>> Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT, 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host John Furrier. Here we are, we're at day two, John, this conference, I gotta say it's pretty cool. 6500 people, we're steps away from Disneyland, and, you go to a lot of these things every year. I also do about a dozen or so for theCUBE. So in other words, we're veterans of this kind of thing. This does seem to have a different vibe and I think it really gets to the kind of company Nutanix is, and where it is in its journey. >> Nutanix is still a small company even though they're 10 years old, as Dheeraj talks about. The numbers aren't massive, I mean, we go to a lot of other shows where it's 15,000, Amazon Web Services just had an event in London, Dave Vellante was out there covering, Stu was covering Red Hat summit in Boston this week, tons of events going on. Amazon Web Services' summit in comparison was 12,500 people, 22,000 registered, that's a summit in London. It's not the re:Invent main conferences like 30,000 people. And that's always sold out, so they got a lot, in terms of attendees numbers they're still in the entry level, mid range growth. But I think that's okay, they like that culture and I think the story here at this show is intimacy, they would rather err on the side of better content and more intimate opportunities for their customers to really get the straight scoop. And I think it's less of a conference slash trade show, more of an intimate relationships where they can provide feedback, for customers to give feedback, and for Nutanix to figure out with the customers how to connect to them. So, I think the story here is, Nutanix is growing up as a company, they're 10 years old and they gotta go the next level and the management team has technical chops, and they have a long term view. They have that 20 mile stare, they can see out and they're trying to figure it out. I still think that the numbers are light on their forecast I still think that there's some sandbagging going on there, I'm not saying they're sandbagging, but I mean, I think, you look at Essentials, which is the enterprise and then multi-cloud, the numbers that we're seeing at Wikibon are much bigger, and Amazon reflects that. So I think they're being cautious but smart about how they execute off their success they've had in the first 10 years to go the next 10 to 20 years and I think that's clear in the management team, that they wanna build a durable company. >> Well exactly, and I think that that's what's really coming through, is that this is, as you said, they're growing up. This is a real coming of age moment for them, they've celebrated the 10 years. Okay, so what kind of company are we? Who do we want to be? And what's coming through is that from the technology side, they get it. They say, I'm sort of reminded of the Henry David Thoreau quote, our life is frittered away by detail, simplify simplify simplify, that's what customers want. They want this one click data recovery, they want their credentials to be assumed. You know who I am, I'm safe to be in here. Fixing things, dealing with that. So I think that they get that, that simplicity is key. They also get customer service. I mean their Net Promoter scores, as we've noted, are in the 90s, that's just unheard of. >> It's monster, monster numbers. >> It really is and so they get it. We need to be responsive to customers, we need to have a personal relationship with these, because it's not just organizations, it's people at the other end of these transactions. >> I mean, I think Nutanix, one of the stories that's popping out in the hallways as I walk around and talk to customers and people and the company and partners, is that Nutanix has a lot of headroom in their growth. I think Wall Street is interesting and you heard Dheeraj talk about that yesterday, about having a new customer, you asked him about his management style and he said quote, I have a new customer called Wall Street. And I have to balance that against mainstream enterprise which is his core business. And so he as a CEO and the company are dealing with this new stakeholder called public company customer retail stock buyers. That's a short term cycle and I think, if you look at their stock, they had a big knife edge drop in the past quarter. And I think the shorts are circling, it's a whole nother dynamic, it's a whole nother theater for Nutanix to deal with, and I think that's something that they gotta get used to. And he was clear, he said I'm addressing it, we're gonna balance it, but they gotta be thinking long term because this company has a lot more to do and their customer base are risk takers. Because everyone we talk to has this different style or persona. They're smart, they're usually engineering oriented, they love engineered solutions. And they're taking chances. And everyone who's taken the chance with Nutanix, has paid off. That seems to be the theme. And as we were talking before we came on camera, Mark Hamill, Jedi knight, you know, Star Wars, was on stage giving the keynote, their customer base, is a lot like the Jedi order, right? I mean they see themselves as, elite, technically, they're not afraid to take organizational risks and push that DevOps culture. And we heard that from Sunil, the chief product officer that they're really looking at, this new way to do things, like they did with hyperconvergence, they pioneered that, set the table on that and foundationally built that. They wanna take that same playbook of HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, and apply it to the cloud. And provide an abstraction layer advantage and I think that is clearly their strategy and that's, to me, the top story here. >> I couldn't agree more and I also think that, what is also coming through is this idea of we don't wanna be safe. What's clear is that, consumer technologies have leapfrogged IT enterprise vendors. The things that we hold in our pockets are so much more sophisticated than what businesses and organizations, multi-billion dollar businesses and organizations, are using, what their employees are using on a day to day basis. So we expect a certain kind of design and ease of use, in our personal lives and they're bringing it to enterprises and think that that is really what's exciting and interesting about this company. >> What's interesting about their story is that, the consistent theme about the customers is that it's kind of a consolidation story but that's not the real story because back in the old days of IT, consolidation was the strategy. Consolidate vendors, consolidate footprint to reduce cost, clearly a cost reduction. With Nutanix what they get is they get consolidation, and they enable advantages so the real value of Nutanix is to be positioned for those new kinds of app developers, so. This is like, you get consolidation as a side benefit for enabling the value, and that's the theme that's coming out of all the customer testimonials and interviews is, we gotta do more, we gotta create more enablement for the app developers and we gotta provide more performant storage servers and software for the customers. And that's their main focus and they consolidation as a benefit. That's gonna scare a lot of people and customers that I've talked to said, hey I got all the stuff but I can't just throw it away tomorrow, I gotta move it out over time, so, this is the Nutanix sales challenge, how do you move faster with all that incumbent, legacy stuff in these datacenters, while enabling the multi-cloud capability? >> And we're gonna be talking about that more today with Chris Kaddaras on the show. We have a lot of great guests, we have the CIO, Wendy Pfeiffer, I was reading an article about her today, she answered an ad as a teenager to work for NASA. She had an idea for NASA and so we're gonna hear much more about her story, we've got a lot of great guests. >> Well what's your take? I mean, you've been here, you're getting immersed in. What's your take of the show, what's your analysis? >> Well, what's really interesting to me is that we're having this conversation against this backdrop where, the technology industry is really under fire. I mean, we heard Ayanna Howard here on the show yesterday and then she was up on the main stage today, talking about the good, the bad, and then the really scary elements of AI and how it really has these powers that can do a lot of wonderful things and help children with special needs and help workers be more productive and engaged and collaborate. But yet, there's also this much darker side that AI's really only as good as its creators. And then the other difficulty is that, because we have become so trusting of these machines, we disregard our own intuition. And that is a really scary element, so. What I think is exciting, and it goes back to this risk taking mentality, that Nutanix has, is, we're gonna talk about these things. We're just going to forget about them or they're gonna be a sideshow, this is really on the main stage, let's talk about our values, let's talk about the humanity of technology and this is really an important part of the conversation. >> It's interesting, the culture, we talked about the culture a lot yesterday. And you can see from the mix of the guests we've had here and how they're putting their content together across the show portfolio, it's not just speeds and feeds. There's a lot of tech for good angle but they're not tech for good stories like hey, look, here's a tech for good story. Look how good we are because we promote it. They're authentic people that have a great story that has a tech involvement. But it's not a pure Nutanix messaging kind of thing. >> Right, and it goes to back to their values, the humble, hungry, honest, and have a lot of heart. I mean I think that that is, you really see how important culture is, when it is top down. When Dheeraj embodies certain characteristics and traits, you see that employees then look up and they say okay, this is what we're about, this is who we are. >> You know, we also talked yesterday about our analysis in the keynote, what's interesting about culture is, there's also a culture shift going on inside their customer base. And again, it's back to this kind of Star Wars theme, Jedi knights and the revolution continuing for Nutanix, their opportunity is to continue to stay on the course, and this is gonna be a big bet for them, they gotta make some big bets on the technology side, which they're making, but also they have an opportunity because a lot of their installed base are rebels, right? So you have this rebellion IT guy, generational shift where you have DevOps coming in and Gene Kim who wrote the book on DevOps, runs the biggest DevOps event in the world, series of events, DevOps Enterprise Summit, he's even saying it's about 3% changeover. So I think there's a big tailwind coming for Nutanix. Around DevOps, operating models, in the enterprise and cloud where, the convergence of those two worlds coming together, and it's gonna be a younger generation, it's gonna be a different world. If that happens, I think that's gonna be something that Wall Street might not see. I think that's kind of an area. And that's gonna be a good tailwind for Nutanix. The other notable thing that I would point out from this show is, the presence of VMware visibly in the conversation. And I think Dheeraj was talking about, hey we don't mind talking about VMware because they validate the marketplace, they're the big 800 pound gorilla. And we're gonna continue to innovate around them. We don't need their Hypervisor, customers don't need to pay their vTax, that's his messaging, so that was a key notable. The other one was the challenge that Nutanix has, this is, again, might be a Wall Street insight for some of the Wall Street folks out there is that, their challenge has been getting new logos. Their cost to sales is a little bit high because they require POCs and once they get in there they usually win. And then their cost per sales, cost per order dollar on the sales side once they have a customer, is very low, they get more renewals and they have more net contract value so they have great customer economics on that side. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal for them, could bring them a tsunami of new logos. That could give them a lot of leverage and bring their customer base well above their 12,000 number now. And bring them up into a whole nother level. So I think the HPE deal will be a tell sign on the numbers, and if they can get more new logos in there, the big accounts that HP has through their channel, that's a big story. So VMware, HPE, culture, all the main story here. >> And of course we had HPE on the show yesterday, talking about that very development, so. We have lots more great content, great guests to come today, this has been just a ball hosting with you, so I'm really for another day. >> Very intimate show, I mean, Nutanix are a very intimate show they don't really care about the big numbers, they want the right numbers and that speaks to their culture. >> And they know their people. Because as we talked about many times, Mark Hamill, up on the stage yesterday, so, they know their community. Please stay tuned for more of the coverage from theCUBE of .NEXT here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)