is one of the things. The other announcement we made was on the compute cloud, right. So you've seen Nutanix bring in hyperconvergence first, then we said you can add storage-only Nords. Now we are saying you compute only, storage-less Nords. And the whole idea is that now you can run AHV on a lot more servers. Even the servers you had earlier invested in, you can bring them into the Nutanix fabric and manage from Prism, the one place to manage all your compute farm, all your hyerconvergence farm, and all your storage farm. So that's pretty exciting right now. Yeah, and it's interesting, those people are like, oh well, Nutanix is a hyperconvergence structure player. Well, that service you describe AC2? There's no storage. It's not not hyperconverged, right? So, is HCI just a piece of the portfolio? How would you look at that from an engineering standpoint? HCI was sort of the hammer we needed to use to get rid of the legacy, if you think about it. But, that essentially got rid of the complexity of three-tier architecture, three-tier mindset. Once that's gone and we now say that okay, this is one compute fabric, and the storage fabric could be married to it, or in some cases, it could be separate, that's completely fine, as long as there's one stack that you're dealing with, you know a single place where you can go and upgrade your files from there, this from there, that from there, hypervisor, you know the storage controller, that makes it an operating system in some sense. OS is the one place where, you know it's still wholistic, it doesn't have, I don't buy parts of an OS from different companies. It's one OS. And that's what we are building, so, HCI was an means to an end, I think. Now building an OS for the cloud is the next goal. All right, so, Aaditya, We hear the message of a one OS. But if I look at any IT environment, they have and, because they have something new and they have their old stuff. And the they accept something new and it's always heterogeneous, well I've got vSphere and AHV. I've got AWS and, you know, GCP. Management has to kind of deal with that. And it's been something we have been struggling with in this industry for longer than I've been in the industry. (laughter) So, how are you looking at this? Where do you feel that Nutanix and Calm is going to help, you know to try to, not silver bullet, hopefully single pane of glass get discussed too much. But, what realistically, what do you solve and what advice do you give customers to try to help them get through this? Sure. So the way we look at it, that's the reality to it, the fractured reality of infrastructure, of the enterprise and the different kinds of Window stacks running together. And to riff off Binny's example, an operating system, forever, had different devices, different hardware devices from different Windows. But, by using things like device drivers or file abstractions, build a consistent, layered platform on top of them, so each application did not need to be return off or I'm running this network card or that network card and so on. So that's how we're looking at this layered approach in Calms as well from Nutanix. And yes, there is going to be AWS, there is going to be GCP. But on top of this a single layer can be built which can go ahead and allow the applications to abstract those parts out. That being said, there is no silver bullet for any of this. There are trade-offs involved, but we like to think of based-off on the feedback we have seen over the last year or so of running betas and getting customer interactions and partnerships that remains is, it takes I'd would say 80, 90% of the complexity over. Now I will specifically not use a single pane of glass. Why, because you said so. Yes. Very rightly so, but I think that as close as coming and not just as a single scream but as a single abstraction across multiple pieces of infrastructure is what we are going and building now. And, I've talked to a number of the Nutanix partners and RESTful APIs come up all the time. It's easy for them to integrate with the services. It's kind of the core fundamental of what we look at today, yes? Yeah, Binny. When I think about the channel and I think about your customers, sell an appliance, it's relatively easy. Selling software and services and these pieces, it's a little bit different mindset for them. How do you help with the customers, the go-to-market for what you're building today, how do you get them ready for that? How do you listen to them? How is the feedback you're getting from people impact the kind of what and how you're building it? Yes, we see all sorts of requirements actually coming in. There are some large customers who still love our appliance model. They can just buy Nutanix appliances and forget about managing them or who do they need to call, it's one number to call, one throat to choke, quote unquote, and then there are some others who want to picky in terms of hey, this is the hardware I need to get, because I have great contacts with Taiwan or China and I'll the hardware from there. I also have been using that in my other server farms. They are using just software from us, so we sell them software only. So, there are many different ways in which we are solving for what customers want. And there's no one-size-fits-all. And that's the beauty of this, I mean, just like, I can take Linux and package it as an appliance and say, hey, this is a router or something else, or maybe a custom, super computer or I could just have it independent, right. So, the beauty of an OS is that it's very flexible in how you package it, right. And that packaging will be very diverse and the partner ecosystem will build around that operating system, as Aaditya was saying. As you see in this expo, there are a lot of partners excited working with our OS and adding their value-add on top of it. All right so, Binny, we heard of there's a lot of features you're rolling out through community edition, CE, first. When I saw the announcements of the object and the compute, there's this disclaimer, it's like well, this is future stuff that we're working on but we're not giving you a date. For a software company, how do you give guidance on this, it gets announced, when should we expect to see it in beta, community edition and kind of generally available? You're a public company, you can't give too much, but general guidance, philosophy, engineering standpoint, how do we look? 'Cause we've gone away from the 18 month major release cycles, so how do you look at release cycles and the way to get them out? So yeah, a couple of things, One is that we are going towards an agile modeling in terms of how releases will be done. Like how Aaditya's team will be releasing Calm at a different cadence compared to, for example, a storage fabric. This is still one OS. But you can upgrade pieces in it, separately. And they can come faster. Basically, the new services that come in, they need more quicker reiteration and that's how they will be iterated on and the older services where you care about, hey, I don't want to cut up my data and all that. You'd be more concerned by nature. And that's essentially, you'll see that's the transition that's going to happen and how we do stuff. One of the core principles, like philosophies, that we have is in mind is that we want to make sure that the experience that our customers have today with Nutanix on trim is maintained. Say, if they want the five nine, six nine is a liability. If they want the NPS of 90 plus, that's what you need. The reason we started with our own appliance was precisely that. We want to control the experience. Then when we went with Onyems and Partners, we were very strict in what we allow, what we don't allow so that experience is maintained. You will see the same thing going forward. So, we're not about, hey, just throwing in a bunch of features because so many people are waiting for it but the quality goes with that. We want to make sure that when we, even when we talk about hybrid cloud and (mumble), and we're talking about DR as a service, what would you DR, your business critical, mission critical apps. So you expect the same quality, right? So, that's what you should expect from Nutanix that if it is GA, it holds up to the bar and net promote a score. It will be maintained very high. All right, Aaditya, one last question I have for you is in an event like this, you get to talk to a lot of customers. I'm sure there's huge requests, talk to a lot of customers, they're excited about what you're doing and they want to know not only GA but kind of roadmap. What can you share with us as some of the big pieces, what should we be looking for beyond the availability itself when it comes to your activities. Sure, I think, I of course, can't go into too much amount of details because I'll unveil it at the right time. Some of the things what we are, what core things we are specifically looking at is how to bridge the chasm between the old school of more than one application and move to container-based modern entirely cloud-based native applications like all the majority of a lot of the enterprise today is stuck on this side of the divide. And it's very simplistic and naive to say just rewrite all your applications to fit into containers, or the modern cloud and everything. So we are building a bunch of technologies which you are here and creatively and incrementally get you over to the other side without doing rewrites, maintaining uptime and hopefully minimizing your spending. Yeah, that's great, Binny, in the keynote today, we heard more about the edge computing, Satyam talked about it. There's certain parts of the market I talk to, it's like containers are pretty much a given at this point. Server list is something that we're talking about a lot. Now, how is engineering and architecture keep up with this change? how do you look at some of these dynamics, how to make sure you don't kind of over-rotate too fast? You want to be with your customers, not too far ahead of them. Well, yeah, so, even in the keynote today, you might have noticed that the way we look at the problem of how our customers will move to the next level. And every customer is at a different phase in this journey towards building their true enterprise hybrid cloud, right. Some are still virtualizing, to be frank. And some are them are moving from three tier to hyperconvergence, some of them from hyperconvergence to hey, I need a better hypervisor with the HV, and then I need Calm and then I need Zi and so on. So they're on a journey. The way we look at this entire transition, even when you talk about IODs, like have it as another phase in the evolution, don't force it on everybody. So IODs being built as a layer after you're standardized on Calm, for example, then you can use Calm as a way of saying now I need to enable some services that I need to create the foundation for building my IOD apps, so functions as a service and all that would be managed by the cloud admin using Calm. So we're building things in layers and IODs is yet another layer that will come out in some time. Binny Gill, Aaditya Sood, thank you so much for giving us all the updates. We look forward to the releases and the future announcements. We'll be back with more coverage here. Nutanix next, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)