>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019. Brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. Live cube coverage here in Atlanta. This is the keeps coverage of Ansible Fest. This is red hat and suppose two days of live coverage. They had a contributor day yesterday before the conference all being covered by the cube. I'm John furrier, Miko Stu Miniman. Our next guest is Chris Gardner, principal analyst at Forrester Gardner. Welcome to the cube. Thanks. See you. Good to talk to you. Hey, analyzing the players in this space is really challenging. You've got a new wave that came out a few months ago. Yep. Laying it all out. Um, certainly the world changed. You go back eight years. Cloud was just hitting the scene on premises. Look good. Data's Stanley was rocking. You're doing network management, you're doing some configuration management now you've got observability, you've got automation apps. The world's changing big time. What's your take? What's this? I mean, it's interesting because the prior versions of that wave focused entirely on configuration management and the feedback I got was, um, the world's a lot bigger than that, right? >>And we have to talk about platforms and you heard it this morning during the keynote about Redhat moving towards an platform and automation platform. And my definition of a platform is things like configuration management, hybrid cloud management, all the various types of automation and orchestration need to be there. But you also need compliance. You need governance, you need the ability to hopefully make a call as to what is actually occurring and have some intelligence behind the automation. And obviously you need the integrations. It's not a situation to simply have as many people as possible, although that's nice as many vendors you work with. But to have real relationships, if you have Microsoft working on automation code with you, if, if Amazon working on automation code with you, that makes a true platform, right? It's John said earlier day a platform needs to be an enabler. And we've even said, if you can't build on top of this, like the collections that Ansible announced here seems like it might fit under that definition. >>And there's an old joke that everything becomes a platform eventually. Right? Um, but I think that, I think it bears it. There's some merit in this one. Um, the other thing is that I'm seeing a lot of folks want a holistic automation solution and the only way you're going to do that is to have a platform that you can build things on top of it and connect the pieces and provide the proper governance. So, um, I'm mostly in agreement with the definition that's been described here and I think you could tackle different ways. Uh, and all the vendors in the space are certainly doing that. Definitely platform thinking is different. Um, you know, the easy way to look at it and the old big data space do, we'll use to cover that was a tool versus a platform, you know, tools, a hammer, everything looks like a nail, did great things. >>One thing great are a few things. Good platform is more of a systems thinking. Yes, yes. And you've got glue layers, you've got data. So it's really more of that systems thinking that separates the winners from the losers, at least at our opinion. Absolutely. I mean, when you looked at who was the leaders in my wave, it wasn't the basics of automating or orchestration and configuration management, they all had that. The, the ones that were winners, where can I do compliance in a different way? Can I actually have people come into the system that aren't it people and make a call on some of these things? Can I apply AI and machine learning to some of this? Can I make some recommendations and hopefully direct people in the right, you know, the way they should go. And you know, the folks that were able to do that Rose to the top, the folks that weren't were average and below. >>Yeah. Chris bring us inside to some of the competitive dynamics here. We understand that, you know, there's a lot of open source here and therefore everybody holds hands and things can buy y'all. But, you know, there's, you know, product tools, there's the public clouds and what they do. And then, you know, Ansible, uh, you know, fit, fits in a lot of different places. Yeah. It's, it's a bit ironic because, uh, you know, this is one of those waves where, and it's very rare that everyone was sitting was, was at least preaching kumbaya. They are all saying that they were friendly with one another. And, and, uh, quite frankly, I, I tend to believe it. We're in a situation right now where you can't get by, especially in a hybrid cloud world. We are going to have resources that live in multiple, you know, AWS and Azure, but also on premises and at the edge. You need to have these integrations. You need to be able to talk to one another. So, um, that said, there's certainly a lot of coopertition going on where people are saying, if I can integrate these tools better, if I could provide a better governance layer, if I can again, hand things off to the enterprise in a way that has not been handed off before that I don't even have to go through an INO group and infrastructure operations group, those are willing, could be the ones that truly succeed in this space. >>Software defined data center, software defined cloud, everything software defined. Yep. These abstraction layers, data and software. We had a guest on the cube a week ago saying, data's the new software I get. Okay, it's nice, nice gimmick. But if you think about it, this abstraction layer, it's like a control plan. Everyone wants to go for these control planes, which is a feature of platform. As this automation platform becomes ultimately the AI platform, how do you see it evolving and expanding? Because you see organic growth, you see certainly key positions, 6 million stars on get hub. I mean, it's running the plumbing. I mean, come on. Like it's not, it's not like it's just some corner case. >>Yeah, yeah. Infrastructure. Yeah. I mean, you know, in an idealistic way, I'd like to see, we us resolve on singular holistic platforms for enterprises. The reality is that's not not the way you can do it today. What I do try to help clients do is at least rationalize their portfolio. If they have 12 different automation products they're running, chances are that's not the best idea. Um, I've actually had situations where someone will say to me, um, I'm running Ansible in one portion of my organization and chef and another, and I say, well, it's some, they do similar things. And the reason for it was because they were stood up organically. Each group kind of figured out the things along the way. And I have to at least guide them and say, you know, where are the similarities? Where can you potentially, you know, move some stuff from there. >>But the cloud discussion, you know, always debate upon, you know, multi-cloud, Seoul cloud, ultimately the workload needs something underneath. And I think workload definition dictates kind of what might be underneath. So it might be okay to have a couple, you know, automation platforms or it could be great to have one. I mean, this is really the eye of the beholder. Beauty is in the eye of the, >>yeah, in my view. Um, I, I've been an analyst for a couple of years before that I was doing this stuff for a living. I have the worst scars and in my view it's, it's not even a matter of how many tools you use. It's putting the workload where it belongs, that matters. And if you could do that with fewer tools, obviously that from an operational level that makes life a lot easier. Um, but I'm not going to say to somebody, you know, completely dismantle your entire automation and orchestration workflow just because I think this one tool is better. Let's talk about how we can, >>that's the worst case scenario because if you have to dictate workloads based on what tool you have, that's supposed to be the other way around. >>Yes. Setting up a nuclear bomb in the data center or in the cloud has never worked. Note to self, don't do that. Yes. One of the interesting conversations we've already been having here at the show is that the tool is actually helping to drive some of the cultural change in collaboration. So, you know, what are you finding in your research? How is that, you know, kind of this admin role and you know, to the cloud in applications. You know, it's interesting. I, we continued to beat the drum that these folks are becoming developers, but we've been beating that drum for a decade now and quite frankly we had to continue to beat it. But what I think is more even more interesting is we have groups starting to pop up in our research that are separate from it, that focus on automation in a way that no one has done before. >>Some we went into it saying, Oh, that's a center of excellence, right? And the teams that we talked to said no, do not call us a center of excellence. A two reasons. One is that term is tainted. Uh, but secondly, we're not one team. There's multiple automation teams. So we're actually starting to call these groups, strike teams that come in and standardize and say, okay, I have a lead architect, a lead robot architects say it's around infrastructure automation. I'm going to standardize across the board and when other groups need to come on board, I have the principles already laid out. I have the, the process is already laid out. I come in, I accelerate that, I set it up and then I back off. I don't own the process and I'm not part of it either. I T's got operations of its own that's got to worry about. >>I'm going between the two and when we talk to especially the fortune 100 they are setting these groups up. Now when I ask them what do you called them? They don't have a name yet, so I think strike team sounds sexy, but ultimately this is not like a, a section of it that's been severed off and becomes this role. It's a completely true committee. I yeah. Oh yeah. I want our falls slow process. Exactly, exactly. And it better fits what the role is. The role is to come in, nail the process, get it automated and the get out. It's not to stand there and be a standards body forever. Um, there's certainly some groups that in some types of automation like RPA where you want them to stick around because you may want them to manage the bots. There's a whole role called bot masters, which is specifically for that role. But most of the time you want them to be part of that process and then you know, hand it back off. >>Yeah. We've seen some interesting patterns. I want to get your thoughts on this as a little bit of a non-sequitur. Want to bring it in, but in the security space you seeing a CSOs chief information security officers building their own stacks internally, they're picking one cloud, Amazon or Azure and they're building all in maybe some hedge with some people working on some backup cloud, but they don't want to fork their talent all on one cloud and they cause they need to be bad ass responsive strike teams for security pressure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Not as critical with the security side with automation, but certainly relevance. Is that the same thing going on here with this development Durham, this being continued to be as much more around core competency and building internally stacks and building some standards? >>I I, I think it is, and you know what's interesting too is that I work with, I'm on the infrastructure and operations team at Forrester. I talk with INO people all day long, but I work alongside the security team and I said to them a couple of years ago, um, you guys are going to have to get your hands dirty with this stuff that I cover. You guys have to know infrastructure, automation, API APIs, you need to know how to code these things. And I said, are you comfortable telling your sec ops folks, your clients that they go, no, by all means they have to be part of this. So they're okay with them talking to me, talking to them and saying that you need to be part of the infrastructure design process and need to be part of this decision making process. Right. Um, which is different than their sec ops role used to be. So my point is, is that these worlds are not that dissimilar as some people might think they are sec dev ops or whatever we're going to call it. We keep tacking letters onto this thing, uhm, is a actual discipline. And it is a reality in most organizations I talked to the people should. >>So a system has all of these things as data across the system. They have high blood subsystem you're talking about and yet it's this holistic system security and data. Yeah. >>And we're in a world now, especially around things like edge computing where data gravity matters. So all these pieces, you know, it's, if you go back to the old school kind of computer science folks from the, you know, 50 sixties and seventies, they're like, this is not new. We've been thinking systems thinking for awhile, but I think we're finally at a place where we're actually now breaking down the silos that we've been championing to do. So for, >>I got to ask you the analyst questions since you're watching the landscape. Sue wants to jump in, but I want to get this out. So observability became a category at a network management. I mean, network management was like this boring kind of plotting along white space. I mean, super important. People need to do network management. Then in comes the cloud becomes a data problem. Whether it's observability you get to microservices, you got security signal FX, all these companies going public. Um, well a lot of M and a activities basically large segment, a lot of frothiness automation feels like it's growing to be big. Is there startup opportunities here? If, if platforms are becoming being a combination of things, is there room for startups and if so, what would you say? Um, those stars would look like? There are, I think >>what we're seeing is, and it speaks to the observer, observe the word you just said. Um, uh, I can, I can S I can know what it is, but I can't say it. Um, we're seeing the APM vendors move down the stack. We're seeing the infrastructure monitoring vendors move up the stack and in the middle we're seeing them both try to automate the same things. Um, you cannot pull off some of the infrastructure as code automation that we need to pull off without observability, but you can't get that observability unless you are able to pull it from the top of the stack. Um, what we're going to see is consolidation and we're already starting to see it, um, where you're gonna have different groups come together and say, why did have to tools to do this? Why not do one? Um, the reason why you do multiple tools today is because no one is truly strong at the entire stack. >>A lot of the folks that are going down the stack to say that they're not quite infrastructure automation players just yet, but watch this space, they will eventually, Oh, this change happening. Absolutely. Startups getting funded. Do you think there's opportunity to take some territory down? If there's any opportunity? And, and I'm, I'm pushing for this, it's in the AI AI ops space when it comes to these things is actually going beyond where we stand today. So I want to be clear that, um, AI ops is a great concept. The reality of is that we're still a ways away from being practical. I'd like to see not just recommendations from these tools that the startups are providing, but actually trust in them to make the changes necessary. So Chris, it sounds like the antibody automation platform announcement today fits with what you've been saying for the last couple of years. >>So the question is, what's next? Where does the Ansible need to mature and expand and you know, what, what are users asking for that Ansible is not doing today? So a couple things. Um, they did okay, but not fantastic at infrastructure modeling. Ansible. They did okay, but not amazing at what we call comprehension, which is making a call as to, you know, using AI and machine learning to make a call and what the infrastructure layers should look like. To be Frank, no one did really well in that one. So not too, not too bad on that. Um, and the other thing is they need to improve slightly. Is there integration story? They actually have a really good one. You see all the folks that are here. Um, it's just, it's, it's just as hair away from being the best. They're not quite there yet. So, and when, again, when I mean integrations, I don't mean having a laundry list of vendors you work with. >>I mean actually working with them to build code and you saw that this morning where there's the best, uh, right now surprisingly is VMware, but for you Morris built that relationship off for a long time. Um, they work right alongside Microsoft and Google and all these folks to build the code together in the industry. Uh, I think the darkest source of all is probably, and it remains to be seen if they can actually do something that is HashiCorp. Um, Terraform is an interesting player in this entire space. I actually included them in our wave on infrastructure automation platforms and you can argue is it even an automation platform? Quite frankly. Um, uh, I think HashiCorp itself was trying to figure out exactly what it is. But the bottom line is it's got tremendous Mindshare and it works well. So I think that if you watch, if you see the strategy going forward and look at, you know, what they're putting their investments into, they could become a really serious damaging player in this space. Chris Gardner, thanks for coming on the cube, sharing your insights and your research at Forrester forced wave. Check it out. Just came out a couple of months ago. Uh, infrastructure automation platforms. Q three 2019. Chris Gardner, the author here in the Q, breaking it down. I'm John furrier. There's too many men. We'll be back with more after the short break. Thank you.

>> Livefrom London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to London, England. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 Europe. My name's Stu Miniman. My cohost for these two days of coverage has been Joep Piscaer. And happy to welcome to the program, two first (mumbles). We're gonna talk about culture and people. To my right is Rukmini Sivaraman, who is the vice president of business operations and chief of staff to the CEO. And sitting next to her is Prabha Krishna, who is the senior vice president of people and places, both of them with Nutanix. Ladies, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> All right so, we've been covering Nutanix for a long time. I've been to every one of the shows. I start out, I guess... Dheeraj talked for a long time about the three Hs. It was humble, hungry, and honest, if I got those right. And more recently, it was with heart. Actually sitting not too far behind us, there's a big booth for heart. So, the culture of the company is something that is tied with the founders. We've watched that growth. I've watched the company go from about 35 people to over 3500 people. So, having those core principles is something that we look at in companies. Why don't we start? If you could both just give quick introduction, what brought you to Nutanix, and what your role is there. >> Sure, I've been at Nutanix a little over 18 months and I started out as an engineer, then went to finance and investment banking of all things, was at Goldman for almost a decade. And Nutanix is a client of Goldman's back form the IPO, and I had heard great things about the company, of course, but wasn't intending to leave Goldman Sachs. But when I got introduced to Dheeraj, there was so much that was compelling about the company, the disruption, the category-defining, category-creating kind of position that the company had. And more importantly, I think, where we were going, which was just phenomenal. it was ambitious, it was bold. And I think for me, it's always been about the people. We spend a lot of time at work and it's really important to feel that connection to the people. And that was really important 'cause I had to pick up and move from New York City to the Bay Area to make this move. And we can talk more about this, but to me the people were, like I said, ambitious, but they were also grounded. And I see it and after being at Nutanix now, it's phenomenal how truly humble the people are and that's always struck me as a great combination. You want ambition and challenging problems to solve, but you also want humility and people that you can relate to. So that's really what got me to Nutanix. >> Please. >> Yeah so, I've actually been following Nutanix for quite a while. It's a company that addresses a space that's very underserved and has created a suite of products that's nothing short of amazing for our customers, entirely focused on our customer base. But for me, the most interesting thing was, it's a company that is as right-brained as it is left-brained. I've actually spent 19 years of my career in engineering and made a career switch into the people side. And it's one of the few companies where that fit is almost perfect. And once I met our founder and our CEO, Dheeraj, this became even more obvious. So. I'm actually very happy to be here. I've been here for about four months now, and it's already very clearly the beginning of a very, very exciting journey. >> Yeah, interesting, both of you kind of making those shifts. Talk a little bit about that, talk about... People from outside of Silicon Valley, always, it's like, "Oh, there's the one where they have the playground "and free meals and free drinks." And it's like, "Yeah, that's because you do the analysis "and if they'll work 18 hours a day, "if we can keep them there, "maybe even put a cot in the office, that's good." I haven't seen cots in the office when I go to Nutanix, but hey are really nice offices. And even on the east coast, we're tartin' to change and see some of those things there. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to that culture. And Nutanix is much more than just Silicon Valley based now. >> That's right. So we are truly a global organization. And we decided very early on that we wanted to be a global organization, but we're also thinking local. All right, so we do have multiple offices within the US, in Durham and Seattle and other places, but we're also truly global. Our Bangalore office, in India we have a big presence. And so for us what that means is there's people from different perspectives and background. But ultimately, it's our sort of, like you said, the four values, but also our culture principles that we've qualified fairly recently that bind us. And that really help us move forward in the same direction and pointing that same direction, and growing the same way. So that has been a phenomenal to see and it's one that I think we've very deliberately qualified more recently. It's sort of the how, how do we behave that embodies those four values that you talked about. >> So Prabha, so you're a new hire, right? >> Yes. >> You haven't been with Nutanix as much. So while we're talking on the subject, what's your personal experience coming into Nutanix? Is it true what you're talking about? How does it work in real life, in practice? >> No, absolutely. All companies state a culture. All companies, I think, in this day and age at least and definitely in Silicon Valley, are very clear about having a specific culture. But the key, as far as I'm concerned, and the strength of a company is how they live and breathe their culture every single day, in every decision, and every action, right. In every difficult balance that they need to meet, that's where the culture really shows up. And at Nutanix, it is... How shall I put it? It's really the core of every single thing we do. It's the core of how we interact. It's the core of how we grow. It's the core of how we recruit, how we define our organizations. And frankly, I have to say, I have been in a lot of organizations and a lot of organizations over time, actually, and particularly as they reach our size... We're a bit at sort of an inflection point, if you will, in terms of size. Our growth has definitely been very, very quick and continues to accelerate. Having that culture being something that we really live is the most important thing. And it is what will allow us to continue to innovate and continue to succeed all over the globe as Rukmini just explained. For me, it's quite extraordinary to see it in action. >> Yeah, that's really interesting because, one, our industry has some challenges hiring. It's finding the right skillset there. If you match that with a culture, what challenge are there? What are you looking for? What is the fit from the outside to match what you're looking for? >> Yeah, I'm happy to address a little bit. So recruiting for us is everything. We want to bring in the best. We wanna bring in the brightest and we wanna bring in folks who really value our culture and our values, who really understand them. And again, are willing to live them every single day. So we do look for great talent all over the planet because great talent exists all over the planet. This is absolutely fundamental to our growth. We are an infrastructure company and we offer, actually, very interesting work for anyone who is interested in the engineering side, who is interested in the sales side, who's interested in market. And for me, the most interesting part in the roles we have, and frankly the most unusual piece if you will, is we offer opportunities to build things from scratch. So, the creative side, the creative mind is really what we encourage. And it shows up in every single aspect of the way we're structured. So, the diversity of thought, the diversity of background, the diversity of... Whether it's gender or location, philosophies, and all of that, is really what we want to bring in and what will allow us to continue to create these products that are quite unique. >> If I may add to that, we talk internally a lot about the founder's mentality. It's a concept, a framework that was developed by Bain & Company and the gist of it is as follows: When you think about great disruptive startups, they're on this rocket ship, accelerating growth. And then they get to a certain size, so they become a little bigger. And they get enjoy the benefits of scale, economies of scale, and that's a good thing. But the best companies take that and then they enjoy those benefits, but they then also don't lose what got them there in the first place, which is the innovation, the ability to disrupt and look around corners, and all of that. So we want the best of both worlds. And in this framework, it's called a scaled insurgent. So you're scaled, but you're still an insurgency. And that is important to us. Folks that can sort of balance the two, really make sure that we are benefiting from one, but also not losing sight of the other. And it's a paradox in many ways and we believe in embracing those paradoxes. And folks who can sort of balance those two would be really a great fit. >> And so, if you're growing that fast, I can imagine that keeping the balance between culture and engineering, and you're growing, that's difficult. How does Nutanix handle that paradox? >> I think it goes back to what Prabha was saying. And for us, culture and the way we behave is like oxygen. So it almost fuels the fire as opposed to the other way around or having to do two things at once. And that's how we've thought about it. And the principles, when we thought about them and conceived them, it was the same idea, which is how can this just be the way we conduct ourselves we treat our customers, we treat each other, we treat our partners? How can it just become the way we do business? And so far, that's worked well for us. >> So one of my favorite culture principles, actually, is comfortable being uncomfortable. And there's a real reason that because given our scale, given the way we wanna grow, and given the fact that we want to preserve that innovative seed at every step, for us, every single day is about balancing opposing forces. Do we invest in the short term? Do we invest in the long term? Do we manage locally? Do we manage more globally? Do we centralize things, do we not? Do we distribute, right? Every single day is about balancing those kinds of things and it's that balance that encourages the creativity in every single one of us. So, the very fact that we've sort of embodied that in a culture principle, really is a very strong indication of what we look for and what we wanna be. >> Right, with the time that we have left, I wondering if you could talk about both at the show and beyond the show, what things Nutanix is doing. Think tech for good, think about the charitable things. Some of speakers I've seen at these shows... Mick Ebeling is one that stood out from a previous show. On talking about tech for good, Dr. Jane Goodall, who I know spoke at a women's lunch event and in the keynote here today, is just so inspiring. As someone that loves science and animals, it was very powerful. You've got the .heart initiatives here. Maybe help for those that don't know here and what else you're doing around the globe and around the year. >> Did you wanna go first? >> Yeah, so giving back is very important for us. It's very fundamental. Gratitude, understanding where we all came from, where we are, and where we wanna go, and not losing ourselves, that's really the key of, I think, any type of success, frankly. So we have an organization around that. It's a very active organization, we all participate. And the company is very much involved in as many different types of charities as possible. It also feeds into the kinds of sourcing that we do when every bring people in. We look for folks who care. We care very much about our people. The amount of attention and the amount of just knowledge and thought that goes into structuring our organization is very much reflective of that sense of giving back and gratitude as well. Our employees are everything and the folks around us who are in need are also everything. It sort of goes together, if you will. So basically to us, it's a hugely, hugely important effort and we'll continue investing in those kinds of things as we go forward. >> I think one thing I would add is as you saw at the end of the closing keynote, I think we announced or shared that thanks to everyone here, really all the folks here, our customers, partners, all of our participants, we were able to collect over 10,000 pounds for .heart and that is phenomenal. We're forever grateful to our community to be able to do things like that. We also partner with organizations like Girls in Tech, which is doing great work on making sure that we are bringing all kinds of talent, as Prabha said, to the table. We believe there's great people everywhere. And so, how do we harness the power of all of those initiatives? >> All right, those are some great examples. And Prabha, to your point, I think that that individual touch to your employees, that also translates to the customer side. Something I hear from Nutanix customers is despite the fact how large you've grown and how many customers you have, they feel that they get that individual attention. So thank you so much for sharing all of the updates. Wish you both the best of luck in your continued journey. And we wanna thank our community, of course, for tuning in to our coverage. It is truly our pleasure to help document what's happening out in the industry, hopefully be a surrogate for you, to ask the questions that you wanna hear and help you along your journeys. My name's Stu Miniman. My first European cohost who also did a segment in Dutch, Joep Piscaer, Can you goodbye in Dutch for us, Joep? >> (Dutch). >> All right, I'll have to learn that one some time because, unfortunately, my english and speaking numbers in a couple of different languages is where I'm a little bit limited. But once again, thanks for watching. Turn to thecube.net to catch all of the replays from this show as well as all the shows that we will be at. Including, next year, Nutanix will be at Anaheim and the spring and Copenhagen in the fall. And our team look forward to bringing you coverage from both of those. So once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (slick electronic music) >> Hi, I'm John Wallis. I've been with theCUBE for a couple years serving as a host here on our broadcast, our flagship broadcast on SiliconANGLE TV. I like to think about the hows and the whys, and the whats of technology. How's it work? Why does it matter? What is it doing for end users? When I think about theCUBE does and what it means, to me, it's an ...

[Announcer] - Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back in D.C., welcome to NextConf, this is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Dheeraj Pandey is here, he's the chairman and CEO of Nutanix. Long time CUBE alum. Great to see you again. >> Pleasure. >> So you know, I love your style, up on stage yesterday. Very philosophical, always have been humble. You sort of said, "I'm going to stay humble," and it appears that's the case. But yet, there's so much excitement around here, you have a lot to be very proud of. How do you feel? >> You know, there's no finish line in this company building, just like there's no finish line when you have a family, it never ends actually. Nutanix is a family, and we are trying to make it a bigger, happier family with more customers, more partners, more employees. I feel good, but I think this company is good right now, it's not a great company. We probably will have to spend another decade to make it a great company actually, so. >> How do you, as the chairman and CEO, how do you define "great company"? >> Great companies, for one, actually take really good care of their stakeholders. You think about employees and customers and partners and also Wall Street, so I think at the end of the day we have barely begun the journey in some of these things. Customers, sure, we have quite a few of them, but I think we can do so much more for them. At some level, even in the largest accounts, we're barely scratching the surface actually. Same thing with employees, you know, we have almost 3000 employees but still, we could do so much more for them as well in terms of wealth creation, in terms of building careers. Very early days. Same thing with Wall Street as well, very early days actually. >> Dheeraj, you're always opening to listening to feedback, but you mentioned, you've now got a lot of constituencies. I know I've interviewed you and said well you know, there's the 90-day shock clock but, we can't get distracted, we need to focus. How do you, you know, what is the filter, how do you, what do you take in and internalize to translate into the direction of the company? >> You know I talk about two things. There's delight, there's waste. Delight for main street and make sure you're cognizant of the waste with Wall Street, because if you keep growing they won't bother you. What they bother you with is waste. How are you growing, what does efficiency look like at scale? So I just learn "growth at any cost". I think these are all timely reminders for any company, so that it doesn't get too painful when recessions hit you, because there's highs and lows of any company that you have to go through. So I believe that waste is the larger ego of delight, and if you can do a really good job of delighting our customers, our partners, our employees and then figure out how to deal with all of this with waste in mind, I think we'll do a pretty good job. So what matters the most is delight, but not without figuring out what's waste-like. I think you have to keep looking at these "KPIs" and say how are we really doing at scale with respect to distribution, marketing, product development, product engineering. Now we have a pretty large engineering workforce as well. How can the company be delightful for them if you don't have "two-pizza teams", if you don't have APIs and microservices in which they actually talk to each other, still feel like they're the CTO of their company, because they all want to make independent decisions and design trade-offs and things of that nature. I think we talk about this thing which is a really important abstract thing, it's called the paradox of growth. I learned this from some of these folks who have done this book called The Founder's Mentality. Growth creates complexity and complexity kills growth, so just be aware of what you really vied for can kill you as well, and continue to release complexity to organizations in the way you deal with your customers, and I think those are the things that really matter. I look at employees as customers, I look at customers as customers, I look at partners as customers. If you have the customer-centric view, you'll probably continue to simplify things under the cover. >> One of the things that you see in great companies is early on they're able to articulate a vision, see that vision, execute on it obviously and continue to grow their team, I mean that's a big part of your job. You've dramatically, well first of all, the team that you started with was quite large. Cloud expands that enormously. So maybe talk about your vision and how you're seeing that through. >> Well I think from very early on, the mission was invisible infrastructure. And that is an infinite mission because again, no finish line actually. You can make things invisible and then probably say we still aren't invisible enough and you have to make it more invisible. When you have downer to four clicks you have to say how about three and two and one click? And finally get rid of the click because machine learning can come in and automate more things as well. So how more and more things go from humans to machines and how the human-man-machine interface becomes less frictioned is the vision of this company. Now, all of this is not just graphical UI because the systems have to work, they have to be scalable, stable, reliable, available. So the back-end has to be very robust but then without a front-end it's really the same as a man-machine interface. Also the machine-machine interface, because APIs match for a lot as well, you know. If you're only thinking about man-machine, then you've lost a lot of this automation and machine learning capability as well, actually. >> I think back to some of our earliest conversations, you always talked about Nutanix is a software company and the challenge of our day is building distributed systems. The tooling and the way we build things today are very different from when you started the company. If you were starting from a bare sheet today, would you be born in the cloud, you know, how would things like containers and microservices change the way, or, and how are you taking from where you are today, which it started out in virtualization, is that a core, you've got AHV driving a lot of the pieces, versus some of those who are models? >> Yeah, I mean, look, VMware was building an operating system, but they needed a shield of EMC to go sell and distribute that. We had the compute virtualization piece that came a little bit later, but the storage virtualization, the control plane pieces, we needed to shield them, and we shield them in appliance, and that became our form factor the could give us the control of our own destiny, and that's what the appliance did to us. But you always knew you were building software, actually. And many people told us early on, just don't build appliances at all, and we would've been killed, we probably would have to sell this company early on, because it's really hard to build an OS company early on when you don't have a brand and nobody's willing to support you and customers are like, you know, if nobody else is willing to support you, how do you really build an operating system, actually? So I think if there's a method to the madness, we always knew we had to be hardware-agnostic, that's why we never built NVRAMs and FBGAs and things like that. And over time when Dell came forward and said look, you should OEM your product, I think it was a very natural decision for us two and a half, three years ago. I think there's been this controlled release of goodness of this operating system that basically not mean like oh we never thought about it, we always thought about hardware-agnosticism, hypervisor-agnosticism, all those things were there from day one in this company. But you know the question of whether we would start in the cloud today? Honestly, all companies have to start where they are in order to make money, and continue to navigate the shifting sands of time actually. I mean, you sell books, then realize it's not good enough, you go and sell, you know goods with e-commerce, and that's not good enough, you sell computing. We started an office productivity company, go and do a desktop operating system, then you go and do databases and server operating system and then all sorts of things for the family room and so on and then finally do a cloud. I think there's no, you know, change is the only constant you know, if you were to think about it, and companies that actually survive and thrive, they start someplace, and their thing, every three, four years, you just find the adjacencies, and keep navigating, you know, how the market is actually shifting and changing. >> There's a strange aura around your company. Now maybe it's the allure of the product, I don't know, but you have a lot of companies now coming into this ecosystem. We have Chad on next from Dell EMC, you know, arguably one of your larger competitors, okay, but they're here and they're happy to be here. So, it's, I say, maybe it's product, but it's also part cultural. And I'm guessing that your philosophy is it can't be a zero sum game. It's got to be a win-win for the partner, so I wonder if you could add any color to that. >> Yeah, that's a great point by the way, bring up this idea that you can be all things to all people. Somebody asked me in this analyst meetup, how about just go and build a firewall? We can, there's too deep a space in there for us to go build everything, so we need to have open APIs, where others also make money. And by the way, when you have a really flourishing ecosystem, the word of mouth, that they're also making money, the word builds a larger ecosystem, a larger operating system and so on. That's what Apple 2.0 was, because in 1.0 they were all about it's me, it's mine, no one else can do anything, and then they saw Microsoft, and how it was really building this burgeoning ecosystem with APIs, APIs, and more APIs. 90 was Microsoft's decade because of APIs actually, and partners and ecosystems, and Apple learned from them by the way, so when they came out and said we built a device, they said no no no, we've also got to build iTunes, because that's ecosystem, and then they built iCloud and app store and things like that. So I think there are lessons galore in the last 20, 25 years where if you're not a good API-driven company, you're probably not a long-lasting company actually. And the idea of a platform is incomplete without those APIs and the ecosystem itself. >> There's a change in accountant coming which is going to make you, I guess, to restate the software that you've sold through the OEMs will probably have Wall Street look at you a little bit differently. We've talked in the past before about how much you want to sell as Nutanix, how much you want to sell with partners. What's that mix that you see today going forward? How much of your product will you see, hardware, software, services, what's a good mix for you? >> Yeah, I think it's a, it's a good opportunity for the company to really think about revenue 2.0, because revenue 1.0 was what we had sort of planned out four, five years ago and 2.0 is a time when we have different form factors. We have ELAs that we started doing in the last 12 months. We're selling software in CISCO and now software in HP. Obviously Zai will happen in subscription as well. Now we have markable routes to market, you know, obviously the OEMs have actually matured, both OEMs have matured. So the question is of how do we really make it simple one more time? Because obviously there's more routes to market, so as a company we're saying now we can sell more software, and with a new accounting change, which is called ASC 606, software will have to be recognized in the same quarter, we can't defer it arbitrarily. And in some ways it's a good thing, in some ways it's bad because it takes away our goodness of the waterfall, because we could have deferred more revenue, as a company we've deferred a lot, I mean, folks know we have about $465,000,000 of deferred revenue right now, because of how good we were in actually postponing this instant gratification of cutted quarter and so on. So I think some of that will have to be brought into the current quarter but in some sense it's a good thing because we can then take the gross margin of that software and sell more appliances, so I think there's some mixing that'll happen with different margin profiles that'll have to come and kind of work with each other to say can we still grow as a company beyond a billion. >> But these are income statement gymnastics, not that you're playing, but that you're able to- >> Well, there's something about guard rails of the gross margin, because Amazon, what did Amazon say, look, your gross margin, my opportunity, right? So if you just let unbridled software go and sell itself, then our gross margins will be starting to creep up, but what if you kept it within the guard rails of around 60%, and then went and sold more appliances, because the software gave us the luxury to buy growth? I think those are the kind of architectures we are actually looking at right now. >> And the knobs that you might choose to turn, but it will have an impact on the income statement from an operating profit standpoint, I mean, right? If you're going to recognize all that deferred revenue up front you know- >> Just in subscription, we can actually do one-year terms and things like that, but obviously we don't want to completely throw the baby out of the bathwater, because a lot of subscription is a good thing, and Zai will provide subscription. Hopefully as we do this Cisco and HP on software, we can do one-year terms. >> It doesn't seem like these are distractions to you, I mean, Michael Dell always talks about the 90-day shock clock. With you, you sat down with Stu after the IPO, I was struck by your comments of "look, I'm not going to get all wound up about the stock price", you know, you're not going to obsess over it. Now it's easy not to obsess when you're growing at 60, 65% a year, but it doesn't seem like it's been a big distraction for you. >> Yeah, I think it's, just like a growing customer base can be a distraction, can be a strength, you know, because you could say, well, they're asking me not to innovate at all, and have the brute force figure out a way to have velocity and quality, because existing customers want quality, because they don't know what else you can be, like, give me a faster horse, right? And then you know from within the area we innovate that's where velocity matters. Same thing is true for Wall Street as well. Main Street wants both, Wall Street is saying look, as long as you can keep growing and grow wisely, I'm not going to touch you, actually. >> I want to ask you about your customers. We've had some great customers on. Most of the customers I've talked to that are Nutanix are what I'd call, you know, they're in the early part of the adoption, they're people that, they're taking some risks, we heard NASDAQ talk you know, forget about the fear, you've got to go forward. As you grow, how do you stop, you know, the enterprise buyer from trying to shift you, change your model? I loved that you're doing things like, you know, many companies are trying to switch to, you know, consumption models to pay as you grow, but as you try to grow that customer base, how do you pull them ahead or how do they not, you know, hold you back? >> Well I think as long as we have an authentic product, customer service, sales motion relationship they'll like us. And I think obviously there are different kind of sub-functions in the customer itself like procurement versus ID versus the business user and so on, and it's a constant hussle, there's no, again way to say that it's going to be a perfect world one day. If you can keep building great products, have great customer service, and we know that our sales motion is easy because it can, it can be a really good product and have really good customer support, but customers might hate transacting with you. I think that's the last piece that matters, and I think as computing becomes a real consumer market, that's what's happening you know with cloud, you can go and buy a computer like the way you used to buy your toothpaste or mouthwash or shampoo. I think it's becoming even more customer-centric, even more customer service-focused and so on. So I think the changing landscape of computing keeps a lot of vendors honest actually. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody will innovate, enough of them will say look, I'm done, and I think one of the things we've done well in the last five years is that the thesis of the product market fit. Like well, we know this is the product direction, this is the vision of the company, it has actually stuck. You know, people have said "I like what you guys are saying," actually. Over and over and over again, I mean, combos and acquisition, people are like "I love this". HP was one of those really audacious ideas, people said "I love this, now that I see it, I love it, when I didn't see it, I was skeptical". So I think a lot of the thesis of the company around innovation have worked in our favor. I think if we keep having that luck with ourselves, good things will happen. >> So Dheeraj, your positioning of the company has usually been a little bit ahead of the market, you know, for years it was like, ah, what, that HEI thing is a niche, and it's not really much that different, oh, enterprise cloud is nothing more than, you know, kind of vapor you know, what are the misperceptions you see today that you'd want to clarify for the market as to who Nutanix is today and where you're going? >> Well the first one is that we are a hardware company, because we are a hardware company, even though we sell a lot of software within the hardware and obviously we do a lot more software these days. And the fact that HEI's the destination, where HEIs basically was a mere milestone like five years ago or something, you know, we talk about I'd say about five years ago imagine a lot of the competition is talking about SEI today, when people are saying the compute storage form factor is interesting but not that interesting because I need to figure out how to converge clouds now, not just converge devices within my data center, I need to figure out OPEX and CAPEX, how do I meld those things, how do I burst, and things like that, you know. So the story keeps evolving because the consumers, the customers, and the competitors continue to evolve the market as well actually. So I would say that people have to look at us as an OS company, and the more they try us the more they realize why we are an OS company. They look at our networking R&D, they look at our security pieces together, storage, hypervisor, and now Zai, I think, you know, good things will happen. >> I inferred from your keynote yesterday that you're on a mission to change the operating model. Certainly Amazon has changed the operating model as we well know and it's translated into their operating profit, you know, their marginal economics as we've talked about in the past are compelling, software-like for services. As you change that operate- first of all, did I get that right? Are you on that- >> I call it a consumption model. >> Consumption model, great. So where do you see that going for customers? They're obviously taking labor costs out, how far can they take that- how much can you sort of automate in that process for your own company, taking those labor costs out to drive your margin? >> I think again, now going back to this idea of invisible infrastructure, just like it has no finish line, automation has no finish line. We used to automate 50 years ago as well. Automation as a word has existed for 200 years you know, since the industrial revolution actually. So again, there's no finish line in automation, there's no finish line for what machines can do compared to humans and I think they've constantly evolved, I mean, 200 years ago we were primarily agrarian, we would do agriculture and nothing more, and today we are doing a lot more things with our brain and I think we're becoming a more evolved species actually. So I think as machines do more, humans will also figure out a way to continue to do higher level things, so I think the best part about this company is that what we have chosen has no end to it, and the more we think we automate, the more we'll have to automate some more actually. And not just within the realm of compute, virtualization, or storage or networking or security, but also migration, portability, you know, what does it mean to really look at things on and off premise and things like that, so a lot of work is around that. Application automation is a big part of it as well. >> When I hear you say there's no finish line, it reminds me of Jeff Bezos, he says, "there is no day two, we will always be in day one". The two concerns I have, that is, number one, you can't have your employees constantly be charging, you know they run to the point where they're going to burn out and I hear Amazon is a challenging company to work for. Secondly, every customer I talk to, like, boy, they can't keep up with the six week release cycles that are coming at that, you know, remember when it used to be 18 to 24 months, you know, that was nice, we could do upgrade cycles when we want. How do you internally and with customers manage that pace of change and avoid burnout or over-complicating the environment for your customers? >> That's a great point actually, because obviously, if you don't have delighted work, it's hard. For them right now their delight, for Amazon employees, it's stock pricing. That's the only delight they have. But I look at it as a marathon of strengths. You basically have to sprint, take some rest, like after this we'll rest a little, and then say let's go and do another sprint, because NIS is another sprint, you know, and then reading all this stuff is another sprint, so I think if we can keep looking at that, and plus even do a little bit of baton-passing that'll happen, you know, I think as a company, we were all in San Jose and now some of the baton has passed to Seattle, some of the baton has passed to RDP Durham and Bangalore. We build this distributed workforce where different teams are coming in and saying "now I can run with it as well", like Bangalore could not have run with this six, seven, eight years ago, because everything was here. You know, RDP and Seattle were too small for us so I think there's critical mass emerging where the overall morale of the workforce is actually just as good as it was like five, six, seven years ago. Now, people talk about burnout a lot, but I also believe that a lot of this is choice. People who are saying "I know how to blend work and life". It's becoming hybrid, there's no such thing as work separate, life separate, it's melding into each other right now, and it's really becoming like this where people who are working smarter saying "I can figure out what that means in terms of balance". And millenials are again one of those who were born with all these things from day one. So the devices have been with them from day one, actually. They're saying "well, I can't not interact with the machine some time or the other". So I think that a lot of this is evolution for us, I mean, the eight to five way of looking at work, which is "batch processing", is now becoming multitasking and so on, so what happened to operating systems 30, 40 years ago is what's happening to humans as well actually. >> You know, we're out of time, but I wanted to share with our audience, one of the unique things about this conference is that you have advisors. A lot of people hire McKinsey and it all stays, you know, behind closed doors. Condi Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, Deepak Malhotra, these are advisors to your company and we've met them all, many have been on theCUBE. You share with your community, your advisors, and you put them in front of your community and it's great content. I've really not seen a company be that transparent with its advisors before. Deliberate? Just sort of happens? >> It's always been like that actually, you know because the more a company learns from them, honestly, the more we've gotten out of them in turns of ROI, if you just think of it from a left wing point of view, but the right wing is that people want to build careers, not just wealth, they want to build careers, they want to actually be with folks that they can look up to you know, when the going gets tough. How do you remember somebody's words? Not just in books, but you know, in flesh and blood, you're like, wow, I talked to Condi Rice, I talked to Bob Gates, I talked to Steve Hadley, these people told me exactly what they went through, and I think there's no substitute to experience actually. To me, people like Mark Templeton and Frank Slootman, they all are great sources of energy and aspiration and ambition as well. >> Outstanding. >> No compression I've heard on experience, right Dave? >> That's right. Dheeraj, I feel calm just hanging out with you here, so thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure to see you, and thanks for having us. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from .Next, be right back. (electronic music)