>> Live from Anaheim, California, it's the Cube! Covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are the Cube. We are the ESPN of tech. We have two tech athletes on with us today. We have Asvin Ramesh, AVP marketing and alliances technology services at Cognizant. Welcome. And we have Inder Sidhu, EVP global customer success at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Inder. >> Thank you. >> So why don't I start with you. For viewers who are not familiar with Cognizant, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you're all about. >> Sure, so Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies. We focus on transforming clients' business model, operating model and technology model. Naztech listed at 16 billion revenue last year. We are a Fortune 200 company. We work with about half of the Fortune 200 companies. And companies trust us to help transform the work that they're doing. >> Those are tall orders. (laughs) So what are you hearing from customers right now? What are their biggest challenges that they're facing? >> So, I think customers are basically in two buckets, as we see it, right? We see customers who are inherently excited about the challenges that they're facing, and there are other customers who are still grappling how to figure out the onslaught that's coming at them. And if I just abstract this beyond technology into the overall spectrum of how I look at it, it really transforms to what I call, are customers set or not? And that translates to social, economic and technology. There are a lot of social changes that are happening because of all the things that are going on. How well are companies able to adapt to those social changes? Really makes a difference in their ability to engage with the consumer. There are a lot of economic changes, economic martyrs that are being brought. How well are companies being able to adapt to those economic models? And more importantly from where Nutanix and Cognizant sit, technology is playing a huge role, both on the social and the economic angle. So how do companies leverage technology to be able to drive that change? And how well you do these three things really makes a difference in customers' lives. >> Talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's the relationship? Obviously partner, you have customers. They got the software now and hardware before, all coming together. What's the relationship how you guys work together? >> It's fantastic. We've been a partner with Nutanix for more than three years. And, I think the critical piece and foundational elements of the partnership with Nutanix, more than the products that they bring out because they're constantly innovating all the time, I think is on a bedrock of transparency, flexibility, and specificity. So there's a lot of transparency in terms of their roadmap, and we get a sense of where they're headed. They get a sense of where we're headed and how we are focused and what our strategy is. That allows us to really lock into what the customer's demanding. Second is flexibility with the elements that I talked about around social, economic and technology. It's very important for a flexible combination, because I kind of look at this age of cooptition as a battle of ecosystems. So, we are locked in with Nutanix in this battle of ecosystems, so in my role, I build value chains, and Nutanix is a critical partner in that value chain and being able to adopt to what the customers are demanding of us, and we are very specific about what we do in the market place. Because all of us have choices, and it's very important to be specific to solving customers' issues. It's been a great partnership-- >> It's interesting, we always talk on the Cube around automation. DevOps has been a big driver with multi cloud now. If you have all these value activities strung together in a set of value chains, no one company can own it all. But automation requires end-to-end visibility, so the big trend we're seeing is who's going to enable that? Because I can imagine, your environment you can talk to the top customers. We do the Cube hundreds of events a year. The same theme comes back over and over again on the Cube. It's a refrain. It's the anthem of the customer which is, look, I need to innovate my business model. I got to move quickly to a new operating model cloud. 'Cause they all taste the cloud, and they want the cloud everywhere. And then they want to make sure they have a technology partner. So all three of those theaters are exploding in innovation, and all at the same time. This has been a big challenge. How do you guys work together to address the business model innovation, the operating model challenges, the skill gaps training or whatever? And then obviously technology selection? >> So I think the most important thing is to be able to sense and engage, right? I think that's where it starts. If you've built a ecosystem of the value chain, in our case with Nutanix, in a way that we stay close to the consumer changes, we build a method of engagement that allows us to sense and engage better. I think that addresses a big part of what you talked about. Then it's about figuring out what elements of technology and being able to advise the customer in the right way in their journey to what they want to achieve in introducing those technologies to the table. >> Inder, I want to bring you in here on this. You are the EVP of customer success at Nutanix. You have a lot of success. You have net supporter scores on 90 which is really unheard of in this industry. I think so many people out there watching this want to know what is your secret sauce. How do you get that? (laughs) >> I think it's a combination of things. I think the first and foremost is being extremely customer centric in everything that you do, not as a function within the company but across the company. Customer success isn't just a function. It's a philosophy; it's a cultural value. It's a mindset; it's everybody's job. You got to start there. Second, you hire people who have a great deal of empathy for the customer and a great deal of expertise in what the customer is looking for. So to bring empathy and they're deeply technical in terms of bringing that expertise and actually applying that towards the customer's problems. And then, maybe the third thing I'd say is always being focused on the customer's outcomes as opposed to your own desire to either sell more services or more products or whatever, because if you're customer-outcome centric, everything else follows from that. Keeping that as a north star, I think has been the primary factor that's driven that. There's one other thing that I'd add to that, and that is something, I think, John, you were referring to a little bit earlier which is this notion of automation. So in the past, people would drive customer success by throwing more and more bodies at the problem, more and more people at the problem. That's so yesterday, right? Now it's all about, you still need people, absolutely, but you need to empower them with a great deal of data, with a great deal of insight, with a great deal of automation. Do that in real time, be predictive, be proactive, and so on. That last element, that secret sauce is pretty important. >> That's interesting. We had a session earlier; I talked about the tech landscape. We talked it out from cloud to politics, and how technology without accountability and responsibility with people can be a bad outcome. Right? (laughs) You give the tools to the wrong people, or someone, say government, doesn't know what the technology can do, bad outcomes happen. Same with cloud selection. When you start to get in some of these new areas where this market shift's going on, where there's real lives on the line in terms of jobs, re-skilling training, you guys are on the cusp of this next shift. You're on the front lines, putting it all together as a global SI for all the top customers. So digital's transformation, although it sounds very buzz-wordy, is actually real in the sense that these are material changes to companies, how they're operating and their business model. So the impact's pretty high, so the role of people is super important. What's going on there? How's the progress, in your view? Are customers ready? Are they getting trained up? Are their IQs moving faster? Are they more accountable? >> Couple of observations over there, I think I would say that in the last 90 days, I've probably met 100 customers. I don't think there's probably, with the exception of maybe a couple, I don't think there's been any conversation where talent hasn't come up. Specifically, the shortage of talent. Which is why, by the way, it becomes hugely critical for us to have partners like Cognizant with whom we have a fantastic relationship. They are so complementary and so critically interwoven into our skill and their skill jointly. Every customer basically says, look, I used to have a virtualization admin, a security admin, a network admin, a database admin, and this, that and the other. And what you've done is you've hyper-converged, not only technology but you've hyper-converged the roles. Well, hyper-converging the roles means you need one person instead of 10 people, but that one is really hard one to find. So help me train them and work with your partners to bring that capability. So talent shortage, especially as you move away from the larger metropolitan areas, is a real issue. And we're working towards that. We're trying to address that by making products simpler. As you know, that's been a hallmark of Nutanix is simplicity and support and service. Those have been our hallmark. So making it simpler is very key, but no matter how simple you make it, you still need that element of human intelligence, human touch, and the automation. Those are the ways. >> And the risk, too, from the customers, love to get the integration standpoint, because, one, that's a lever for you guys. You get leverage out of that. When you take 10 to one or reduce down the roles, hyper-converge things, but the outcome is pretty positive. You're enabling new things, but it allows for people to be redeployed, as well. The existing roles, they're not really going away. They just get shifted. So, yes we need more people, need new people, but also, the dynamic of fear. Is my job going away? So there's leverage and you get efficiencies and potentially redeployment capabilities. How's that affecting your job at Cognizant? >> So, at Cognizant, people are extremely core to the way we operate, so, as I mentioned, we are a $16 billion organization, but we are almost 200,000 people. 185,000, just to be precise. So, for us, the retraining and re-skilling of people is ingrained in the way we've operated since our inception 25 years ago. And it's about two, three things. One is a basic understanding that while technology curves at exponential, the change management in people are linear. So that fundamental understanding of that shift is very important that we continue to invest into the training and change management of individuals to allow them to progress through the value curve as technology shifts happen. And for that, you need both a culture and a structure for that to happen. And because we have grown through this environment, we have Cognizant Academy, and we have few other systems and processes and communication elements that we have put in place that allow our employees to grow as the technology shifts happen. That's one. Second piece is, I think, a very important reason why customers work with us is because we understand their industry. So we serve almost 20 industries, but almost 70 to 80% of our revenue comes from a few industries. And customers really engage and continue to work with us because of our deep understanding of their business, right? So it's this ability to be able to understand technology and the progress of technology from companies like Nutanix. And then, be able to stitch that appropriately to the business of the customer, and put a structure in place that allows the shift to happen, that allows us to grow. >> But going back to what Inder said earlier, so many of the skills that are necessary today, I mean, yes of course, it's about keeping up with the shifts in technology, but so many of the reasons that Nutanix has been successful is that its employees are empathetic, that they listen, that they're paying attention, that they ask good follow-up questions. So when you're talking about Cognizant Academy and the re-skilling, are you also helping them learn these important skills? >> No, I think, I have a 10-year-old son, so as I think about what his future would look like, I definitely feel that the relevance of IQ, as a race is reducing, and empathy to the point that Inder made and your EQ is far more important. And we live in this world where the virtual world is almost taking over the physical world. We're on that cusp, right? Somewhere. >> You're talking John's language there. (laughs) >> You can take a guess on who's ahead and who's losing. So it becomes very important not only to build a sense of empathy in the real world but also a sense of empathy in the virtual world, in the way you communicate with customers, in the way you listen to customers, how you listen to customers and engage. So that is a very critical component of how we train our employees so that we're continuously staying ahead, in terms of even sensing and engaging with them. >> One of the things that brings up in conversation we had earlier with a customer, they love the efficiencies of how you guys can collapse with the hyper convergence which you've done in modern enterprise now and going to the cloud, you know, hyper-converged clouds, we get that strategy, and I think it's going to be bigger than you guys forecast in my opinion. But what that really points to is a cultural shift. And the cultural shift is, okay, I had this before, all this legacy stuff. Then it's the question of, okay, how do I get people on the right tune here? How do I organize internally? So it's not so much a technology decision. It's more of a cultural decision. And so I asked the CIO of a big consumer company who came in to transform this big conglomerate. You'd know their name if I said it. He said, when he walked in, the biggest problem that they had is they outsourced everything in the 90s to the point where in the 2000s, they were so efficient. They had the storage admin, and they had all these roles, and they were holding the gear down. They had perimeter base security; they were perfect. But they had lost their competencies during software. So as the world shifts to software, a lot of CIOs are being asked essentially to build software teams. So the new changeover combined with the new efficiencies is they have to boot up development teams, infrastructure all the way to the top of the stacks. It's challenging, so I know you guys do a lot of work there, in this area, in helping companies transform. This is a huge challenge. How do you go from being lean and nimble, operationally, to having fewer core competency in software development, automation, machine learning? There's not enough people to hire, so this seems to be a core challenge. >> Yeah, I think if I look at the core challenge, in terms of areas to focus, clearly, people focus historically on infrastructure technologies. They need to focus on two additional areas. Let me elaborate what they are. One of them is absolutely the new move towards DevOps, containerization, those kinds of newer technologies that play not in the CIO's shop but in the development side of the house. And there's clearly a focus within Nutanix on the product side and on the people side to emphasize that, and we work with customers on that. The second thing is actually a little bit related to what Asvin was saying. What we find when we engage with customers is again and again if there's an issue, it turns out nine times out of 10 it's not because of a technology. It's either because there was an operational deficiency in their processes, or there was an organizational lack of proficiency or just something financial. So, when I put customer success managers onto accounts, the biggest thing that they do is they create a customer success plan that actually focuses number one on operational practices. Do you have run books? Do you have controls? Do you have automation? Do you have monitoring? Do you have callback information? Do you have all of that so that your processes are robust? It's entirely customer centric. It's independent of technology or only mildly related. That's one. Second, do you have the organizational skills, the capabilities that these people need to have? Can you get them sandboxes or training? Can you get them certified, et cetera, et cetera? Can you move them up? And then, of course, the last thing is financial which is, can you look at it in a larger context, not just of a technology decision but of a financial decision relative to total cost of ownership, return on the investment, cloud versus private, et cetera, et cetera. >> And software seems to be the theme in all of this. >> Software, absolutely-- >> Software rules. >> Software rules. (all laugh) Well, everyone's a software company now. >> Yes. >> That's right. Especially the Cube. (laughs) Inder, Asvin, thank you both so much for coming on the Cube. This was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube. (techno music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's The Cube! Covering .NEXT conference, 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage here of Nutanix .NEXT 2018, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. We have Sherry Lautenbach who's the SVP of America Sales with Nutanix and Inder Sidhu who is the EVP of Global Customer Success, also with Nutanix. Sherry and Inder, thanks for joining us. >> Sherry: Thank you. >> Alright, so Sherry, first of all, you were up on stage this morning celebrating customers, we actually had the chance yesterday to nominate one of the, to interview one of the, nominees there and talked about what that meant to them and it was really talked about, you know, it's validation, where you know, we're trying something, we think we went out beyond what other people are doing and getting that validation back was just, they were really excited just to be nominated, so, you know, take us inside. >> Yeah, so first of all, we had hundreds of nominations, so it was super hard to choose and break it down to the finalists and then of course the winners, but for us, it was about innovation about cloud trailblazers, you know, dev ops, lots of different types of awards this year, and recognizing things that customers are doing to innovate with Nutanix. The best award we did have was Art.Heart give-back award and that, you know, it says a lot about our company that we focus on what companies are doing to better the communities they live in and the world in general, so. >> Yeah, and JetBlue is the winner there. >> Absolutely. >> Have to say, it makes me even happier to talk about, I have status with JetBlue, cause I fly to a lot of shows. >> Yeah, I can imagine Doug, they've been a great partner of ours, a great spokesperson, and they've really leveraged our technology to innovate with their company, so it's been a, it was a great morning. >> Alright, Inder, we watched Nutanix since the early days, discussion about NPS scores, and when you can't, when you come to an event like this, you can't help but feel the passion of the customers - over 5500 people here. Talk to us about what your role is, your engagement with customers, that whole customer success, and what that means. >> Yeah, customer success in my mind, Stu, is probably the single most important thing that we do at Nutanix, and the reason is because customers drive everything that the company does; it drives our employee behavior, it drives our partner behavior, it drives our product roadmaps. We're an outside-in company, fundamentally, and therefore, driving the customer success holistically, not just in terms of support after they might have an issue, but holistically, end-to-end over the entire life cycle is very very important for us. So, we're creating an organization, an investment, reporting all the way to the CEO to drive exactly that and we're very excited about that. >> Right, and I call it customer obsession, so I've been at Nutanix six months, the first day I showed up to headquarters, they gave me my laptop, and then they brought me up to the customer support area and said, "This is why we're so successful, because we are maniacally focused on ensuring our customers are being delivered value every day." And with a focus on our NPS four daily. So, for me, that was super impressive, and we don't let up on it. >> Stu: You know, Sherry, and I love some of the pieces. You were talking about innovation, talking about developers-- >> Sherry: Yes. >> We've been talking to a lot of customers about their digital transformation. It's not just, "Oh, okay, I'm re-platforming," it's more than that, talking about, what one of the customers said is, you know, "Business as IT." >> Right, no absolutely. So, digital transformation is clearly the buzzword, but it is all about what are companies doing to transform their businesses to become digital. And, Dheeraj always says, you know, "To be in that digital transformation journey is all about what you do to transform not only your IT operations, but the business." And the business drives what digital transformation does, absolutely. And it's not just creating things online or creating a presence, but its actually innovating yourself to differentiate yourself from your competition. We've seen that time and time again on what Amazon did to bookstores or what Netflix did to Blockbuster. And those types of things are the innovation that drives the change. >> Keith: So, Inder, speaking of innovation-- >> Inder: Mmhmm. >> Nutanix digitally transformed themselves into a software company. You guys made a lot of announcements, a lot of new products in the pipeline, a lot of new features available: GA as of the show. Nutanix has become a bigger company, valuation over nine billion dollars, as you get bigger, it's hard to keep that NPS score over 90. Where's the focus and how do you do it as Nutanix grows? >> You know one of the things, I think, as we become a big company in terms of size and scale, in terms of our heart and in terms of our spirit, we're very much a small company. I go tell customers, there is going to be times when we'll screw up. But you'll never find any company that's going to work harder than us to drive your success. And that's where the intent is, that's where the focus is. We're going to do whatever it takes from an holistic end-to-end customer perspective. We're assigning customer success managers to some of our largest customers so we can proactively engage with them, especially along three dimensions. We're not like a lot of other technology companies, where you just try to sell them technology, we're around three things: we want to make sure make sure that our customers can be organizationally proficient, we want to make sure they're operationally efficient and we want to make sure that they're financially accountable. All three of those dimensions have to do with stuff that's important to them. As we make them successful along those dimensions, automatically the technology starts to get adopted and they start seeing some benefits. >> So, Sherry, let's talk about that customer success manager. What are they empowered to do, like, if there's a problem, how do they make it right? >> Well that's a great question, they're empowered to do whatever it takes on behalf of the customer to ensure that one, they're deploying our technology well and they're finding great value in it. It's interesting, I've spoken to many customers at this conference and so many of them have said, you know, using Nutanix has changed my career, my career trajectory, and the business value I provide the organization, not just from an IT standpoint, but on the business side. And so for me, there's no greater compliment when our customers, they're cheering for us, they're rooting for us cause we're helping to transform what they do every day. So the customer success manager is just going to be an overlap in terms of ensuring and driving that success as we get deeper and deeper into these customers. >> And what we're going to do is we're going to start out with customer success managers more at the top of the pyramid, some of the largest accounts, but remember, we still have hundreds and hundreds of account team members from Sherry's team and others; SEs, all of whom provide an even greater leverage, and then extending all the way through our partners. So we have a high-touch model at the top with CSMs, we have a medium-touch model with SEs and account teams and insight sales reps and partners in the middle, and on the bottom of the pyramid, we've got a tech-touch model, where we're going to actually leverage our technology with self-service portals and so on with emails and webinars and training and material that can actually drive their end-to-end success, very focused on that. >> Stu: Sherry, I'm wondering if you can dig in some of the organizational pieces that Inder was talking about. From your customers as you move up the food chain with the products, what are you hearing from your various constituencies inside of companies? >> Inside of our customers? >> Stu: Inside of the customers, yes. >> Right, so, well we cover, in terms of an organizational size, we cover all different types of customers in various ways. We have dedicated account people to our largest accounts alongside with SEs of course. And we leverage our partners, though, in our channel and everything we do, so they're considered an extension of our sales force, which I think is truly valuable and really important that we ensure that they drive success with our customers. >> Anything special you're hearing when you get up to the C-Suite, pain points, that they're hearing more than you heard in the architect or admin standpoint? >> Yeah, no, they're looking for more of, you know, helping to rationalize cloud: how do I get to cloud, what's the right balance in terms of hybrid, on-prem, off-prem, and really, understanding the business value and drivers around it, not just cost efficiency. It's about transforming different areas of their business and many of the C-Suite customers that I speak to really are approaching it many different ways, dependent on what is the key pain point and business problem they're trying to solve. >> Inder: So, two things I'd say to add to Sherry's answer there is that what we see is customers wanting to engage more architecturally rather than an individual point product through a consultative process that is more around business outcomes. So it's not something necessarily new, but it's a little bit new for Nutanix, cause we've historically engaged at the technology level, and now you're finding more and more. Of the Fortune 50, we have 33. Of the Fortune 100, we have 66. So we're actually starting to get to really large customers in a big way. They want a deeper, architectural, all-in engagement, and as our portfolio starts to expand from just HCI to Flow and Beam and Xi and all of those, they're saying gosh, I mean I just literally ran into a CIO in the elevator, coming down this morning, and he said gosh, we were thinking about doing NSX but now that I came here and I heard about Flow and I heard about Xi, I think I'm going to go all-in with you guys, I'm going to put that thing on ice, and really work with you guys on this. Literally, unsolicited, in the elevator, this morning. >> Keith: That's impressive. So as we, on all those lines of growth, you guys have a huge user community: 70,000 participants, and this morning, Dr. Brennan, I'm sorry, Dr. Brené Brown talked about having difficult conversations around diversity. I want to first give you guys kudos, this is from an optics perspective been one of the most diverse technology conferences I've attended from an entertainment to the onstage presence to the keynote speakers, awesome job. As you guys are working towards having a more diverse user set, how are you helping your user community be successful along with their careers from a diversity perspective and whereas a career development perspective. >> Great question, and yes, I'm super proud of the diversity, things we're doing in the company. Just yesterday, I hosted a women's IT luncheon, so we celebrated the women around Nutanix so that was all about building a network of all of our customers: female and male, they were included too in this luncheon. And we had over 130 people, spent time, I said let's exchange business cards, let's talk about some of the challenges you face. We had one of our board members, Sue Bostrom share some very personal stories about challenges she's faced and opportunities to help advance her career, gave a great perspective on that. We also had the CEO of FlyWheel, she talked about failing fast and pivoting, and that to me was great little lessons and tidbits that we can provide our customers to say let's empower you to be even better and to build your network even more effectively. >> And if I can add to that, I think, what we're always looking for is a diversity of ideas, and those diversity of ideas is not just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have because it actually drives positive business outcomes from us when we start to represent what our community of users and what our community of customers is. And that diversity of ideas comes from people who have had a diversity of backgrounds, across a wide range of dimensions of diversity, and that's what we're really looking for. We're not necessarily solving for outcomes, we want to solve for opportunity, and make sure that everybody has that equal opportunity to engage and participate, and the more we do that, the richer we get, the more powerful we get, the more alive we become, I think, with diversity. >> Right, I mean, you think about that, you know, our traditional influencer was in the data center side, but we've found now in terms of diversity of our portfolio, the developer is going to be just as important of an influencer for Nutanix, so we're looking at it from not only our customers and who but what they do. >> Stu: Inder, I was wondering if you could get some colla rosso on the vertical side of things, we know you started early very much in the public sector phase, had a lot of strength there, so speak to how else you're growing in the vertical space. >> Inder: Yeah, one of the things we're doing is as we get into bigger and larger customers, as you know, we have 9000 customers, adding a thousand every quarter, we have about 642 after global 2000 customers and so, as we get into those, those customers want us to be able to talk to them in their language, around their issue. So I'll give you a great example, you know, recently, we hired a guy, his name is Don Mims out of Baylor Scott & White as a Customer Success Manager. Here's a guy who's done everything the Nutanix products, implemented them all through Baylor Scott & White, 7000 beds, 48 hospitals, and here's a guy who's implemented Nutanix, he's implemented AHV, he's implemented Epic. I got 40 other customers in the US alone who want to implement Epic and AHV in the healthcare sector among the provider community, and we're going to go towards those customers with that kind of verticalized expertise. Same thing around financial services, same thing around retail. I mean, when you look at retail, Walmart, Home Depot, Tractor Supply Company, Nordstrom, Target, you know, Best Buy, Kohls, we've got a wide range of customers who give us insight into their operations, and when we engage with them, when you're talking to a retailer, you're talking about dollars per square foot, you're talking about same store sales, you're talking about a flexible workforce and then you translate that into IT, which translates into a hybrid public-private flexible infrastructure. So as we have these conversations, they're very engaging, and we are starting to verticalize if you will, in terms of our overlay expertise. Sales force of course is going to be geographic first, because of the proximity that's required, but we're going to have overlay both in the services and in the sales organization that's going to be very noticeable as well. >> And we have found that there are certain geographies and areas that we can verticalize in the field, so, for example, Tennessee or in California, we can build healthcare verticals which has been very effective cause customers want us to talk in their language, understand what critical business applications they can leverage with Nutanix. So we're trying to mirror, as best we can, the vertical point of view in the field. >> Public sector of course is the first vertical that gets carved out for many companies, service providers, the second, we've already got public sector carved out, and one of the things, great kudos to Sherry and her team, you were proactive, Sherry, with Brad Rhodes in kind of carving out healthcare as a dedicated sales region in the West where people have nowhere to hide, you just live and die by the healthcare success, customer success. >> Well, and also, the familiarity on the use cases, right, cause a lot of the use cases are repeatable, so it just makes a lot of sense for us to bring teams together that can go to market that way. >> Keith: So, let's talk about the speed of Nutanix. I love the story, the impromptu meeting, CIO in an elevator, you guys are wowing me with the technologies in ways I never thought of. Let's talk about the other end of it. Where are customers pushing you, saying, "You know what, you guys need to move faster." You have one customer that's on NSX, you have a bunch that are looking way past that. >> Sherry: Right, no that's a great question, and the great thing about Nutanix is we really don't say no a lot, I mean, we've got to be very thoughtful in what we sign up for, but we will innovate and collaborate with customers in every instance. So what is it that you need, you need a support on a platform? We'll give you the right timeframe to do it, but yeah, we're going to do what we can to deliver on that, so, there is a lot that's coming at us from a speed standpoint with our customers and the demands that they have but I think that's a testament to the adoption and the delight that they have of using Nutanix and wanting to expand that in their enterprise. >> Inder: And I think, to some extent, Keith, I think your question is more about where are we perhaps falling short a little bit, and I'll tell you one area where perhaps we could do better, which is for support of a wider array of platforms. So for example, when we go to Asia Pacific, a lot of our customers are telling us, gosh you got support for Dell or Lenovo or IBM, etc., but what about other platforms that are local, Hitachi or Fujitsu or Inspira or Avia, etc.? So we're going to get very disciplined and structured around it, we don't want to over commit and let anybody down, because extending support to multiple platforms is not trivial, but we want to make sure that when we commit, we say what we'll do and we do what we say. And that's a guarantee that we'd like to provide to our customers. >> Stu: Inder and Sherry, I want to give you both an opportunity: just final takeaways you want your customers to know about Nutanix as they leave the show this year. >> Well, we'd love for more customers to come onboard, one thing I've seen with our customers that are here is that they love our technology, they're delighted. We've helped change jobs and careers with many of our customers and for me that's a huge privilege. >> I'd just say that customer success is the single most important thing for us, for our customers, we might make a mistake every once in a while, but you will never find anybody who works harder on your behalf. We've got the energy, we've got the fire in the belly, we've got the agility, and we're going to do everything that it takes to make you successful, no matter what. Period, end of story. So we're all in, we hope you can be all in with us as well. >> Alright, Inder and Sherry, obviously the passion is here from you, from your customers and the team. Thanks so much for joining us today. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more coverage here coming from Nutanix.NEXT, New Orleans, 2018. Thanks for watching The Cube. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm here with Keith Townsend and I'm Stu Miniman. Happy to have on the program first-time guest Joe Zarb, who's with SAP Labs. He's the Vice President of Global Technology Partners. And welcome back to the Cube, long-time guest, Venugopal Pai, Vice President of Customer Success with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Great to be here, Stu, great to be here, Keith. >> All right, so Venugopal, our audience has seen him a few times. Joe, let's start, your role and inside SAP Labs what your organization does. >> Sure, happy to do that. So Joe Zarb, I head up our global technology partners within our global business development and ecosystems team. Basically helping our customers to respond to their needs and their wants for solutions that span not only SAP, but their whole digital transformation agenda. So we do that with the partners, and we do it with global service providers, we do it with software technology partners, and hardware technology partners. >> And Pai, we talked to Inder earlier today about customer success, but from an application standpoint, tell us why you're here. >> Of course, no thank you, Stu, thank you, Keith. Very good to be here again. So the reason that I'm here with Joe from SAP is we've had a long-standing relationship with SAP. Spanning almost four years. And the reason it's important is as Nutanix becomes the platform that customers start to depend on for the infrastructure, the key elements of what value we provide the customer is to mitigate a lot of the complexity that comes from infrastructure and allow them to focus on the business value of the application. And the predominant application as you start to global enterprises, large customers, SAP tends to be the lifeblood of that company. And the business value of how they drive value. So our partnership with SAP is to really make sure that as we start looking at transforming the data center and moving them to a digital platform that makes it very easy to consume, the ability for transcending the value to an SAP application, making sure that customers have that trust of, if I run SAP on Nutanix, the trust of availability, performance, capability, all the things that they need enterprise vendors to stand up to, we wanted to make sure that our journey with SAP started up early. Our journey with SAP in making sure they understand the concept of hyper-convergence and the impact of what it does for them has been a very fulfilling one and has been a journey that will continue on for a long ways to come. So that's why we're here. >> So, Joe, let's talk about digital transformation and the drivers. You know SAP, rich set of data is, I've heard it called a cash register of the world. So many transactions go through that. With that said, it's also one of those areas that we say, oh thoust dare not touch SAP. It is the system of record. However, it's a rich, rich area for digital transformation. The go fast, break things, part of the IT team, wants access to SAP, they want to get the data from there, they want to update transactions. Talk about that conflicting role that SAP has of, we're steady, rock solid versus go fast and break stuff. >> Right, so that's a great question. And what we're facing at SAP are demands that are coming from our customers around what people term as bimodal IT. They got to run their business, but they also have to innovate. So a big part of our strategy going forward is centered around HANA as you know, which is our real-time database, and it's a translytics database, right? So you could do transactions in it, you could also do analytics with the database within the same data set. So it provides a very powerful platform so that you could do your transactional operations and the analytics in a way where you could innovate. So that bimodal IT, and the relationship with Nutanix and the other hyper-convergent infrastructure players that we work with is really to focus on driving down the total cost of ownership in those operational areas, get to market quicker with those, and free up a technical center of excellence and functional center of excellence resources so that they can help the enterprise innovate. We have an entire platform that's dedicated just to innovation. It's our SAP Leonardo platform with our SAP Cloud platform, with Nutanix, and other hyper-converged players, and our transactional system. So that whole digital transformation really needs to take into account, hey, you got to protect the base, you got to run those core applications, but you can't take your eye off of innovation 'cause digital transformation's all about innovations. Business model reinvention as well as business process reinvention. So I think that's a big part of what we're focused on. >> So talk about Nutanix's role. How do you help customers with that goal of saying, the things that we do before are critically important, you need to keep doin' 'em, we need to do it cheaper, we need to do it faster, and we need to do it more reliably while we look to innovation. >> Absolutely. And I think that's a great story in terms of what Joe talked about in terms of SAP's lead into making sure that the ship is steady as it goes while making sure that the innovation engine is not forgotten, right? Where we start seeing is that the amalgamation between the two saying, I've got the traditional applications running as is, but I got to embrace innovation. And if we look at what Nutanix has done, and continues to do as you saw in some of the announcements at this event, is bringing the innovation in, but making sure that that innovation is brought with the respect of applications running in the data center, and still giving the customer the flexibility of hey, I want to embrace Cloud. I want to embrace the concept of what Cloud means to me, not just taking my data and moving it into the public Cloud, but giving me the way to get the Cloud-like heuristics, the Cloud-like management, Cloud-like flexibility, Cloud-like agility, the consumption of Cloud DevOps capabilities, so the combination of what we delivered in infrastructure layer, become where hardware to software, and tie it to what SAP is doing to drive that innovation from an application level is a very good partnership conversation to have, is hey, how do we now blend this software base in terms of what we're doing in the data center, and tie that to the innovation that SAP's driving at the application level, and together that's when true innovation for customers starts bringing to light. Because they focus the applications, we got the infrastructure, but this partnership then brings the two together. >> So, Pai, let's put some meat on the bone. It takes nine months, 12 months, to deploy SAP infrastructure period. Nutanix rack and stack, I can get a whole cluster up in less than an hour. However, there's still that SAP layer that basis layer that has to be laid out. How are you helping customers get more agile in that so that they wow the business? >> Absolutely. And just to put things in context, our SAP partner who has been around for four years, right? We've been SAP certified for 2 1/2 years, right? Both for SAP NetWeaver running on VMware hypervisors, and then as of a year and a half ago, running on our AHV hypervisor. So we're bringing that hypervisor innovation into the SAP world. Right, so that's one side. When you start looking at our software stack that start disseminating the focus on why things take so long for deploying an application is because the application layer is complex and the infrastructure layer is complex. So what we're doing is with the 40 to 50 customers you already have running on SAP is what we bring is if we can reduce the complexity of the infrastructure layer, the speed to value of deploying an application becomes much, much faster. So that's why customers are gravitating to Nutanix is because the infrastructure complexity has been eliminated as hey, it takes me six months to spin up a infrastructure that's meet variety of where they apply the amount of VM, which server, which storage, and you figure we're networking, and then I spin up the application. When we bring in Nutanix, the ability for us to disaggregate all that layered complexity that comes into play, speeds up the deployment of the application, therefore better time to value for customers saying, hey, I got to spin up the application a few months. I can't wait for nine months because the infrastructure's slowing me down. We start eliminating that complexity. >> Joe, one of the more interesting things to watch in the industry is the change in how customers are purchasing. Especially from software. The days of everything fully shrink-wrapped are long behind us. It's the subscription economy now. Nutanix is going along that journey from buying to software to fully subscription model. Can you touch on what you're seeing in maybe either you or Pai'll connect how that comes together with Nutanix. >> Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. So what we are seeing, and this is implemented in our strategy and our go-to market approach, is really that we live in a hybrid world. And I thought that that was a wonderful quote that I heard here at the conference or driven home in the keynote. So we do. We live in a hybrid world. SAP's strategy recognizes that. That's what our customers want. So we work very closely with Cloud partners like Microsoft Azure and Google, and of course Amazon and others. And of course we have an on-premise suite of solutions. So when we start to look at these business models, it's oftentimes about right-sizing the business model for the workload and the need of that particular customer sometimes for a particular industry. Now where Nutanix comes into play in this hyper-converged infrastructure is, there's some really difficult things that need to get done to make this world a reality. Right if you're going to move workloads and have them run in the Cloud, you might have them run at the edge if it's an IoT solution leveraging our Leonardo platform you might have them running in the core or you might have it running in a branch office. Every time you start adding those layers, you're adding complexity, you're adding cost, and you're adding a requirement for skills. So when we can work with close partners to downgrade the skills, downgrade some of the number of people you might need, create simplicity and create an environment where really it's a Nutanix statement but where our customers have that freedom to move their workload to the right environment to take advantage of it. Those are the partners who we want to work with. >> So SAP Labs, you can't get out of a Labs conversation without talking, well no we can't get out of a SAP Labs conversation without talking mobile and Fiori and all of the great stuff that's happening on just taking advantage of the deep data. Data's the biggest accessor, and mobile and giving that data to mobile, let's talk a little bit about the itch. What's the story between Nutanix, SAP, when it comes to stuff that CIOs care about today and that's Fiori. >> Yeah, so a great question. So if we look at Satyam presented yesterday in terms of our direction around IoT and looking at the edge as a very critical component of the entire operating system, enterprise called operating system model. One of the key things that we are spending a lot of time on is understanding the use cases for verticals and understanding okay when you look at a specific vertical, let's say it's oil and gas, or energy, or manufacturing, right? All of those verticals have a unique perspective on what IoT means to them. So IoT is a good buzzword and a good catchword, but when it comes to use cases and verticals, there's a very specific nomenclature on what they mean by IoT for them, right? So spending a lot of steam and Nutanix making a lot of time in deciphering what IoT means for customers, defining what use cases mean for that vertical and then working with SAP in determining okay, what does Leonardo mean for them because Leonardo is again, is a platform. Within the verticals, we're working with SAP and okay within the Leonardo platform, within the vertical, how do we define what our value prop within the IoT landscape is when it comes to the edge? And so you can see more coming from us, but we truly understand the importance of data like you said, and the creation of data at the edge, and the importance of analyzing the data, maybe in the Cloud. And that transformation of where the edge of data's created and where it needs to be analyzed, that journey is very complex. And if we can make that journey simple, then SAP customers win, SAP application, deployment wins, and we're able to therefore mitigate some of the complexity that comes with making that journey simple. >> You know I might add to that is again, what Pai said is spot on, but if you look at it from a manufacturing point of view, moving to the edge, customers are confronted with the reality of the networking complexity and they're either going to take the processing and move it to the problem or bring the problem to the processing. And so to do that takes hard work. And servers, and so there's a whole new genre of high-performance gateways and hardware that's emerging on the market from players like Fujitsu and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Dell, what have you. And you end up having a plethora of these devices at every well head, on every AMI, AMR meter-reading infrastructure in the utility system or in every single plant floor. So how do you take that level of innovation that's happening now at the plant floor and make it part, not only of your operational system, but of your IT and your data center so you could manage it with all the ilities that IT people do. And I think Nutanix and SAP are working to solve that problem. And our Leonardo platform is what we have to drive that edge and with Nutanix it's a very manageable environment. >> Great well, Joe and Pai, really appreciate the update on where you are today, where some of the direction are, we're going to the future. Getting towards the end of two days of live coverage here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching the Cube. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris, Moe Abdulla is here. He's the vice president of Cloud Garage and Solution Architecture Hybrid Cloud for IBM and Tim Davis is here, Data Analytics and Cloud Architecture Group and Services Center of Excellence IBM. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Thanks for having us. >> Moe, Garage, Cloud Garage, I'm picturing drills and wrenches, what's the story with Garage? Bring that home for us. >> (laughs) I wish it was that type of a garage. My bill would go down for sure. No, the garage is playing on the theme of the start-up, the idea of how do you bring new ideas and innovate on them, but for the enterprises. So what two people can do with pizza and innovate, how do you bring that to a larger concept. That's what The Garage is really about. >> Alright and Tim, talk about your role. >> Yeah, I lead the data and analytics field team and so we're really focused on helping companies do digital transformation and really drive digital and analytics, data, into their businesses to get better business value, accelerate time to value. >> Awesome, so we're going to get into it. You guys both have written books. We're going to get into the Field Guide and we're going to get into the Cloud Adoption Playbook, but Peter I want you to jump in here because I know you got to run, so get your questions in and then I'll take over. >> Sure I think so obvious question number one is, one of the biggest challenges we've had in analytics over the past couple of years is we had to get really good at the infrastructure and really good at the software and really good at this and really good at that and there were a lot of pilot failures because if you succeeded at one you might not have succeeded at the other. The Garage sounds like it's time to value based. Is that the right way to think about this? And what are you guys together doing to drive time to value, facilitate adoption, and get to the changes, the outcomes that the business really wants? >> So Tim you want to start? >> Yeah I can start because Moe leads the overall Garage and within the Garage we have something called the Data First Methodology where we're really driving a direct engagement with the clients where we help them develop a data strategy because most clients when they do digital transformation or really go after data, they're taking kind of a legacy approach. They're building these big monolithic data warehouses, they're doing big master data management programs and what we're really trying to do is change the paradigm and so we connect with the Data First Methodology through the Garage to get to a data strategy that's connected to the business outcome because it's what data and analytics do you need to successfully achieve what you're trying to do as a business. A lot of this is digital transformation which means you're not only changing what you're doing from a data warehouse to a data lake, but you're also accelerating the data because now we have to get into the time domain of a customer, or your customer where they may be consuming things digitally and so they're at a website, they're moving into a bank branch, they go into a social media site, maybe they're being contacted by a fintech. You've got to retain an maintain a digital relationship and that's the key. >> And The Garage itself is really playing on the same core value of it's not the big beating the small anymore, it's the fast beating the slow and so when you think of the fast beating the slow, how do you achieve fast? You really do that by three ways. So The Garage says the first way to achieve fast is to break down the problem into smaller chunks, also known as MVPs or minimum viable product. So you take a very complex problem that people are talking and over-talking and over engineering, and you really bring it down to something that has a client value, user-centered. So bring the discipline from the business side, the operation side, the developers, and we mush them together to center that. That's one way to do fast. The second way-- >> By the way, I did, worked with a client. They started calling it minimum viable outcomes. >> Yes, minimum viable outcomes means what product and there's a lot of types of these minimum viable to achieve, we're talking about four weeks, six weeks, and so on and so forth. The story of American Airlines was taking all of their kiosk systems for example and really changing them both in terms of the types of services they can deliver, so now you can recheck your flights, et cetera, within six week periods and you really, that's fast, and doing it in one terminal and then moving to others. The second way you do fast is by understanding that the change is not just technology. The change is culture, process, and so on. So when you come to The Garage, it's not like the mechanic style garage where you are sitting in the waiting room and the mechanic is fixing your car. Not at all. You really have some sort of mechanical skills and you're in there with me. That's called pair programming. That's called test-driven, these types of techniques and methodologies are proven in the industry. So Tim will sit right next to me and we'll code together. By the time Tim goes back to his company, he's now an expert on how to do it. So fast is achieving the cultural transformation as well as this minimum viable aspect. >> Hands on, and you guys are actually learning from each in that experience, aren't you? >> Absolutely. >> Oh yeah. >> And then sharing, yeah. >> I would also say I would think that there's one more thing for both of you guys and that is increasingly as business acknowledges that data is an asset unlike traditional systems approaches where we built a siloed application, this server, that database manager, this data model, that application and then we do some integration at some point in time, when you start with this garage approach, data-centric approach, figure out how that works, now you have an asset that can be reused in a lot of new and interesting ways. Does that also factor into this from a speed aspect? >> Yeah it does. And this is a key part. We have something called data science experience now and we're really driving pilots through The Garage, through the data first method to get that rapid engagement and the goal is to do sprints, to do 12 to 20 week kind of sprints where we actually produce a business outcome that you show to the business and then you put it into production and we're actually developing algorithms and other things as we go that are part of the analytic result and that's kind of the key and behind that, you know the analytic result is really the, kind of the icing on the cake and the business value where you connect, but there's a whole foundation underneath that of data and that's why we do a data topology and the data topology has kind of replaced the data lake, replaces all that modeling because now we can have a data topology that spans on premise, private cloud, and public cloud and we can drive an integrated strategy with the governance program over that to actually support the data analytics that you're trying to drive and that's how we get at that. >> But that topology's got to tie back to the attributes of the data, right? Not the infrastructure that's associated with it. >> It does and the idea of the topology is you may have an existing warehouse. That becomes a zone in the topology, so we aren't really ripping and replacing, we're augmenting, you know, so we may augment an on premise warehouse that may sit in a relational database technology with a Hadoop environment that we can spin up in the cloud very rapidly and then the data science applications and so we can have a discovery zone as well as the traditional structured reporting and the level of data quality can be mixed. You may do analytic discovery against raw data versus where you have highly processed data where we have extreme data quality for regulatory reporting. >> Compared to a god box where everything goes through some pipe into that box. >> And you put in on later. >> Yes. >> Well and this is the, when Hadoop came out, right, people thought they were going to dump all their data into Hadoop and something beautiful was going to happen right? And what happened is everybody created a lot of data swamps out there. >> Something really ugly happened. >> Right, right, it's just a pile of data. >> Well they ended up with a cheaper data warehouse. >> But it's not because that data warehouse was structured, it has-- >> Dave: Yeah and data quality. >> All the data modeling, but all that stuff took massive amounts of time. When you just dump it into a Hadoop environment you have no structure, you have to discover the structures so we're really doing all the things we used to do with data warehousing only we're doing it in incremental, agile, faster method where you can also get access to the data all the way through it. >> Yeah that makes sense. >> You know it's not like we will serve new wine before its time, you know you can. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> You know, now you can eat the grapes, you can drink the wine as it's fermenting, and you can-- >> No wrong or right, just throw it in and figure it out. >> There's an image that Tim chose that the idea of a data lake is this organized library with books, but the reality is a library with all the books dumped in the middle and go find the book that you want. >> Peter: And no Dewey Decimal. >> And, exactly. And if you want to pick on the idea that you had earlier, when you look at that type of a solution, the squad structure is changing. To solve that particular problem you no longer just have your data people on one side. You have a data person, you have the business person that's trying to distill it, you have the developer, you have the operator, so the concept of DevOps to try and synchronize between these two players is now really evolved and this is the first time you're hearing it, right at The Cube. It's the Biz Data DevOps. That's the new way we actually start to tell this. >> Dave: Explain that, explain that to us. >> Very simple. It starts with business requirements. So the business reflects the user and the consumer and they come with not just generics, they come with very specific requirements that then automatically and immediately says what are the most valuable data sources I need either from my enterprise or externally? Because the minute I understand those requirements and the persistence of those requirements, I'm now shaping the way the solution has to be implemented. Data first, not data as an afterthought. That's why we call it the data first method. The developers then, when they're building the cloud infrastructure, they really understand the type of resilience, the type of compliance, the type of meshing that you need to do and they're doing it from the outside. And because of the fact that they're dealing with data, the operation people automatically understand that they have to deal with the right to recovery and so on and so forth. So now we're having this. >> Makes sense. You're not throwing it over the wall. >> Exactly. >> That's where the DevOps piece comes in. >> And you're also understanding the velocity of data, through the enterprise as well as the gaps that you have as an enterprise because you're, when you go into a digital world you have to accumulate a lot more data and then you have to be able to match that and you have to be able to do identity resolution to get to a customer to understand all the dimensions of it. >> Well in the digital world, data is the core, so and it's interesting what you were saying Moe about essentially the line of business identifying the data sources because they're the ones who know how data affects monetization. >> Yes. >> Inder Paul Mendari, when he took over as IBM Chief Data Officer, said you must from partnerships with the line of business in order to understand how to monetize, how data contributes to the monetization and your DevOps metaphor is very important because everybody is sort of on the same page is the idea right? >> That's right. >> And there's a transformation here because we're working very close with Inder Paul's team and the emergence of a Chief Data Officer in many enterprises and we actually kind of had a program that we still have going from last year which is kind of the Chief Data Officer success program where you can help get at this because the classic IT structure has kind of started to fail because it's not data oriented, it's technology oriented, so by getting to a data oriented organization and having a elevated Chief Data Officer, you can get aligned with the line of business, really get your hands on the data and we prescribe the data topology, which is actually the back cover of that book, shows an example of one, because that's the new center of the universe. The technologies can change, this data can live on premise or in the cloud, but the topology should only change when your business changes-- (drowned out) >> This is hugely important so I want to pick up on something Ginny Rometti was talking about yesterday was incumbent disruptors. And when I heard that I'm like, come on no way. You know, instant skeptic. >> Tim: And that's what, that's what it is. >> Right and so then I started-- >> Moe: Wait, wait, discover. >> To think about it and you guys, what you're describing is how you take somebody, a company, who's been organized around human expertise and other physical assets for years, decades, maybe hundreds of years and transform them into a data oriented company-- >> Tim: Exactly. >> Where data is the core asset and human expertise is surrounding that data and learn to say look, it's not an, most data's in silos. You're busting down those silos. >> Exactly. >> And giving the prescription to do that. >> Exactly, yeah exactly. >> I think that's what Tim actually said this very, you heard us use the word re-prescriptive. You heard us use the word methodology, data first method or The Garage method and what we're really starting to see is these patterns from enterprises. You know, what works for a startup does not necessarily translate easily for an enterprise. You have to make it work in the context of the existing baggage, the existing processes, the existing culture. >> Customer expectations. >> Expectations, the scale, all of those type dimensions. So this particular notion of a prescription is we're taking the experiences from Hertz, Marriott, American Airlines, RVs, all of these clients that really have made that leap and got the value and essentially started to put it in the simple framework, seven elements to those frameworks, and that's in the adoption, yeah. >> You're talking this, right? >> Yeah. >> So we got two documents here, the Cloud Adoption Playbook, which Moe you authored, co-authored. >> Moe: With Tim's help. >> Tim as well and then this Field Guide, the IBM Data and Analytic Strategy Field Guide that Tim you also contributed to this right? >> Yeah, I wrote some of it yeah. >> Which augments the book, so I'll give you the description of it too. >> Well I love the hybrid cloud data topology in the back. >> That's an example of a topology on the back. >> So that's kind of cool. But go ahead, let's talk about these. >> So if you look at the cover of that book and piece of art, very well drawn. That's right. You will see that there are seven elements. You start to see architecture, you start to see culture and organization, you start to see methodology, you start to see all of these different components. >> Dave: Governance, management, security, emerging tech. >> That's right, that really are important in any type of transformation. And then when you look at the data piece, that's a way of taking that data and applying all of these dimensions, so when a client comes forward and says, "Look, I'm having a data challenge "in the sense of how do I transform access, "how do I share data, how to I monetize?," we start to take them through all of these dimensions and what we've been able to do is to go back to our starting comment, accelerate the transformation, sorry. >> And the real engagement that we're getting pulled into now in many cases and getting pulled right up the executive chains at these companies is data strategy because this is kind of the core, you've got to, so many companies have a business strategy, very good business strategies, but then you ask for their data strategy, they show you some kind of block diagram architecture or they show you a bunch of servers and the data center. You know, that's not a strategy. The data strategy really gets at the sources and consumption, velocity of data, and gaps in the data that you need to achieve your business outcome. And so by developing a data strategy, this opens up the patterns and the things that we talk to. So now we look at data security, we look at data management, we look at governance, we look at all the aspects of it to actually lay this out. And another thought here, the other transformation is in data warehousing, we've been doing this for the past, some of us longer than others, 20 or 30 years, right? And our whole thing then was we're going to align the silos by dumping all the data into this big data warehouse. That is really not the path to go because these things became like giant dinosaurs, big monolithic difficult to change. The data lake concept is you leave the data where it is and you establish a governance and management process over top of it and then you augment it with things like cloud, like Hadoop, like other things where we can rapidly spin up and we're taking advantage of things like object stores and advanced infrastructures and this is really where Moe and I connect with our IBM Club private platforms, with our data capabilities, because we can now put together managed solutions for some of these major enterprises and even show them the road map and that's really that road map. >> It's critical in that transformation. Last word, Moe. >> Yeah, so to me I think the exciting thing about this year, versus when we spoke last year, is the maturity curve. You asked me this last year, you said, "Moe where are we on the maturity curve of adoption?" And I think the fact that we're talking today about data strategies and so on is a reflection of how people have matured. >> Making progress. >> Earlier on, they really start to think about experimenting with ideas. We're now starting to see them access detailed deep information about approaches and methodologies to do it and the key word for us this year was not about experimentation or trial, it's about acceleration. >> Exactly. >> Because they've proven it in that garage fashion in small places, now I want to do it in the American Airlines scale, I want to do it at the global scale. >> Exactly. >> And I want, so acceleration is the key theme of what we're trying to do here. >> What a change from 15, 20 years ago when the deep data warehouse was the single version of the truth. It was like snake swallowing a basketball. >> Tim: Yeah exactly, that's a good analogy. >> And you had a handful of people who actually knew how to get in there and you had this huge asynchronous process to get insights out. Now you guys have a very important, in a year you've made a ton of progress, yea >> It's democratization of data. Everyone should, yeah. >> So guys, really exciting, I love the enthusiasm. Congratulations. A lot more work to do, a lot more companies to affect, so we'll be watching. Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you very much. >> And make sure you read our book. (Tim laughs) >> Yeah definitely, read these books. >> They'll be a quiz after. >> Cloud Adoption Playbook and IBM Data and Analytic Strategy Field Guide. Where can you get these? I presume on your website? >> On Amazon, you can get these on Amazon. >> Oh you get them on Amazon, great. Okay, good. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Alright, thank you. >> Keep it right there everybody, this is The Cube. We're live from IBM Think 2018 and we'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)