(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: You're on camera. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier, we are joined by Chris Kaddaras. He is the Senior Vice President Americas at Nutanix, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> Rebecca: Returning to theCUBE I should say. >> Yes, good to be back. >> So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I wanna hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting journey 'cause I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies so I started here in the Americas. You can tell by my accent, and I spent the last nine years in the AMEA business and getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world. So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're gonna get those benefits so it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past, and they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that so it's been fun. >> What accounts for this difference in mindset, you say? >> You know, I think it has to do first off with in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and when you get competition you get pressures that come with that competition. You have to evolve, you have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications, and the business needs to evolve that supports that, so that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of risk taking, a lot of transformation. A lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end-user business sooner. >> That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage Mark Hamill. The Star Wars scene, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic to target there. Everyone loves Star Wars, in fact. But I gotta ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers. Not like the other big shows, your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. You have a chance to sit down with them while they're here, what's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? >> Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. I compare our customers to almost like a religious following, I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations but it's really like that, these customers bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing. They're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational, now what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger, last year we were like five thousand, the year before that we were another two thousand less than that so it's gotten a lot bigger, and our customers are coming back and saying we want you to be a bit more intimate, okay so we've had that in the past, we've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to you development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer because that's gonna give you the true north as to where you need to go, so we're getting that feedback, some of it's hard. Some of it's you're getting too big. You're getting too dispersed, you need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey. But that's part of growing up as a company and that's the reason why we're here. To hear customer feedback. >> And you guys have that true north. Essentials, the enterprise opportunity. Multi-cloud right around the corner on top of your core business which is doing great by the way, got a great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical. Building on that core, and this product risk potential, we talked with Sunil too, the next waves are coming so customers kind of want that assurance. So I gotta ask you, when you go out there and you're selling the customers and you tell them that Nutanix is the bridge to the future, what's the value proposition, I mean obviously we touched on the enablement side. Obviously consolidation's a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that, but what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatest of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? >> I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to a customer is to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build SaaS and compute farms and how they're gonna deal with multiple hypervisors, so let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple. Develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms so let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at, let's forget about infrastructure, let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy, you pick the platform, you're locked in to the entire application set, locked in to the compute set, you're locked in to the storage set, you have no decision on hypervisor, and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications, so the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovator's dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application so that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. >> So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements. How do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? >> Yeah, it's hard, we're not doing a good job there today, just we're not. Now this is a journey of all of these companies like us, it's how do you go through that, I have the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company. Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult, so I understand what we're doing, what you do is come up with a lot of different products. A lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize, right? We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated into the core. All of those things are happening and the nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do, let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more. And then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you're fooling yourself. So that's our direction today. >> Well Chris you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers and the enterprise which is great, you don't have to worry about product leadership. You got it there, as you guys, for you in particular and your customers you're also transitioning to software. You got the full stack, that's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors, you mentioned that. We know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software which by the way is great from economics, the economics and valuations on software business are super high. >> Sure. >> So on the consumption side for customers this is gonna be something that you're gonna be involved in, you gotta bring Nutanix out to the field. You gotta roll it out for the customers. They're gonna consume Nutanix with software. How's that going, can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model, what are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transitional software? >> That's a transition we started about a year ago, and some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some real plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally so the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software and they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be so they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open and when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resale partners and all of our GSI partners it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here, what platform do you wanna consume, so that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve so moving our customers to a term based licensing model was really important. We've done that in the last year and then allowing our customers that consume very easily when you move to those terms so how do I consume a node of software? How does that work, how do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple, you know. Our previous go to market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes. It came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model it becomes a little more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELAs, what they may wanna consume have more agility around their software licensing mechanism. Get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise type purchase agreement society, I wouldn't call it ELAs because ELAs in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things about that our other competitors do around true-ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to so we wanna work with our customers and partners as to how do you wanna buy those new enterprise price purchase agreements moving forward. >> I wanna ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation you're hearing feedback from customers you're getting too big, and I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback you're getting too big, guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's the internal strategy there? >> Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right, because I see it as well, I've only been here for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now , I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, so the things that we're gonna do are a few things. We do have a customer advisory board that meets, right now it only meets once a year in certain markets and we need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voices back into what we're doing, we got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week, big customers that said you need to think about this and it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, we also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right, so our sales reps, our Ses, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day. Out support people, providing that vehicle of feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important, so we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today but we're not getting the message through. They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're gonna start to create and develop that within the company. >> So, growing pains, you have to fix those things. Software model, looking good, so things are clicking right now, net promoter score in the 90s which is pretty much unheard of. You have a great, loyal customer base. Good news there? >> Yeah, I mean great news, we're talking about first world problems here, right? We have a huge market, the market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how we take our fair share and more of that marketplace so these are the discussion that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Any other country >> Well, you're Chris, you're in sales, you're running all the fields. Sales and you guys got a humble culture with a heart, as Dheeraj talked about. You gotta be aggressive, you gotta be competitive, and you gotta go win those deals. You gotta win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah, and it's really from our perspective it's turned a bit into a two horse race at this point in time, we think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace for customers who want flexibility and choice. I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time. Our competitors are strong, and they're good. They're good people, they work hard, they have great people and great technologies. Our entire value proposition around how to provide customers flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in their future and I think if we do that then we'll be in a good place. >> Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years knowing the competition, who could out-muscle you if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just be faster and innovate. >> Yeah, I think we're doing that on technology. We're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean coming out with an amazing product. Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid market company to an enterprise company to a global account company. These things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, it's a scaling problem and those are things that we can easily do. I'm happy to do those and those are things that we are hiring new people that help us through that journey and it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of positive results for our customers. >> Exciting times, well Chris Kaddaras thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)