>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE. Covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and my Co-host is John Troyer. And you're watching theCUBE here in day two of our coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. And joining me is Tobi Knaup who is the co-founder and CTO of D2iQ. See what I did there, Tobi? >> That's right, I love it. >> Alright. So Tobi, first of all, KubeCon, of course D2iQ, last year when we were here it was Mesosphere, so give us a little bit, you've been to lots of customer meetings, 12,000 people in attendance, tell us a little bit about the energy and how your team's finding the show so far. >> Yeah, obviously biggest KubeCon so far and it's just amazing how far this community has come, how it's grown. How many projects are part of it now, how many vendors here, too. You know two expo halls with different booths and you know, I think it just shows how important this community, this ecosystem is. When customers come to us and say they want to work with Kubernetes the community's why they're really doing it. >> Yeah, it is a great community, great vibe for people that aren't already in it. It's easy to get started, but one of the big themes we're hearing here is simplicity, how to make it easier to get going and once they get going, what happens after day one? That's some of the rebranded pieces. So for our audience, explain a little bit, why the rebrand focus of the company, Day 2 operations, absolutely something that I hear a lot of discussion on and why is your team specifically well positioned for that environment. >> No absolutely, so the rebrand we did because obviously our old company named Mesosphere has Mesos in it. That's the open source product we started with. But we've been doing a lot more than that actually for many years, right? We help customers run Apache Kafka and Spark and Cassandra. We've been doing a lot with Kubernetes also for some time now and even more so now. So having one particular technology in the company name was holding us back, right. People just put us in that box but we're doing so much more. So that was the reason for the rebrand and so, we wanted a name that doesn't have a particular technology in it and so we're looking for what is really expressed, what we do, what we help our customers with? And we've always been focused on Day 2 operations, so everything that happens after the initial install. How do you monitor things properly, upgrade them and so on? So that's why we loved that Day 2 concept. And then the IQ really stands for a couple of things. First of all we try to put a lot of automation into our products, so make those products smart to help our customers. But more importantly too, when we look at the ecosystem as a whole, where are most customers at, where are most companies at. Well, they're still early in their cloud-native journey and they need to get up to speed, they need to get smart about cloud-native and about Day 2 operations and so that's the IQ piece. We want to help our customers become smart about this space, get educated and then learn to do cloud-native. >> So Tobi, one of the things that fascinates me about the Kubernetes ecosystem is that people bring stuff to the table. Kubernetes is here, that's evolving. Other companies, entities, projects are coming to the table with other open source concepts and solving problems that they have in the field. At D2iQ, when you were Mesosphere, you have years of experience dealing with production issues, scaling management, all these sort of really, really fascinating cloud-native problems, so you bring a lot of experience to the table. So one of the projects that you are now working on and working with your customers and partners and the bigger ecosystem on is a way of approaching operators. The concept of bringing this kind of lifecycle automation to applications and helping with all these Day 2 problems. Can you talk a little about so KUDO is the name of the framework, I guess. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you're bringing that here to sit at the table and what some people's experiences with that are and what they are using it for? >> Absolutely, yeah, so these data services, these stapler workloads like Kafka, Cassandra and Spark, that's been in our DNA for a very long time. In fact, a little known fact, Apache Spark was originally a demo application for Apache Mesos. That's how it started originally. Obviously, it took off. So, we've been doing that since even before we were a company. And we've been helping our customers on top of Mesos with running these complex data stacks and there's some equivalent of operators on top of Mesos called frameworks. So we've been building these frameworks and we realized it's a little too hard to build these things. We typically had to write thousands of lines of code, 10, 20,000 sometimes and it took too long. So what we actually did on Mesos many years ago is we extracted the common patterns from those frameworks and built it into a library and made it so you can actually build a framework with just configuration, with just YAML, so it's a language that allows you to essentially sequence your operations into phases and steps. kind of like you would write a run book that a human operator takes and then goes through, right? So when we looked at the Kubernetes Operator space, we saw some of those same challenges that we had faced years ago. Building a Kubernetes Operator requires to write a lot of code. Not every company has Go programmers, people that are skilled enough in Kubernetes that they can write an operator. And more importantly too, once you write those 10,000 lines of code or more, you also have to maintain it. You have to keep up with API changes and so, a lot of folks we talked to at KubeCon last year and to customers, said it's just too hard to build operators. The other side of that too, is folks said it's a little too hard to use those operators too because very common use cases, you build a data pipeline. That means you'll be using multiple different operators, say Kafka, Cassandra and Spark. So if those all have different APIs, that's pretty hard to manage. So we wanted to simplify that. We wanted to create an alternative way for building operators that doesn't require you to learn Go, doesn't require you to write code, it works with just this orchestration language that KUDO offers and then for the KUDO users, the API is the same across these different operators. It has a plugin for Kube Cuddle, so you can interface with all the different operators through that. So yeah, simplicity and a great developer experience are the keys here. >> Tobi, I was wondering maybe you bring us inside the personas you target with this type of solution. As we've seen the maturation of this space, first couple of years I came, it felt very infrastructure heavy. The last year or two, there's more of the AppDev discussion there. They don't always speak the same languages. Looks like you've got some tooling here to help simplify that environment and make it easier because of course your application developers don't want to worry about that stuff. That's the promise of things like serverless, or just we're going to take care of that and stats and whatnot, so where specifically do you target and what are you hearing from customers as to how they're sorting through these organizational changes? >> Yeah, so I think ultimately, everybody kind of wants a platform as a service in some way, right? If you're building an app for your business, you don't want to think about, how do I provision this database, how to do that? And obviously, I can go to a public cloud and I can use all those public cloud services but what a lot of folks are doing now is they're running on various different types of infrastructure. They're running on multiple public clouds. They're running on the Edge. We work with a lot of customers that have a need to deploy these data services, these operators in Edge locations, on the manufacturing floor in a factory, for instance. Or on a cruise ship, that's one company we're working with. So, how do you bring this API-driven deployment of these services to all these different types of locations? And so that's what we try to achieve with KUDO for the data services and then with our other products too, like Kommander, which is a multi-cluster control plane. It's about when organizations have all these different clusters. And very typically they get into the dozens or even hundreds of clusters fast. How do you then manage that? How do you apply configuration consistently across these clusters? Manage your secrets and RBAC rules and things like that? So those are all the Day 2 things that we try to help customers with. There's a little bit of a tension there sometimes, right? Because the great thing about Kubernetes is it's great for developers. It has a nice API, people love the API. People are very quick to adopt it, right? They try it out on their laptop, they setup their first cluster. That typically goes very fast and they very quickly have their first app running. So it happens organically, right? But every large organization also has a need to put the right governance in place, right? How I keep those clusters secure? How do I meet my regulatory requirements? How do I make sure I can upgrade those clusters fast, if I need to fix a security issue and so on? So there's that tension between the governance, the central IT and what the developers want to do. We try to strike a balance there with our products to give developers the agility that cloud-native promises but at the same time, give the IT folks the right controls so they can meet their requirements. >> Tobi, here at the show this year, obviously bigger and a lot more folks at different parts of their cloud-native journey. Again, with the experience you all have, as you talk to folks this year, obviously people are clearly in production. You talk about some of the governance issues, is there anything you can say about either what you think is going to make for a successful partnership with you and a successful customer? What qualities do you need to have by the time you're growing up in production and then also as they're making choices here, what should the end users be looking at? >> Right, so one of the things we realized over the years is actually cloud-native is a journey. Every organization is somewhere else on that journey. And you said partnership, I think that's the key word here. We want to partner with our customers because we realize that this stuff is complicated, right? And it's actually for us as a company, our journey has been kind of interesting because we started at this large scale spot, right? Before we were even a company, we were running these clusters with tens of thousands of notes. These large online services at Twitter and other companies, that's where we started and that's where our first product kind of landed. It's at that large scale is what we're known for but most organizations out there are much earlier in their journey to cloud-native. As so, what we realized is that we really need to partner with folks to even at the very first steps, where they're just getting educated about this space, right? What are containers? How are they different from VMs? What is this cluster management thing, right? How does this all fit together? So we try to hold our customers' hands, catch them where they are. Besides all of the software that we're building, we also offer trainings for example. And so we just try to have the conversation with the customer. Figure out what their needs are, whether that's training, whether that's services or different products. And the different products that come together in our Kubernetes product line, they're really designed to meet the customer at these different stages. There's Konway, that's our Kubernetes distribution, get your first project up and running. Then once you get a little bit more sophisticated, you probably want to do CI/CD. So we have an upcoming product for that, it's called Dispatch. Pretty excited about it. The data services with KUDO. Folks typically add that next and then very quickly you have these dozens of hundreds of clusters. Now, you need Kommander, right? So we try to fit that all together. Meet the customer where they are and I think education is a big piece of that. >> All right, Tobi, we want to give you the final word. You talked about some of the things coming out here, so just give us your viewpoint of the ecosystem broader as to what next things need to be done to help even further the journey that we're all on? >> Yeah, I think in terms of next things, there's a lot of interest around operators. Well, operators as the implementation but really what's happening is, people are running more and more different workloads on top of Kubernetes, right? And I think that's where a lot of the work is going to happen over the next year. There's some discussions in the CNCF now even. What is an operator? How do we define that? Is it something fairly broad? Is it something fairly specific? But Kubernetes is definitely the factor standard for doing cloud-native and people are putting it in a lot of different environments. They're putting it in Edge locations. So I think we need to figure out how do you have a sane sort of development workflow for these types of deployments? How do you define an application that might actually run on multiple different clusters? So I think there's going to be a lot of talk. Operators obviously, but also on the developers side, in a layer above Kubernetes, right? How can I just define my application in a way where I say maybe just run this thing at a highly available way on two different cloud providers, instead of saying specifically it needs to go here, it needs to go there? Or deploy this thing in a follow the sun model or whatever that is. So I think that's where a lot of the conversations are going to happen, is that level above. >> All right well Tobi, appreciate the updates. Congratulations on the progress and definitely look forward to catching more from you and D2iQ team in the near future. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> All right, for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, lots more to come. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (light music)