>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, Rachel Mushahwar is here, from Intel. She's the general manager and head of America's Industry Sales, and she's joined by Jason Kimrey, who's Managing Director of America's Sales at Intel. Folks, welcome to theCube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright so Rachel, let's start with you. First of all, this event, you guys are partners with Nutanix, we'll get into that in a minute, but what's Intel doing here, what's the vibe of the event, what are you talking about? >> So there's a variety of things that we're talking about, first of all, Nutanix is a fabulous partner of ours, but it's not just about the technology that Intel is supplying to Nutanix, and that's what's great about this event, is you see so many different business folks that are focused on what are the right outcomes for their businesses, and how do you start to use technology to solve business problems, and that's a big part of what Intel is helping companies do, it's all about the digital transformation, and how to keep pace with your competitors, so that you don't fall behind, or worse, fall off the Fortune 500 list, like most companies have done. >> So Jason, how's that conversation translate into the discussions you're having with customers? >> You know I think digital transformation, that topic is everywhere, and there isn't a company on the planet that isn't trying to figure out how to transform their business through digital, and at Intel there's pretty much two ways the company can transform their business, either through culture, or through technology, and we see Intel playing a key role in being that technology enabler to a digital transformation strategy, and that's a big part of our conversations and our strategy with Nutanix, is how to enable companies to be more data driven, move towards a more on demand infrastructure, be more secure, and really look at how we can help companies adopt those technologies faster. >> And frankly, how do we help them move more quickly, right? The average age of a company used to be about 60 years. The average age of a company today is less than 12 years old. Think about what that means from a digital transformation perspective, and how fast companies have to move to adapt to what consumers are expecting, and that's a big part of what we do. >> So Jason, I'm glad you mentioned data, so Rachel, you were talking about digital transformation, it's kind of a buzz word that's thrown around, but when we unpack it, it seems like it's all about the data. Becoming data driven, digital means data. We just saw Amazon buy Whole Foods, and you would never think that a retailer would get into the grocery business like that, but data allows you to sort of jump these industry value chains. So I wonder if you could talk about digital disruption and the data relevance. >> So there's a variety of digital disruptions that are happening across every industry, whether you're, you know, retail, or you're a transportation company, or you're a health and life sciences company. Data is at the heart of all of that, and figuring out how do I address what my consumers are looking for, in as close to real time as possible. How do you make those decisions just like that so that you can provide those answers back to you consumers? Amazon, is it a retailer, is it a supply chain company, it's all of... >> Content company. >> It's all of those things, and a lot of companies are taking a step back saying "Holy moly, how do we start "to transform everything all at once, "and how do we use technology "to leapfrog where are competitors are?" They don't want to be knocked off that Fortune 500 list. Who's saw >> Yeah, that... >> Yeah, go ahead. That's what's... There's just so many cool examples of where traditional mainstay companies are integrating digital, and becoming data companies almost overnight. We looked at John Deere, which is one of these old line agriculture companies that's really now a data company, they're applying analytics to help do more crop forensics and determine what the optimal time to plant. They're using IOT with the use of drones to survey fields. They're even using autonomous driving capabilities, inputting sensors in directly into the equipment to make sure that they're planting within, you know, driving large 120 foot wide pieces of equipment to one inch of accuracy. Just seeing incredible use of technology, and it's all centered around better use of data to transform their business. >> I mean John Deere comes up a lot, we hear that example. Do you feel like they're sort of a leading edge of the bell curve, or are they to the more mainstream now? I mean they're certainly a mainstream company, but I feel like they're advanced, in terms of their data, more advanced than the average bear, with their data usage, what do you think? >> What's interesting about that is between now and 2018, the board of directors from all of the major companies out there will have digital transformation as part of their agenda. Probably about 60% of all of the companies that we talk to are talking about some level of digital transformation, so it's not just John Deere. You think about all of the big brands, especially with some of the big changes that are happening from a technology perspective, whether it's autonomous driving, it's you know, the use of the smartphones, right? Apple just celebrated what, it's tenth birthday for an iPhone? This is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Just because of how fast technology is moving. >> So Jason, we've been interviewing Intel I think every show we go to, the cloud shows, server storage, you know, across the board. How did Nutanix differentiate itself, how do you partner with them? Understand of course, they've got the x86, but a lot of it's software, the hooks that Intel's been building for a long time. Bring us a little bit inside some of the sausage making. >> We've been talking about re-imagining the data center for years, and I think what's been really cool about Nutanix is they really are bringing that concept alive, and really re-imagining the data center platform. And I think what we've done is through silicon and a lot of our enabling technologies, we've always tried to provision those up for our partners to build innovation on top of, and Nutanix has done as good of a job as anyone, has really taken advantage of those capabilities, and bringing them to their customer in a way that they can consume and digest quickly, implement quickly, and really start moving fast on a data center transformation strategy, almost overnight. >> So you talked about the digital transformation, Nutanix is one of those leading indicators out there, as a strategic partner for us, of how do you help companies evolve to what they need to be to make consumer demand, and using some of those amazing data center technologies, and re-imagine what the data center looks like, that's Nutanix. >> Yeah, and Rachel, it's curious, you know, I said I've yet to find a CIO that said they have a convergence challenge or issue. Talked to lots of companies that are trying to figure out their cloud strategy, but it's more how are they transforming into being more a software company? I interviewed a large financial service company that says "We're going to be a software company that happens "to deliver these type of solutions." So what are those critical issues that your customers are talking to and how do you see Nutanix, you know, you said they're helping with the digital transformation, how do they get there? And how do they do even more? >> So there's a variety of ways that Nutanix is really transforming that whole data center industry, and a big part of it is time to market. One of the biggest roadblocks from a CIO's perspective, as you said, it's not about what they want to do, it's about how they go do it, and they start running up against a variety of roadblocks, of "Oh my gosh, that particular application stack "isn't certified on this, or this software won't work "on this hardware", and all of a sudden, a project that should take three to six months is now over a year, right? Time kills all deals, and it includes, it, you know, kills all innovation. So with the Nutanix and Intel platform, that time to delivery is shrunk so dramatically. You don't have to worry about certifying all those different types of things, and when you go to an upgrade, it's invisible. That's the way technology should be, it should just work. When you answer your phone, do you think about it not working? >> Yeah. I want to go back, you said 10 years ago was the slowest that things will ever be, if you look going forward. How do you find customers are keeping up with this? Continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous updates coming. We used to just know the tick tock of Intel, and that made upgrades a little bit easier, Now it's a software world. How do you find customers are keeping up with it, how do they try? >> So I think customers are struggling with how fast technology is moving, but one way to start to start to keep up with it is to use products like Nutanix. It takes some of the guesswork out of a variety of things in your data center. >> So how should we think about Nutanix inside of the Intel? I mean Intel is the gold standard of how to build an ecosystem. Where does Nutanix fit? How should we think about this new type of company? >> I think it starts with looking at them not as a hardware company, as much as a software company. They are truly agnostic across the platform that they deploy on. Their whole goal is to extract the applications from the hardware that it sits on, and I think really providing cloud-like capabilities for an on-prem environment so I think that's a pretty big differentiator, because they really have this software platform that runs on multiple Intel based hardware platforms, and our goal working with them is to really help proliferate that as quickly as we can because it really creates an upgrade path and a path towards transformation much quicker than was historically possible. >> So we call that, what you just described, cloud-like on prem, we call it true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the public cloud, we came up with that term because there were so many fake private clouds out there. You obviously, you see the growth, in all these markets, and the decline in many markets. You see the public cloud explode. We see this notion of mimicking the public cloud on-prem as a huge growth area. Are you seeing the same thing, can you add some color to that narrative? >> When we talk to customers, again, across multiple industries, whether it's an energy industry, it's a transportation industry, it's manufacturing, you name the industry, they're all struggling with the same thing. Yes, public cloud is exploding, but a lot of CIOs are taking a step back saying, "Hey, there's some part of my data "that I want to keep absolutely inside of my private cloud. "There's some data that I always want "to keep on prem, and there's some pieces that I want "to put out to the public cloud." So we're seeing a lot of companies kind of normalize back in that middle, where the pendulum swung so far to the right of "Hey, boom, public cloud", and now I think they're taking a step back from a privacy and security perspective saying "What's the happy medium here?" >> I think we just, public Cloud, which we love, did an incredible job of making people aware of how quickly it was possible to deploy resources or deploy VMs very quickly, in a way that was never possible before in an on-prem environment. Partners like Nutanix, and I would say Nutanix really led a lot of this, really bringing that public cloud capability to an on-prem environment. The application at rationalization and the application virtualization, a lot of those capabilities that were very simple in a cloud environment are now just as simple in an on-prem environment. That's why we see that normalization that Rachel was talking about. >> So just when we thought that this was a zero sum game, it was like public cloud versus on-prem, IOT comes in and advances in connectivity and data, it's like a tide that lifts all boats. What are you guys seeing in IOT, maybe you can make some comments there? >> Sure. So I think IOT is just beginning to catch the next wave. For a while folks have been talking about the internet of things and how it's going to help transform industries, and how you can use sensors to detect everything from soil erosion, as related to the John Deere, to "What are we doing for an average consumer "who walks down in the aisle in your favorite retail store. "How do we start to deliver them personalized messages?" So IOT is again, changing that game and moving up that sigmoid curve of change. And you go back to, look, today, right now, at this moment, is the least amount of change that you'll see, in five minutes from now, there's going to be some other big tech announcement or some big evolution, and that's the beauty of where we sit in today's world. About every hundred years we enter this big change, or this big disruption, and this one is going to be driven by compute and Intel is all about compute. >> David: Are you guys paranoid? >> Absolutely >> I think we're excited, but paranoid as well. >> Only the paranoid survive. >> That's right, that's right. >> This data explosion through IOT, it really fuels what Intel calls our virtuous cycle of growth. The more data, the more endpoints, that hit the network, the more data that creates, the more requirement for data center and data capabilities >> I totally agree, we used to say it was kind of customers that were the flywheel, and data is the potential to be the flywheel for the next ten years. >> Jason: Yeah to Rachel's point, we're excited. >> Data is the new oil. But the magic is going to be in how we refine that data. >> Yeah, I mean, I always say data is plentiful, but insights aren't, and those companies that can find those insights, and gain a competitive advantage, and as you've been pointing out, both of you, Rachel and Jason, the cycles are so fast, one insight is not enough, it's not sufficient, you have to continuously innovate, speed is the game. >> Rachel: It is the game. >> And you guys play that game well, so thanks very much for sharing your insights. Great segment. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome, alright, keep right there everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break, this is theCube, we're live from DC, and Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (techno music)