>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage. We had Michael Dell on this morning. We had Pat Gelsinger on this afternoon. And happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Keith Moran, who's the vice president with Nutanix. Keith, I've talked to you lots about theCUBE, you've watched theCUBE, first time on theCUBE. Thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a great show. >> Alright, so let's set the stage here. We're here in Vegas. It's my ninth year doing VMworld. How many of these have you done? >> So this is my fourth. >> Yeah? How's the energy of the show? The expo hall's hopping. You guys have a nice booth. What are you hearing from the customers here? >> I think that we're seeing just a lot of discussion around where the market's going with hybrid cloud. I think that it's a massive opportunity. I think people are trying to connect the dots on where it's going in the next five years. The vibe's extremely strong right now. >> I've met you at some of the Nutanix shows in the past and seen you at some of these, but tell us a little bit about your role, how long you've been there, where you came from before. >> I run the Central US for Nutanix, and I spent a long time in the converged, whether it was that app at EMC, through a few start-ups, and then I've been at Nutanix for four years. It's been a great ride, seeing how the market's adopting to hyperconverged. The core problem and vision that Dheeraj saw nine years ago is playing out. He's five chess moves ahead of everyone. I think there's, again, a massive opportunity as we move forward. >> Keith, I love your to share. I love people in the field. You're talking to customers every day. You hear their mindset. I think back over the last 15 years in my career, and when Blade Server first came out, or when we started building converged solutions. It was like, "Oh, wait." Getting the organization together, sorting out the budgets. There were so many hurdles because this was the way we did things, and this is the way we're organized, and this is the way the budgets go. I think we've worked through a number of those, but I'd love to hear from you where we are with most customers, how many of them are on board, and doing more things, modernizing, and making changes, and being more flexible. >> Yeah, so I think you're spot on in the sense that the silos was the enemy in the sense that people were doing business as usual and that there was process, and they didn't want to take risks. But I think that the wave of disruption has been so strong and that we're in this period of mass extinction where customers, They don't have a choice anymore. That they have to protect against the competitive threat or exploit opportunity, and I think that the speed and the agility with hyperconverged is, And what the market disruption is forcing them to make those changes and forcing them to innovate. At the end of the day, that's their core revenue stream is how they experiment, how they innovate. Again, you're seeing the disruptions coming so fast that people are changing to survive. >> Yeah, we have some interesting paradoxes in the industry. We're talking about things like hyperconverged, yet really what we're trying to do is build distributed architectures. >> Correct. >> We're talking about, "Oh, well I want simplicity, and I want to get rid of the silos, but now I've got multicloud environment where I've got lots of different SaaS pieces, I've got multiple public clouds, I often have multiple vendors in my public cloud, and I've like recreated silos and certifications and expertise." How do customers deal with that? How do you help, and your team help to educate and get them up so that hopefully the new modern era is a little bit better than what they were dealing with? >> Yeah, and I think that's part of where the opportunity is. I think that the private cloud people don't do public well, and I don't think that the public cloud vendors do private well. So that's why the opportunity's so big. And I think for us, we're going to continue to harden the IaaS stack of what we built, and then our vision is how do we build a control plane for the next generation. If you look at our acquisition strategy, and where we're putting in it, how do you have a single operating system that spans the user experience from the public to private, making an exact replica. Again, I think customers are struggling with this problem and that as apps scale up, and scale down, and the demand for them, that they want this ability to course correct and be able to move VMs and containers in a very seamless fashion from one app to the next and adjust for the business market conditions. >> Yeah, I had a comment actually by one of my guests this week. We now have pervasive multicloud. We spent a few years sorting out who are the public clouds going to be. And there's still moves and changes, but we know there's a handful of the real big guys, then there's the next tier of all of the server providers, and the software players, like Nutanix. Look, you're not trying to become a competitor at Amazon or Google. You're partners. I see Nutanix at those shows. So maybe explain what's the long-term strategy. How does Nutanix, as you've been talking about enterprise cloud for a number of years, but what's that long-term vision as to how Nutanix plays in this ecosystem? >> Yeah. So for us I think part of it is our own cloud, which is Xi, and it's living in this multicloud world where our customer can do DRs of service with that single operating system, moving it from a Nutanix on-prem solution, moving it to a Nutanix cloud, moving it to Azure, moving it up to TCP, or moving it to AWS. And they have to do with it with thought because clearly there are so many interdependencies with these apps. There's governance, there's laws of the land, there's physics. There's so many things that are going to make this a complex equation for customers. But again, they're demanding, and that's forcing the issue where customers have to make these decisions. >> Keith, I want to hear, when you talk to your customers, where are they with their cloud strategy? I heard a one conference, 85% of customers have a cloud strategy, and I kind of put tongue in cheek. I said, "Well 15% of the people got to figure something out, and the other 85, when you talk to them next quarter, the strategy probably has changed quite a bit." Because things are changing fast, and you need to be agile and be able to change and adjust with what's going on. So where do your customers, I'm sure it's a big spectrum but? >> It is. The interesting thing for me for cloud is on average, we're seeing that the utilization rate, specifically in AWS, is somewhere in the 25% rate for reserved entrance, which was very surprising to me because the whole point of cloud is to test it, to deploy it, and to scale up, and if you're running in an environment where the utilization rate that the economics aren't working. So I think that people are starting to look at, alright, what are the economics behind the app? Does it make sense in the cloud? Does it make sense on-prem? Again, what are the interdependencies of it? The classic problems they're having are still around. They're spending 80% of their time just managing firmware and drivers and spending thousands of hours per quarter just troubleshooting and not impacting the business. So I think, fundamentally, that's what the customers are trying to solve is how do we get out of this business of spending all our time keeping the lights on and how do we drive innovation. And that ratio has been historically for 20 years. And I think, again, Nutanix helps drive that in the sense that we're helping customers shift that ratio and that pain. I always say, "Put your smartest people on your hardest problems," and when you've got these high-end SAN administrators spending a lot of time, they should be working on automation, orchestration, repeatable process that gives scale and again, impacts the business. >> Yeah. A line that I used at your most recent Nutanix show is talking to customers. Step one was modernize the platform, and step two, they could modernize the application. >> Absolutely. >> Speak a little bit to that because in this environment, we know the journey we went through to virtualize a lot of applications. I talked to a Nutanix customer this morning and talked about deploying Oracle, and I said, "Tell me how that was," because how many years did we spend fighting as customers? "You want to virtualize Oracle?" And Oracle would be like, "No, no, no. You have to use OVM. You have to use Oracle this. You have to use Oracle that." We've gone through that. And is it certified on Nutanix? It's good to go. It's ready to go. He's like, "It was pretty easy." And I'm like, it's so refreshing to see that. But when you talk about new modern applications and customers have this whole journey to embrace things like Agile, LMC ICD, and the like. Where does Nutanix play in this, and how are you helping? >> Yeah, so I think on the first. When you look at the classic database, so things like Sequel were automating so that you can extract it in a very simple manner. You look at the mode 2 apps like Kubernetes, we're taking a 37 page deployment guide and automating it down into three clicks because customers want the speed, they want the deployment cycles, they want the automation associated with that. And it's having a big impact in the sense that these customers are trying to figure out, "Where am I going here in the next three years?" For us, we're seeing massive workloads, whether it's Oracle, Sequel, people deploying on it. And again, there's so much pressure for people to change and constantly disrupt themselves, and that's what we're seeing. And layer that all on top of a lot of legacy apps. So we've got oil and gas customers, and big retailers, and when they show us the dependency maps of their applications, it's incredible. How complex these are, and they want simplicity and speed, and how do they get out of that business of the tangled mess. >> Yeah. Keith, I wonder if you have an example, and you might not be able to use an exact customer, but you mentioned some industries, so here's something I hear at a show like this. Alright, I understand my virtualized environment. I've deployed HCI. I really need to start extending and using public cloud. What are some first steps that you've seen customers as to how they're making that successful? What are some of those important patterns, what works, and where's good places for them to start? >> I look at it almost, when I see some of the automation deployment cycles they have of how they get a VM through the full lifecycle, and behind the scenes they have such massive complexities that it's hindering their ability to create automations. So the first layer is how do you simplify the infrastructure underneath, and it goes back to that dependency map. So again, oil and gas, that's big retailers. When they show us what their infrastructure is, they want to simplify that layer first, and then from there they can build incredible automation that gives them a multiple in the return that is much greater than what they're seeing in today's infrastructure. >> Keith, what's exciting you in the marketplace today? You get to meet with a lot of customers. Just kind of an open-ended. >> So for me, it's I've worked in a lot of big legacy companies, and I've never seen customers that have the passion towards Nutanix. And I think that it's the problems that we're solving for them, the impacts we're having on the business is driving that loyal following. But again, how fast people are either trying to exploit a competitive advantage or protect against a threat, that it's interesting to be right in this, in the epicenter of this big shift that's happening, right? Tectonic plates are shifting in that you've got a massive cloud provider like AWS. You've got a big player like VMware. What's the next generation going to look like? For me it's fascinating to see how these businesses are competing. I look at a customer. I've got a Fortune 500, The CTO's comment to me was, "I'm one app away from disruption." So they're a massive commercial real estate organization, and he's terrified of what could happen next, and he's got to stay way ahead of the curve, and I think that the innovation rate that we're bringing, the support, the infrastructure. I think it's a great place because of how we're serving what we call the underserved customer and having a big impact. >> Yeah. It's interesting. We always poke at the how much are customers just dreading that potential disruption and how much are they excited about what they can do different. You talk about working with traditional vendors in IT for the last decade or so, it's like IT and the business were kind of fighting over it. There's a line one of our hosts here, Alan Cohen, used to use. Actually, the first time I heard it was at the Nutanix show in Miami when we had it on. And he said there's this triangle, and where you want to get people is away from the no and the slow, and get them to go. Do you feel more people are fearful, or more people are excited. Is it a mix of-- >> It is. >> Those for your customers? >> And again, I think that the marketforce is really helping because people there they have to shift to stay competitive, and they're pushing every day to the level of change and how people are embracing change is much faster than it was. Because again, these disruption cycles are much faster and they're coming at customers in a totally different way that they weren't prepared for. >> Alright, Keith, final word from you is how many of theCUBE interviews have you watched in the last bunch of years? >> The content, I mean, it's off the charts. Hundreds and hundreds of hours, I would say. >> Well, hey. Really appreciate you joining us. Keith Moran, not only a long-time watcher, but now a CUBE alumni with the thousands that we've done. So pleasure to talk with ya on-camera, as well as always off-camera. >> Yeah, great stuff, Stu. >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)