>> Narrator: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Washington, D.C. everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman, this is day two of our coverage of .NEXT Conf #NEXTConf. Wendy M. Pfeiffer is here. She's the relatively new CIO of Nutanix. Wendy, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> Okay, you got my attention. You said there's a reason for it. >> Reason for the M? >> For the M. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's my mom's middle initial, her middle name is Michelle. My middle name is Michelle and my ten-year-old daughter Holly's middle name is Michelle and we sort of pass along our female heritage. I send Holly a message whenever I do anything publicly that it's a shout out to her. She gets to lead, she gets to be proud of her feminine heritage as well as her family heritage. >> I love that, that is fantastic. Quick aside, I'm going to make you laugh. We're at the race track one day and there was this one guy, and he was winning and I wasn't winning so I said, it's like the eighth race, How are you doing this? Well his last name began with an M. He goes, I'm just betting on all the horses with an M in it. >> That could be another good reason. Thanks for the tip. >> Anyway, welcome to theCUBE and welcome to Nutanix. Five months in on the job, you got a really strong IT background. GoPro, Yahoo, both companies of senior leadership. Robert Half, I think, was on the resume as well. >> Yeah, CISCO Systems, Exodus Communications. >> You've seen it all. >> Which means I'm old. I've been around a long time. Any company, I would work anywhere. >> Not as old as I am, honey. So, what's the experience been like at Nutanix? Tell us about the onboarding. >> It is a playground, I love it. Nutanix, I was hoping that they would have the technology that I love and they do. It's one of the first places I've worked where it doesn't matter if I need server storage, we have that. It's pretty cool. I have a really amazing team and then the leadership there is fantastic. It's also the first time in my career where I'm working for a company that sells to CIO's and so my opinion of our product matters. I get to be customer number one, drink our champagne, that sort of thing. In fact, I'm on that path, we call it Eat Your Own Dog Food, when I came on board and I said, I don't want the dog food. We're going to be drinking our own champagne. I want the good stuff. I'm getting to play and just experience the product and experience that process and then people care what I think, people who are developing product care what I think and that's great. >> Are the sales guys dragging you into situations as well? >> They are totally dragging me into situations. I'm not that compelling in direct sales but I have been giving them some tips on how to sell to CIO's. Just letting them know how to approach us, and some of the things that we care about and don't care about. What's great as well is, I'm not very good at being fake, so when I talk about using our product and when I'm excited about our product, it's pretty, you know, it's genuine. If I don't like something, you know that too. >> Well CIO's, you're part of a network. >> We are. >> And that network is sort of immutable, in my opinion. >> It's a secret cabal. It really is, we get together in treehouses and exchange the password. >> But there's a code, right? >> There is. >> You're not going to give another one of your peers some bad advice, even if you are a CIO of a company that's trying to sell to them. >> That's right. It's a small circle. I do belong to some groups that get together and talk about some of our common challenges and one of our cardinal rules is that no vendors are allowed and there's no selling. We do, if we have some expertise, we'll share that but we really don't cross that line. So when I do give advice, they know it's genuine, as much as possible. >> Wendy, we always like to ask CO's, what's challenging you today? Typical IT, we always said for years, it was like, Okay, your headcount next year is going to be flat, your budget's going to be declining. What do you see when you're talking to your peers? What are some of the biggest challenges that they see? >> It's a few things. One thing is, the transformation that's happening around digital technologies and moving into the cloud. It's requiring a transformation of skill sets as well. We really have a challenge, first of all, in deciding, if we have traditional IT folks, how do we transform their skill sets? How do you make an infrastructure guy or gal someone who writes code? That's one thing and just a dearth of talent. There aren't enough people entering the workforce. That's one thing. Another thing is, really just about the pace of innovation. By nature, when you get to a senior executive level, you're almost less innovative than you might've originally been but we're supposed to be the paragons of innovation and new ideas and so we struggle with that. We struggle to keep it fresh and reinvent ourselves. I left a fairly traditional career to go to GoPro, just because of that desire to reinvent myself and try something hard and new. We've got that struggle as well. I'd think as well, just the changing business models, too. There's a lot, we're always balancing CapEx, OpEx, a lot of us have a big investment in OpEx and in SaaS and then trying to balance that with CapEx. We've always got those challenges. I think that's a lot of it. >> Wendy, we're 10 years into this journey of what cloud and how it's going to affect it and the role of the CIO is something that's been in the center of it. Does the CIO become irrelevant? Does he become a broker of services? You talked a little bit about some of the changing roles. How was your viewpoint on cloud, has it changed over the last few years in some of your different roles and I'm curious inside of Nutanix, how public cloud fits into what you use. >> I think there's a couple of layers. One layer that doesn't go away is operations. Whether it's taking operational expertise and transforming that into code for DevOps, or whether it's transforming it into process for on-premise infrastructure, you have to have that knowledge and you have to have that leadership so I don't think the need for leadership is ever really going away. I think the center of leadership is changing over time and has sort of moved from place to place but ultimately, we have to have folks who understand how to build whatever it is, to scale, who understand how to flex, who understand how to deal with crisis. Then also, there's some fundamentals towards architecture and building blocks. Yes, we're architecting differently. We're architecting with code in the cloud but the principles underlying those things are relatively the same. I don't think that the functions, the need for leadership, is going away at all but I do think that we have to be flexible in our thinking. I will say the title CIO it's actually never kind of been right. Chief Digital Officer or Chief AWS Officer. All of those things are not exactly right. We need to not be so precious about titles and just go back to thinking and leading and innovating and let the titles take care of themselves. >> I got to still ask you about this emergent role of the Chief Data Officer. We can all agree data's important, whatever bromide you want to use, data's the new oil and so forth and so on. Many of the chief data officers that we've talked to are individuals that maybe do a lot of governance, lot of things that CIO's generally aren't responsible for. Yet at the same time, data is becoming this new competitive advantage and it's so important to information technology. What are your thoughts on data, helping companies become data-driven and what is the role of the CIO in that context? >> First of all, data is really, really important. How a company deals with its data is a gigantic differentiator. Obviously, we have all this opportunity in the areas of machine learning and potentially AI and so on. When I was at Yahoo, one of the things I worked on was our privacy initiatives and even back then, we had the ability to ingest a lot of data about our users and we had the ability, algorithmically, to do behavioral targeting. But we had to make some ethical decisions and some compliance decisions about how we used that data and so, the technology has been available for some time, but where we haven't caught up is in policy. I think that Chief Data Officer is really at the nexus of creating policy, understanding capabilities and deciding how we apply those things. We've always needed that role. Sometimes it's the CIO, sometimes it's the Chief Privacy Officer, we've always needed that role but the role is a little bit different, I think, with data because of the power of the data. I do think there's a need for some knowledge of the law, GDPR is coming down from Europe and there's a key factor there. Ultimately, data needs to be treated like an asset. It's product as much as anything else. I think someone who's akin to a Chief Product Officer needs to handle the company's data and that data needs to imbue the product, it needs to go to market plans. It also can be a reflection of the culture of the company, as well. Even collecting data on ourselves and how we operate and how our employees move through their cycles is very, very powerful. Always with ethics, though. That's the thing that, if you leave data in the hands of pure engineers or pure technologists, then you need some sorts of checks and balances as well because sometimes we're overcome by the possibilities of the technology, without thinking through the possibilities that affect human beings. We need that balance. >> I've always felt like the CIO is the field general and should be implementing the data strategy but he or she shouldn't be necessarily responsible for, Okay, how are we going to monetize the data? Who has access to data? What are the data policies? That seems like a full-time job but there is overlap, though. >> It's messy, right? A lot of times it has to do with, I mean at that sea level, those are all board-level positions, right? Ultimately, we're responsible for the financial health of the company >> Sure. >> At that level. Really, we're playing to our strengths. Sometimes we come to the table and we understand how to monetize data. Sometimes we come to the table and we know how to efficiently manage operations. There's usually a mix. There's somebody with a CTO or a CPO or a CIO title or a Chief Data Officer title, but it's less about the title and more about those strengths that show up around the executive table but there needs to be somebody, or maybe a combination of a couple of somebodies, who are hungry for the value that they can derive from that data and accrue that to value to the company. >> It's some notion of swim lanes for accountability but recognizing there's some overlap. We got to talk about women in tech, but go ahead. >> Just two things, Wendy. >> Did you notice I'm a girl? >> As a technology leader, I'm curious if you see differences between yourself being a technology leader in Silicon Valley and those outside the Valley and the second one, just curious if you've had any learnings working now for a company that sells to the enterprise versus being on the consumer side of the house at GoPro and some of the others? >> Silicon Valley is a bubble. We all breathe our own oxygen. We think we're pretty cool. We tend to be libertarian as a group and therefore, we have libertarian policies that are embodied in how we develop code, how we create product and we're creating our own little culture but we're not in sync with a lot of the rest of the world. Luckily, one of the pieces of our culture is about building things that are open and so people can repurpose our technologies in ways that make sense for them. The other thing is, even more profound, is the effect of millennials on both Silicon Valley and outside of Silicon Valley. Millennials are changing how we develop code, how we organize our companies, et cetera. Your other question, can't remember. >> Consumer versus selling to the enterprise. >> I think the difference really is just internally, my job it was a different sport, working for a consumer company because people weren't generally smarter than me around my technology. In the consumer company. But they are a lot smarter than me. I am not the technical expert in the room at Nutanix. All of them know more than I do. >> No offense, but I'll bet. >> That was a little intimidating. I had to think twice, do I want to go back to being in junior high? >> Got to ask you, your journey. 17% of the IT industry's employment comprises women. Just so happens that 17% of the guests on theCUBE are women. We really try and go overboard on it. >> Hard to find us. >> There's a clear disparity in pay, it's well-documented. What was your journey to get here? >> It's only now that I'm old and wise and at a senior level that people are making a big thing about me being female. I've been female my entire career. >> Never heard boo. >> I never traded on it. I will tell you that throughout my career, I have been given advice that would seem ridiculous if it were given to a male. As an example, I've been told that I use too many words. That I'm too emotional. I've been told, can you imagine? If I said, Hey Bob, could you button up that top button of your shirt, there? When you sit down, don't spread your legs because I'm drawn to looking at Girls, women, we get that advice from senior advisors. We're told, Be less emotional. I've always ignored that advice. I'm a mom, I have the blonde 1980's hair. There's not much I can do about that. Being genuinely myself, it was all I could figure out how to be. It just so happens that now I'm in my 50's and I'm a CIO, so suddenly that's a thing. It's never been a thing. It's been something where my entire career, I've had to just keep my own counsel and be genuine and the fact that I'm female and feminine and a mom, doesn't diminish the fact that I'm also a brilliant technologist, that I'm good at leading people. I can feel empathy and care in my heart for a person, at the same time that I'm firing them for non-performance. I can be multifaceted. I think that's women's superpower. I think when we try to be just one thing or we try to be more like the traditional male in leadership, then it's like being Jerry Rice and walking onto the field with your legs tied together. My unfair advantage, to quote John Madden, I got to use my unfair advantage. My unfair advantage is that I think in a multifaceted way. >> Wendy M., thanks so much for coming. I'm glad we could make time for you, I'm glad you could make time for us. Thank you. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it was fun. >> Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back to wrap. This is theCUBE in D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Right back.