>> from Bahrain. It's the Q recovery AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Welcome back. Everyone's Cube coverage here in my reign Middle East, part of A W s Amazon Web services Summit, sir. Second year covering the evolution and the Revolution to cloud computing. This year, the big news is a Davis has a region spurring innovation and entrepreneurship in the Middle East region or next gases. Ahmad Hamadan, CEO and CO. Front of Uniform Nick, a super hot company. Congratulations on your success. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you, Joe. So we just talked before we came on camera. This ap I economy that we've been covering in death you been living? This is your world. You have a really big business. Not a lot of employees. Less than 200 employees, billions of transactions. Ap I transactions. This is This is the successful man we've been seeing in the public companies truly, among others. Messaging application integration. This is cloud now, right? This is happening. What's your story? >> Okay, so >> you know, these times I would say it's a golden age for the technology in the region on for the cloud specifically when we started back in 2006. Uh, you know, we're very lonely. We're we're not even in that time in the club. So we started just tow, solve the issue off bulk messaging through writing a script or software that allow us to broadcast a message to a group of people. But along the journey, we realized that businesses need tools, especially a B I's that will allow them tow, tow each toe a wider, I would say audience with a seamless integration. And this is how the cloud communication industry emerged. So we avoid our baby eyes for businesses from all around TV region, especially with segments or sectors that have a mass communication need, like banks in government retailers on the E businesses, >> the data is the data in this business is a fascinating. Before we get into some of those questions about the origination story, how did it all start? >> Okay, so I wasn't at the university a teenage off 22 probably on I leave the one of the student clubs. Andi. I wanted to communicate a message Tau 400 people on, you know, the limitation of the mobile. Back then, I couldn't do it. It's terrible experience. You cannot send two more than 10 people. The text is not full. You know all these complications. So being a software engineer on Dhe, you know, I had an idea. There should be a solution that you can write code, publish it online, and then it will do the magic for you. For months later, I apartment with my brother was a software, you know, geek more than I on dhe. You know, already >> older or younger, brother. >> Younger brother. Okay. Yeah. Hey, was at high school on then four months later, we're life sending thousands of messages over the Internet. It was like magic friends and family like it. It's really making money on, you know, for us, you know, You know, it's like when you have 4005 thousand's a big money for us. That way, any each month, Andre, Like moving forward 2008. I decided this is the dream we need to scale this and, ah, venture out of this small, you know, experiment on. Then I left the job and dedicated my time to scale that business. And I moved the business toward the business and the cloud and communication. Our first move to the cloud was, Ah, 2010. We used aws toe move most of our infrastructure to the cloud on By 2013 we completely divert it into the cloud communication business where the focus is into the FBI. The integration with the applications at the customer systems on Ben allow them tow, communicate to, you know, 100 of millions off >> and then mobile phones, obviously GPS built in application. Tsunamis happened. Exactly. People want to interface with the companies. The other phone? >> Exactly. I will give you an example. You know, you come to my mind while you're talking. We used to have customers back in 2010 descend on Lee along the year like maximum one million transaction the same customers nowadays, like nine years later, they send at least 200 million transactions, so you can imagine the growth in the use cases on the adoption from the customers. Use it now for engagement for notification, for awareness for security and authentication for personalized marketing content, like hundreds of fuse cases like we do some analysis in the behavior of the customers and the consumer on. We realised that in a modern society on individual interact digitally with at least 50 grands and a day. This is huge. You can do the math if you multiply this by 100 million population than there is a massively huge number of transaction and data's being >> percent. What are you guys doing now? Is mainly targeted application developers or businesses as a turnkey solution? What's the What's the value proposition? >> So, >> UH, >> two years like nature, we realized that we cannot target or the market and serve, or the customers we need to focus into the sick man that has hypertension. Then we identified five segment where we tell her our solution, our value proposition toward those segments on it's aligned with the trends in the region. Maybe it's not applicable to other regions. Eso number one for us is the online banking segment. I would see the financial industry with all the, you know, evolution off the authentic and the online and mobile banking. So those are number one. We do integrate our system with their current systems out off the shelf. We don't do much of a cast immunization. We usually provide really integral components toe toward their system, and then they hook up their system two hours, and then they have the dashboard and blood form to orchestrate the communication. The number one is the M government. It's also a, you know, an industry that is evolving in the region. The number three for us is the businesses, and they're very hot, very high potential growth. I would say the number one in terms of growth a business include the e commerce on demand delivery, the food delivery applications you name it on then. The fourth industry for us is the retailer who are moving now toward the reality and the engagement. More to them prison share themselves in this stuff word for them. And the last one is the I would say the hospitality and the, you know, the, you know, hotels and, you know, travel agents. >> I think anyone building an app would want this of their mobile. So what's what's your take of the ecosystem? Entrepreneurship now much different in one year. You have an Amazon region here. What do you think's gonna happen? It's gonna be like you and your brother all over again with other entrepreneur. >> Exactly. You know, when I you know, see, photo interpreters usually approach me for, you know, kind of mentorship and coaching. You know, we're at the stage little bit, you know, being fruit difficult. You know, >> the situation's got the scar >> tissue. Yeah, So I usually told them guys, it's like being so easy for you. You know, at this time, I know that with all the luck, I would say support the barrier to entry had become much less. But at least there are many things you don't need to think how you figure out. It's already there. Just need to have the badge and dedication, and then you'll find many people to support you. Especially, I would say there is only one areas not yet will, you know, covered in the region, which is the access to the talents. I think this is a worldwide problem, even for Forks in the Silicon Valley. But in terms of funding thes of doing business, sitting up ventures, access to the technology platforms like the cloud infrastructure in terms, off advice, mentorship and coaching there is, I would say, an abundant off that available today for for interpreters. And I can tell the next five years you will see a huge value being created out of this. >> Yeah, instead of riding, waves will be running s curves. So it's easier now, Still hard to build a company. But you're right. I mean, go back 10 years ago. You to put it all together, >> Takes us six months to set up the company. You know, legally, back in 2006 >> to get the infrastructure legally, get servers, get some funding, prototype it, get it launched its customers. Now they have a partner network. These kids are spoiled. >> But you know, it's difficult >> today to differentiate yourself because you will find tons of people are either doing or planning to do the same. >> They gotta build some smart intellectual property. This one machine learning is gonna be a great opportunity. That's gonna be a domain expertise kind of thing. You guys have a nice niche, and broad market is growing good. Calm, surround it. Got all kinds of systems out there that need this >> Exactly. You know, the question today is not if the tools and support is available or not. The question is, how you gonna use those tools to create something unique? >> I'm a great to See you. Thanks for coming on and sharing your experiences. You're an inspiration to the other entrepreneurs out there again. Remember Entrepreneurship like a family. Took a team, sport. Pay it forward. The other generations coming online. Absolutely. Congratulations on your success Cube coverage here by rain talking to start ups. This is going to be a hot market for entrepreneurship If the capital markets conform around it. The Cube is here covering it here and by rain. Stay with us for more at a debate summit. If this trip

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe, 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost Joep Piscaer, and you're watching theCUBE here at Nutanix .NEXT, London, 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program the co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj, thanks so much. Congratulations on 3500 people here at the third annual European show, and thanks so much for having theCUBE. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. So, Dheeraj, first of all, you got a lot going on. Big company event here, last night you announced the Q1 2019 earnings. I guess, step back for a second. Nutanix is now, nine years since the founding, you've been public now for a little while, you got to be feeling good. The company's reached a certain size, very respected in the marketplace. So how are you and the team feeling? >> Yeah, well, I tell people that it's actually fun to be a public company. And obviously there is a cost to being a public company, because you're on a quarterly treadmill, in some sense. But Wall Street also keeps you honest. Just like Main Street keeps you honest on quality of product and customer service, Wall Street keeps you honest on spend and what does it really mean to grow at scale. So I like the fact that there is two good streets that are keeping the company honest. And it's really fun to think about capital allocation, one of the big things as you grow. I mean, you're going to spend more than a billion dollars this year alone. How do you allocate capital wisely is something that I think a lot about in (mumbles). >> Yeah. So, at this show, you kind of change some of the positioning of the portfolio. It's the Core, Essentials, and Enterprise, and right, that asset allocation, when I look at Essential, Xi Cloud, there's all these different pieces, some of them through acquisition, some of them created internally. You need to be careful that you don't over-commit, but when do you decide to kill stuff or keep it going, so you got a lot of plates to spin now, a lot more than you did a year or two ago. >> Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just product development. It's also marketing and sales and G&A. I mean, there's other departments we need to think hard about. Like, how do you create brand awareness for these new things? How do you do demand generation? How do you have a specialty sales force? All those things have to be considered, so, nine years, it's been a journey, but it still looks like it's nothing. And we're still a very small company, and we need to think hard about the next five years, in some sense. >> Yeah. So, one of the metrics you gave Wall Street to be able to look at is, what percentage of customers are using more than just the Core? So the Essentials or the Enterprise. And if I got it right, it's up to 19% from 15%, the quarter before. I wonder, is the packaging, how much of that is for Wall Street? Somebody cynically might look and be like, hey, is the Core market slowing down? And therefore you need to expand. We've all seen public companies that need to go into adjacencies, and shouldn't you stick to your knitting? You've got a great solid product with leadership in the marketplace. >> Yep, absolutely. Also, look, we are not bundling them in SKUs so we cannot force customers to actually buy them. We're not doing financial engineering of dollars, because these not SKUs or bundles. This is a journey which is mostly advisory, in some sense. This is how you should start, this is how you should go, and this is advisory for our sellers and our buyers and our channel people. Everybody needs to say, look, have the customer go through the journey. If you had to do what he just said, probably would've bundled them in SKUs and then allocated capital to one or the other. I think, to your other comment about just sticking to the core, Juniper stuck to the core. And many companies out there which just stayed as a single-box company, they stayed at the core. And eventually you realize the market has moved faster than your core itself. So there's this business school thinking, they call it the Icarus Effect. The Icarus Effect is all about, I'm so good at what I do that I can fly to the sun and nothing will happen. But you don't realize that Icarus, the wings were actually pasted using wax. And you go to the sun, and the sun actually melts the wax. So companies like FGI and SUN, Norca, many companies just stuck to one thing. And they couldn't evolve, actually. >> Obviously you're not sticking to the core alone, right? You're expanding the portfolio, I mean, you're not just an infrastructure company anymore. You do so much on top of the infrastructure on-prem. You have so many SAP services, so how do you manage the portfolio in terms of the customer journey? Because there's so much to tell to a customer. How do you sell it? How do you convince a customer to go from Core to Essentials to Enterprise? >> The most important thing is leverage. Is Essentials going to leverage Core, and is the Enterprise going to leverage Essentials and Core itself? Case in point, Files is completely built on top of Core. So every time somebody's using Files, they're also using Core. If you think about Flow, it uses AHV underneath. Frame, and case in point. When it's going to deliver desktops, it's going to use Files because every desktop needs a filer as well. And then when Frame delivers desktops on-prem, it's going to use all the Core. So the important thing is how they don't become disparate things, like they're all going in their own direction, is there a level of progressiveness where you say, well, if you're using the Enterprise features, a lot of them actually go in and drag in the Core as well as Essentials. So how do we build that progressive experience for the customer, where each of these layers are actually being utilized, is the important piece. >> Dheeraj, so, we're talking a lot about the expansion beyond the Core. But there was a pretty significant activity that your team did on Core itself. So the first time I heard about it, it basically said, we're doing an entire file system rewrite. Think of it almost as AoS 2.0. Now, from a product name, I believe it's 5.10, so I might have trouble remembering which release it was, but talk about what went involved in that. Obviously a lot has changed in the nine years since you created it, so. >> Absolutely. Yeah, yesterday in the earnings call I talked about it too, that people scoff at Core infrastructure. Like, oh, it's going to be a commodity because it's good enough infrastructure. But then I argue that there's no such thing as good enough infrastructure. And companies struggle when they don't focus on infrastructure itself. It's like food, shelter, clothing in the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you don't get that, then there's no point self-actualizing it. So, Core infrastructure completely destroys network insecurity. You got to get it right. I mean, look at Oracle, how it's struggling with IaaS. And look at Google, they're trying to figure out how to make it relevant for the Enterprise. Azure has like three or four different stacks for infrastructure. One for old 265, one for Azure DB, one for Azure, and now they're rewriting it for Azure itself. VMware has three different infrastructure stacks. One for three tier, where they are very happily, they're saying, look, let EMC, their NetApps actually are underneath, and Cisco's, and stuff like that. And then they have this software-defined infrastructure with commodity servers. And finally, they have VMware-enabled AWS which is going to use AWS services. So now you have three different forks of your core base, in some sense. And for us, what's important is how we use a single core base for everything. So architecture matters. I was arguing yesterday in the earnings call that good enough infrastructure is an oxymoron. You need to get core right before you can go and try to live the other layers of the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, actually. And that's why we went back and thought about, as the workloads were growing and increasing, and we had mission-critical stuff in memory databases, what do we need to really do about the way we lay out the data and lay out the metadata? So as you know, metadata is at the core of anything in systems, and especially storage systems. And the metadata of our erstwhile system was actually very completely distributed. And then we realized that some things can be local, and some things can be distributed, and that's better scale. Again, going back to this understanding of what things can be represented locally for a certain disk versus what things need to be global so that you can go and say, okay, where is this data really located? What drive? But once you go to the drive, you can actually get more metadata. So, again, you're getting more progressive scanning. So at the end of the day, our engineers are constantly thinking about performance and scalability, and how do you change the wings of the plane at 35,000 feet? It's a very big challenge. >> So that's one of the issues, right? So you're still focusing on your own infrastructure layer, right? But many customers do already have presence in a different hardware stack, or the public cloud, or some service provider. So not everything runs on your platform. So how are you planning to deliver the services ensemble to customers that don't necessarily run on AoS? >> So that's the multi-cloud journey, which is basically the enterprise journey of our customers. I said this yesterday in the earnings call as well, that all our services should be available both on-prem and off-prem. This idea of a VPC, that is multi-location, is what hybrid cloud is all about. So how do you get a virtual private cloud to really span multiple clouds in multiple locations? I think you saw from the demos today of how you're really running all of AoS on top of GCP virtual infrastructure. And in the course of the coming year or two, you'll see us do the same thing, BEM at Amazon, BEM at Azure. Because they deliver servers in their data centers and that's leverage for them because they've already gone and spent so much money on data centers that it's easy for them to deliver a physical server that our software can run on top of. And if people are not using AoS, they'll still want to use things like Frame and Beam and COM and other such things like that. >> Yep, Dheeraj, what are you hearing from customers and how do you think of hybrid, as it were? You know, a lot of attention gets played to things like Azure Stack from Microsoft from VMware on AWS, I know you've got some view points on this. >> Yeah, no, in fact, so if you go back five years, hyperconvergence had become a buzz word maybe three, four years ago. And there were a lot of companies doing hyperconvergence. And only one or two have survived and it's us and VMware, basically have survived that. Everybody else has a checkbox because the customers said well, what about that? Will we have a check box? But, it's really about operating system sort of hyperconvergence. And it has to be honest. And it has to really blur the lines between compute and storage and networking and security. I think hybrid needs to be honest and one of the killer things that hybrid needs is blurring the lines between networks, blurring the lines on storage so you can do one click replication and one click fail over. So a lot of those things have required a lot of innovations from us. That's why we were delayed in Xi. We didn't want to just put up data centers and just like that. I mean, if you go back in time to many hardware companies were putting open stack data centers and calling it their new cloud in response to Amazon. And VMware tried vCloud Air. And they had a charter to go spend money. They weren't going to spend a ton of money on hardware. Without even knowing that the cloud is not about data centers. Cloud is about an experience. It's about eCommerce and computing coming together. And you have to be passionate about a catalog. You know, the marketplace, the catalog so that people can really go and consume things from a catalog. I think that's what our experience has been that. Look, if you don't think of it like a retail giant or retail customer, which is what Amazon has done such a good job of. You know, they've thought about computing as an eCommerce problem as opposed to as a compute storage networking problem itself. And those are the lessons that we have learned about hybrid just as much >> Alright, you did a nice job on the keynote, laying out that Nutanix, like your customers, you're going through a journey. The crawl-walk-run, if you will. We got a tease in the keynote this morning about something cloud native. Where you're going. Final question for you is as you look at the company, you said it's still young, where are your customers going, where are some of the things they need to work on, and that Nutanix will mature with them as we look to move forward? >> Well, I mean, look. I think everybody knows where customers are headed. They're questioning who fulfills the promise because the requirements are all the same. They all want to go and use next generation infrastructure, they want to modernize their data centers, the infrastructure. They want to use some things that they want to own, some things they want to rent. The question is, where is the best experience possible? And by that, I mean not just systems experience of hybrid clouds but also customer service and having an ever-growing catalog and being able to deliver things for developers and devops. And technology will come and go. Two, three years ago, the Puppet and Chef were the hottest thing on, now today, it's Kubernetes. Tomorrow, it's going to be something else. It's the fact that what you see is what you do. And what you do is what you say. In our business, it's about integrity. I was arguing about this yesterday in the earnings call, as well, that building business software is a little bit easier. I shouldn't trivialize it as much but if people use business software, they can work around weaknesses of business software. But if you are in the business of infrastructure, applications cannot work around weaknesses of infrastructure. So integrity matters a lot in our space, actually, and that is about great products, great customer service, fast innovation, recovering fast, being resilient. Those are the things that we focus a lot on. >> Alright, well, Dheeraj, thanks again, always. We didn't even get to talk about the width part, the fourth H that you've been talking about for the honest, humble, and hungry. So, thank you. Congratulations to the team and always appreciate you having on our program. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Stay with us. Two days live of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music) >> I have been in the software and technology industry for over 12 years now. And so I've had the opportunity as a marketer.