>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE! Covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost, Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, Ben Gibson, who's the Chief Marketing Officer at Nutanix. Ben, nice to have you on your third time now on theCUBE. Couple more, you got one of those VIP badges on our website. (Ben laughs) >> It's getting to be a really good habit. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks for having me here. >> Well, thank you. And You and Keith share something in common. This is the first time you've been to a .NEXT conference. >> Indeed. >> So, I've had the pleasure of actually being at every single one of the US and Europeans. Haven't done the .NEXT On Tours. But give us your impression so far as to, you're heavily involved, but of the show. >> You know, I have to say it's lived up to all my expectations and more. I talked about this, this morning. The first .NEXT back in 2015. You were there, it was in Miami. We had a little over 800 people. Today, we had 5,500 registered to be here. And it's a thrill to see that many of our best customers and partners come together. And for me too being new to this company, I've been here almost six months now. It really brings home the level of energy, and loyalty in excitement that we've engendered within our customer base. It's palpable. And what better way to experience that live than here in New Orleans? >> Yeah, as we say, a lot of shows like this, there sometimes it's like well, I've got all the true believers here. But, you know, there's good customers here. They're poking, they're prodding, they're trying. But they are big fans of the product. Any kind of key things, interactions, you've had so far? >> Yeah, I've had a lot of conversations with customers here. And I am picking up on some common themes. One of them is moving more and more of tier-one applications onto Nutanix. And that's very exciting for us. You know, in our early days, it was all about VDI and that was the sweet spot workload. And now, we're starting to see more and more Oracle and SAP, and other major tier-one applications, being deployed over Nutanix. And customers are excited to do that because we've made things so much radically simple for them in terms of the infrastructure that is being run upon, (laughs), so to speak right? And so that's certainly a key theme that we're hearing. >> Yeah, one of the things that I took out of your opening at the keynote is that we talk about how much change there is in the industry, but in some ways it's a challenge, but another way it's really an opportunity for customers to go through their transformations, change their businesses, and prove their careers. What's Nutanix's positioning? >> Yeah, first of all, my first and Nutanix's first position on this is .NEXT. We see as a place where IT professionals can come, they can learn, they can share, get certified; but also help them position themselves for all this change that's happening in the industry. Public cloud, right? If you're managing and building infrastructure or you're renting it. And we think there's a really interesting opportunity for those who have built, to become those who have advise and lead. As everything moves to be a more hybrid cloud scenario out there. And so, I think that's the opportunity that we have and this show is about how do we empower our attendees to go back out and be that strategic counselor. To build the right type of data center the way they've always wanted to do. And, be that broker almost, between different clouds. And that's a lot about, what you heard Sunil talk about today. >> So Ben, one of the things that I've heard consistently from customers over the past couple of days: Nutanix, humble. Nutanix, not entitled. You're the chief storyteller at Nutanix. How did you get that message out, without eliminating the core of that message? I mean, that's great to hear when I'm here at the show. But how do you expand that message out to the greater audience and future customers? >> That's a great question. It's something I think about every day and every night (chuckles). And for us, you know, we talk about our core values, about being hungry, humble, and honest. And I really think we live up to that. I think, how do we get out that persona of who we are as a company out to the broader marketplace? We have a lot of great early adoptive customers. And now as we move and as hyperconvergence and everything we're doing moves more into mainstream with candidly more conservative customers that may not be ready to try the brand new, then we do have to get that story out there more. So one big way we do it, just this week we've launched our new brand campaign around freedom: Freedom to build. Freedom to run the applications where you want to run them. Freedom to choose the right cloud platform that suit your needs. And so, a big thing we're doing this week is we're rolling out this campaign. And who better to unveil that to you first, than our best and brightest and most loyal customers here at .NEXT? >> Yeah, expand on that, that freedom campaign. It definitely, it struck me when I landed in the airport, here in New Orleans. And I believe it's: "Build, run, cloud, invent, and play." >> Ben: Yeah. >> Some of those themes, I've heard in the past. I remember the first .NEXT conference, it was, "Nutanix gave me my weekends back." And then, you know went a little bit, "Nutanix enabled me to go to "that security project that I couldn't do before." So, why the freedom brand? what have you heard from customers that resonated with that? >> We chose to go down this path, because we wanted to make sure we connected, everything that's wonderful about Nutanix. And, I'm going to brag about my marketing team. What I inherited here is an amazing marketing team. And, we've all recognized that what this team has built in terms of the voice of the company, in terms of the story that we created. A category how, maybe not quite so humbly, say we created with hyperconvergence. We want to connect the past to the present and into the future. And so, yes, give us your weekends back. That's something in common, we have heard from customers. Freedom to play is about building all for that. Freedom to build, is about building on the early success we've had. Now it's freedom to run, Freedom to cloud. As we've moved into multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud management automation and control. These are new elements to our portfolio. So these are new storylines that we need to open up. So, the way I like to think about it, this campaign is connecting everything that's been great about Nutanix to today and then also taking us into a new direction. >> So, Nuich talked earlier about the importance of being able to just go to that website, download Nutanix CE version, kick the tires; A promise Angelo Luciani, who runs the community program-- >> They did a wonderful job. >> Wonderful program, tie that together to their freedom program. How important is your community program? Which gave some big numbers today on stage. How important is that in helping customers discover Nutanix and move their careers in help digital transformation? >> Keith I'm glad you brought this up. Our next community, yeah, so the number I gave today was close to 70,000 active members. And we've drawn almost 20,000 to all of our .NEXT conferences over the past year. The online community to me is fundamental to how we continue to grow and deepen the connection and affinity we have with our customers. And what you going to see us do is really bet on driving more curriculum that's easy to consume, that helps our community members expand their knowledge base in the areas like multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud management. We introduced Nutanix Era today bringing new database services to the floor starting with copy data management. That community needs to be step number one for where our best customers go and learn more about the roadmap. Learn about best tips in trades to be able to embrace this new capabilities and then weed down into the fabric of they are doing with their data center builds. So community, I'm a big believer in it. We are lucky enough to have a vibrant and strong community already. So, now it's like how do we add more to that experience. This place, is kind of like coming to Mecca, it's like coming to-- (laughing) For us, right? It's coming to the event to have a touchstone. But then for the other 51 weeks to the year, that's what NEXT community is all about. >> Yeah, Ben, what type of roles are you trying to reach with your message? We've talked traditionally. We're talking kind of the infrastructure, getting out of the silos, going to the architect, But then we have a product like Beam which doesn't even. It started in the public clouds and working there. Who are you trying to reach with your freedom messaging and as you expand the portfolio to SaaS and beyond. >> You know it's interesting. Our business is diversifying and the audience and the personas that we have reach is definitely diversifying. So, obviously we have great affinity with servers, store admins, infrastructure managers. We are increasingly engaging up the IT stacks so to speak. Application owners and developers, is a significant audience for us. In fact yesterday for the first time in .NEXT, we had our inaugural Hackathon. And we had lot of folks that come from DevOps practices, within their organization, and this is a huge growth area within enterprises, and they came yesterday, they sat down, they had six hours, we fed them cookies, we gave them drink. All sorts of drink, and they came up with some really cool new apps where they developed to our APIs. And that's just one representation of a new audience and building that bridge between whose building an architect in the infrastructure And who's developing these new apps, which by the way need to get to market immediately. Which is why you need such radically simplified infrastructure to make that happen. App developers move up the stack. Before I came here to join you, I was with a room full of CIOs, and we talked a lot about some of the business pressures they're feeling. We talked a lot about governance and cloud. So there's a lot of new topics there, that under the freedom campaign, we talk about freedom to cloud. But then the meat underneath that is really around some of these topics we covered earlier today. >> So, still we've been at other infrastructure shows that have tried to do DevOps and Hackathons and they haven't been successful or they've been successful for a limited amount, you guys actually, quote unquote, sold out the space. What is the message that's resonating with that crowd that's bringing them to a DevOps Hackathon at what is essentially still, an infrastructure-focused audience? >> You know, the way I'll answer that question, one of my favorite early stories since I've joined Nutanix; major retail or customer. The infrastructure team without telling the app dev folks, moved some of their early apps onto Nutanix and didn't tell them. All the sudden, they started getting all these phone calls, and it's like, "what did you do?" "My apps are performing beautifully. "Oh, my Gosh it's so simple." Then they provided them with the portal that we offer through our software, So they could see how everything is moving. Are the SLAs there? Are these Apps humming? And they said, "what did you do?" "Well, we moved it onto Nutanix." And so then all of a sudden this new audience for us started saying we want the Nutanix. (Keith laughs) Which I think is a brilliant tagline, I love it. >> Keith: The Nutanix. We're trying to capture that spirit. So to me it's about. In the past there's been a lot of frustration, candidly, between these app developers who are under extreme pressure to get their new app to market. Customer facing, business facing, or what have you. And it's been so slow to get it done and so then often a crazy CMO of an organization, may work around IT and go throw something out in the public cloud. Well that could still be the model, but with the tools and HCI as a simplified infrastructure. Now there's a big answer, hey, we can move, we can sprint at your speed. And I think that's the key message. And so we're starting to attract that self-fulfilling prophecy to help make that possible. >> All right so, Ben, you are talking about your teams built a really impressive show here. Got the Hackathon as a new thing, one of the things I noticed here in the Expo Hall, there's now a whole area with some of the channel providers. There's always been channel providers here but they've got booths and speaking gigs. What other aspects for those people that didn't attend, in person here would you want to call out, give a little bit of color to what's happening? >> Yeah, Stu thanks for pointing out channel partners. This year over 1,200 representatives from Nutanix's channel are here. And Lou Attanasio, my esteemed colleague and global head of sales, and Rodney Foreman, our head of channels, they are both with me very focused on how do we go bigger and deeper with our channel community. If you think about it, we've moved to a software choice strategy. You can consume Nutanix on our own appliance, you can consume it on our OEM, great OEM partner Dell, but we also have ways that you consume our software with Cisco infrastructure, with HPE servers and the like. Channels is a wonderful way for us to be able to gage and find that new elasticity, candidly, in the market where they have customer relationships we may not have yet, but we have to invest in that, we have to invest in technical enablement, we have to invest in co-marketing with them, and I'd say we've done some on this front in the past. The time is now for us to really go deeper on that front. And that one's a big message we delivered during our partner exchange event just yesterday here in beautiful New Orleans. >> All right, so Ben do we have to wait to the closing keynote till we know where Nutanix .NEXT US is next year? >> Yes, you cannot get it out of me. The announcement will come tomorrow end of day. >> Camera's will lie for their all asking. >> No, I'm not going to betray any body language or anything, but we're looking forward to seeing you there next year. >> All right, well, Ben Gibson, pleasure to catch up with you again. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)