>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody. Welcome back to Nutanix NEXTConf. This is the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Rich Napolitano is here as the CEO of Plexxi. Good friend, long time CUBE alum. Great to see you. >> Great to see you guys. Pleasure to be here with you again. >> Yeah, so you know, I love the fact that you're back in startup land. I mean, you did unbelievable things at EMC, but really this is your real love, alright, runnin' startups, you know, eating glass as we call it. So, when we first heard about Plexxi, I have to admit, Rich, we were down at Strada that time and it was kind of heavy and really geeky. I'm not a networky guy. You've really done a great job of sort of transforming the messaging and the company's vision. Share with us what's up with Plexxi. >> Yeah, I know, again thank you for inviting me here and it's a pleasure. It's an exciting time for the company. You know, we're actually breaking out, right and so it's great to see the momentum. And, the team has done a fabulous job. The challenge in the early days is, you know, you have the technology and you're trying to establish your product market fit and we've done that now. And so, it's exciting to be at this important inflection point, you know, tremendous revenue growth this year. You know, we could probably be profitable if we want to be this year which there's not many startups that can say that. And, what's happened is fundamentally we really connected now what we have built, our technology to the ping points in the marketplace and we have, you know, deep deep clarity and understanding of that now. >> So, talk a little bit more about the sort of value proposition and kind of why you guys, why Dave started the company and why you joined, what you're all about. >> Yeah, so we're building the next generation networks. We're not building additional networks and so we're very focused on the next era of computing, you know, third platform, you know, and scaled down infrastructure, cloud, where the requirements on the infrastructure are very different. You need to just build a much more agile and flexible infrastructure. You know, the choice the public cloud is there and it's going to be there forever, but how do you build an agile infrastructure for private and for hybrid infrastructure? And, what we've realized, and Dave realized this early on, is that the networking architectures haven't fundamentally changed in a very, very long time. And, you know, there's an emergence now, and this is what we've really learned in the last two years, there's an emergence of this other data center network. You know, Sysco has been dominant and done a phenomenal job in traditional data sending networking, but there's this emergence of this other network and we now we call it by a name, which is the Hyper Converge Network, HCN. And so, in very simple terms, what is Plexxi? Plexxi builds the HCN for the HEI infrastructure. >> Okay, Rich, you're just going to have to unpack this a little bit so, you know, people in the networking world will be said, we understand that it was a lot of the east, west traffic, the traffic between those, but you know, architecturally you know, we kind of got rid of the sand and now we've got this distributed software model that I've got these nodes, so where was the gap that you were lookin' to fill and you know, does Nutanix understand that this was a challenge? >> Those are all great questions and very relevant to the challenge. So, when you really look at the problems we solved, we start, we pull it up to the top for a second and we've learned a lot about this the last couple of years. What people want is simplicity. They don't want complexity. And, we built a lot of complexity into every layer of the infrastructure. Everything from the applications to the operating environments, to compute, to the storage and to the network. And so, what we really bring to the marketplace is a much simpler approach to deploy infrastructure and we do that by simplifying the network dramatically. So, and we do that by having a software definable network that's built out of industry standard components. So, Plexxi really brings three things to the table. We figured out how to build this very elastic and agile fabric to allow you to compute storage, allow you to connect storaging a few things together. And, we do that on white box switches and that's dramatically reduced our cost point and is tremendously simple to deploy, but on top of that, we built our software abstractions. And, it really is the key to us is really our software control and our integrations into operating environments. So, what we bring to market is an integrated solution with a set of switches that build this fabric, but our software controller allows you to provision this network seamlessly in the same way that Nutanix talks about being the invisible infrastructure, we're the invisible network. >> So, when Nutanix first started they were like, we're going to kill that sand 'cause you don't need some of that complexity, so when do I need this you know, fabric as you call it, as that interconnected tissue, you know, what size customer, you know, what kind of challenges does that, you know, really knock down. And So, if you're living within a rack you don't have any of these problems really. Right, I mean our integration into Nutanix is so sophisticated now that even within the rack we dramatically simplify your network provisioning so even within a rack our value proposition of simplicity and ease of use is compelling. We make the network invisible in that context. So, as you provision your VM's or your storage in a Nutanix environment, the network comes along. The value proposition just is most compelling as you go to second, third or more racks. Some of our biggest customers deploy us in tremendous configurations, you know, 10 racks in 10 rows, thousands of servers. But, we can start as small as you know, one or two switches. And so, the value proposition really is, how seamlessly can you build your infrastructure, in other words, can you make the network invisible in these infrastructures? And, that's exactly what we do. >> You have this picture in your booth, these things that you're handing out, and it's really simple. You got the old way which is storage, server and networking all that complexity. Nutanix, really kind of attacked the server and storage piece, brought those together, connect to the network. What you guys are doing is collapsing that complexity even further. Is that right, so what does that mean for a customer from a scaling standpoint? >> So, if you look at the three tier architecture as you talked about, then we're maxing multiple networks. And, the first thing anyone does whey they deploy converged infrastructure, hyperconversions in particular, is they eliminate the SAD. So, that was another network, we just never really thought about it that way. And so, effectively what we do is we allow you to have the properties of a SAD on your network. So, for a storage guy, notions of like Fibre Channel zoning are inherent now in our IP oriented network. Our network is very low latency because of our architecture. So, as you scale your latency is constant as you would things like NVME, our latency is extremely low. It's not a multi tiered network, so you don't have the complexity of building a multi tiered network as you scale your converged infrastructure. The benefit of hyperconversion is that you can deploy these racks of infrastructure and easily deploy them. The challenge is that if you don't attack the networking problem you still bump into that as you deploy this infrastructure. >> That becomes your new bottleneck. >> It's your new bottleneck for performance, but it's really for administration. And so, our integration layer ties into Nutanix and makes us aware of Nutanix operating environment, its file system, when nodes are being added or removed, when you're doing STApps or backups, et cetera and the network is shaped in the context of that application called Nutanix. It'll do the same thing for VMware. >> And, when you say it's tied into Nutanix, is that you know, the Nutanix the kind of the software between nodes is also things like AHV. Do you have awareness of that? >> So, AHV or VMware and PRISM, so you know, our management console can be launched from PRISM now so you can seamlessly have an experience. You can't tell when you're really in Nutanix or when you're in Plexxi's management domain. But, more importantly, we're aware of when nodes are added. We understand if you're rebuilding your underlying file systems, et cetera, as the requirements on the network shift, as you add more workloads, as workloads move, as applications move on the infrastructure and you need more compute over here or more storage there, our network adapts to that. >> So, explain how this is different than, just say, Nutanix bringing its platform and partnering up with UCS, for example. What's different about what you're doing? >> So, we're, for one thing, we're only the network, right. And so, the compute infrastructure, we don't do that. We don't do storage. We don't compute. And so, we're just a network that is really, think about it as the fabric for compute and storage as opposed to a data center network where you connect, you know, your printers and your desktops and your infrastructure for your, you know, multiple sites, et cetera. That's the kind of Sysco, if you will, network. We're this embedded network in these hyperconvert solutions. Put one or two switches in your rack and as you pump out this converged infrastructure you just scale that fabric seamlessly. And, it's so well integrated inside of Nutanix you don't even realize it's another network. It's just embedded in the infrastructure. >> So, sorry Stu. From a buyer's standpoint, do I get to eliminate some other or limit my growth of my traditional network or do I have to throw that out and bring this in? >> So, we're totally compatible with existing networks. So, what you do is you do two or three things. We can insert into existing networks without modifying them, but you don't need to keep adding top rack switches and spines to your existing network because our, most of the traffic stays on this other network. The Nutanix guy, sales teams, are actually starting to call this the Nutanix Network or the Nutanix Fabric because it's embedded in their solution. So, most of the traffic between Nutanix and those goes on that network which minimizes your northbound traffic to your existing network which just frankly, removes a headache from traditional network admins to deal with this other stuff. And, that same way the network admin in the past didn't worry about sand traffic. You shouldn't have to worry about this other problems too. >> So, Rich, it's interesting, talking to Nutanix customers you're right, smaller customers don't have networking issues, some larger customers it depends on how good their network is. The thing coming on the horizon that's going to dramatically change this embedded network thing is got to be NVME over fabrics, so what does that mean for Nutanix standalone and you know, I got to think that that's a huge tie to bring you into a lot of accounts. >> I mean, it is clear that the next tsunami, I mean you know, we were all involved in the early days of Flash and we saw that coming when we were at EMC, you know, I probably saw more Flash than anybody in the world actually, in terms of petabytes actually. And, NVME is that next wave, right. So, whether it's embedded in Nutanix or it's standalone bricks, you know, it's going to elevate the, this east, west, this need for this other network and you know, to pitch Plexxi a little bit, there's no better network that's tuned for this. The nature of our network is it's flat, it's extremely low latency, so we're actually awaiting the day that, you know, NVME hits the market in a big way because it will blow apart every other network, every hierarchal network will just be blown apart because the latency characteristics of a multi tiered network are just, are just clear. You can measure it. Also, we're doing a lot of stuff like that. >> Are any of your solutions ready for this today? >> We're ready for it. >> And, when you simplify the network like that, the entire infrastructure, and you provide that infrastructure with virtually no latency impact, now you can start to see the way in which application development changes and, you know, everybody's talking about digital disruption and how they going to pay for it. They're going to pay for it by, I would think, shifting labor resource from non-differentiated infrastructure to some of these more exciting areas. We've just heard that from two CIOs. >> We see this a lot. Telecom Italia is here with us. Sparkle, one of our bigger customers, we have a session this afternoon at 3 o'clock and Sparkle's going to be in the session with us and I just met a good hour with them here. And, it's all about the operating expense. It's like, Nutanix plus Plexxi reduces my operating expense and he's going to repeatedly say that. And, it's just clear that people cannot afford the complexity associated with traditional networks anymore. They can't hire programmers to build out, you know, not to pick on ACI, but complicated scripts for ACI, they can't afford to build those programs. Our integration layer makes that seamless, it takes it away. >> So, what's your relationship with Nutanix? You're obviously doing some hardcore integration. How do you describe the partnership and do you have other partnerships that you can talk about? >> So, right now we have a number of large scale, service provider customers we sell through distribution and other partners. We're partnering a lot with Nutanix now, a little bit with SimpliVity, but we're going to go after all of the HCI vendors ultimately. But, pretty clearly Nutanix is the leader and we've been developing a relationship at the top and in the field and parallel we've been recruiting Nutanix partners. AERO's our master distributor, so we're recruiting AERO partners that sell Nutanix and we're building a set of solutions. We announce our reference architecture this week with Nutanix, so we're very focused on Nutanix. They're clearly the leader in this space and they get our value proposition. Invisible infrastructure meets the invisible network. I mean, it's perfect. >> You mentioned before you could be profitable if you wanted to be. It's kind of, it's not in vogue to be profitable, Rich. People want growth, but you know, hey, this booming market's not going to last forever. >> Timing's different, timing is different. I think, actually I think it plays to our strength that you know, I looked at our financials a couple of weeks ago and I realized some about 80% of all that we've spent has been in R and D, and that's not common. Most starters at this stage have invested a lot more in the go to market and now's our time to go do that, but we have, now we have the advantage that we have such tremendous revenue growth that we can fund a bunch of it ourselves and the capital markets are different than they were two or three years ago when Nutanix was growing. So, I think it's prudent for CEOs now to be just more, more capital efficient because the markets are different and I think we're in a unique position now given all of our growth. >> Well, Rich, congratulations on the early success. We know what you're capable of. We'll be watching. I really wish you the best. >> My pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Nutanix, NEXTConf. Be right back.