>> Presenter: Live from the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2016. Brought to you by Nutanix. Now here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. Mark Templeton is here, industry legend, former CEO of Citrix. Mark, really a pleasure having you on. >> Thanks, thanks, really great to be here. >> So what are you doing these days? (laughter) >> Enjoying retirement, right, way more than I thought. But earlier today at the Nutanix NEXT Conference, Mark Leslie, the legend, icon, talked about the Ark of Life. And he had this one slide that said, "There is no finish line." And I think anyone who is blessed to have worked their career around their passion, he just captured it all in that one slide. And so there's no finish line, it's just sort of continuing the journey with maybe some new friends and colleagues. >> Right, no hammock, no umbrella drinks. >> Oh plenty of drinks-- >> But it doesn't end there. >> No, plenty of drinks as always but no hammock. >> So we heard your keynote yesterday, which is outstanding. You're spending a lot of time thinking about the future. >> Yes. >> So you've got time to do that now, what are you seeing? What's in the binoculars of Mark Templeton. >> Well, a big thing for me is people and how generations of people actually influence changes in our environment and how they drive different ages in the sense of descriptions of time. So I think for me, I was born analog, I'm a boomer, and boomers generally, born analog, but I fell in love with digital and made it my career. My children are XY geners. They were born digital mainly because of my career, but many in their generation we're actually born analog but learned digital pretty quickly. Now Millennials, they're born digital and they're not interested in how things work from a computing perspective. They want to know what can it do. And so the question is now what's next? And as I sort of talked to a lot of Millennials, talked to a lot of companies that are out there with ideas, I've concluded that we're actually at the end of the digital age because we're on digital overload. There are too many devices, there are too many apps, too much data, too many social connections. I mean, no one can handle and manage it all and the only way we can keep going in terms of leveraging technology to the benefit of humankind is for it to become invisible. And the way it becomes invisible is to take what we've accepted as analog for a long, long time, human emotion, relationships, location of people, intersections amongst people, et cetera, and start creating context out of that through digital mechanisms. So I think this next, where things are going, is away from digital, toward contextual. And it's through contextual that we can actually have a greater experience with technology underneath. And yeah, tremendous opportunities for invention, innovation, et cetera. You asked the question yesterday to the audience, who can program an assembler. I put my hand up. I don't know if I still could, but I certainly have. But your point was that everybody who's programming today is programming an assembler, it's just invisible. >> It's invisible, that's right. Every layer of extraction makes the layers below invisible. And that's one of the things I love about Nutanix because they're making cloud infrastructure, hypervisors, kind of all this componentry, invisible, allowing the focus on a common set of services that are exposed. And for a whole set of people, that's great, right? And that means you can move on to the higher layers of the stack. Same thing goes for contextuality. Contextuality will create layers of abstraction that when you enter the room, the right things happen. You don't have to think about oh, I'm using Lutron switches or I've got a nest going on here, did it move from away to home? All of that, it becomes invisible and goes away. It's just early in the cycle of getting there. >> Yeah, so what do you see that having an impact on the jobs that people are having? You talked about moving up the stack. Even in IT here and for Nutanix, it's oh wow, this is what my job's been for years and now I don't need to do that, I'm retraining, moving up the stack, those challenges. >> Well, I think history shows that every generation where there's a layer of abstraction that has lots of staying power, what it does is it takes a bunch of people and it says okay, you stay below that stack if you're a specialist and you stay deep on it. I mean, let's face it, you put Nutanix technology in place, you have to have deep specialists under that. It's just that the DevOps people don't have to know anything about how it works underneath. The business units don't have to know anything about that, and so they can take all of that stuff that's cluttering their time and mind and focus on the missions that are important to them. So it creates layers of specialization along the way, and then it pushes generalists up, up, up. And look, I mean I think the Nutanix team I think adequately talked about the notion of what do we do when we get time back, whether we're admins or whether we're CIOs or whether we're CEOs or whether we're just individuals? And I think that's where humankind seems to not have a problem in consuming that extra time, whether it's recreational or maybe more return to some of the basic values of families and relationships, or new levels of innovation and invention. I think there are a lot of things that get done with that extra time. >> If I infer from your talk yesterday, you don't like the term consumerization of IT. You used a different term. >> Yeah, I actually... Jeff with Slack made that point around consumerization of IT, and he said really, it's about humanization of IT. I think these terms serve purposes along the way, and I think that we're still in the process of consumerizing IT. It's just that the purpose of the consumerization is to humanize it. And the consumerization basically is making things, making the IT experience much more retail, right? Where people get choice, where they get self service, and IT organizations actually describe themselves in a way where they're merchandising services that benefit the business. So I don't dislike consumerization as much as I really like the idea of moving the idea forward to humanization, because that's the outcome you're looking for. >> So square or circle for me because you said something that surprised me, the end of the digital age, right? And you defended that position, but I want to ask you about something like autonomous vehicles. I was talking to my teenage daughters the other day, and one of them made the point that turning 16 is a symbol of freedom. And one of the pieces of that freedom is you get to drive a car. And so I thought you were going to say this is just the beginning of the digital age. What do you make of that in terms of the impact on society and its humanization aspect? >> Well, so the end of the digital age includes it's the end of the visibility of digital, because it's just peaked out. And so digital and technologies around digital, you're just becoming more and more and more invisible as machines do more work that humans used to do. I mean, here's a question. Why is it so hard for older people to adopt new technologies? If they're so simple and they're so great, why do they have a hard time adopting? >> Dave: Because they're complicated. >> They're complicated, right? When you're doing it over and over, you don't realize how much knowledge you're applying to something that's so simple, all right? So all I'm saying is that the test will be when a generation that's behind us can actually consume it in pretty ubiquitous ways. And so it's the boomerang kind of effect, all right? >> So Stu, you were talking a little bit about the work that we did with the guys at MIT and Brynjolfsson and McAfee of The Second Machine Age. So do you think much about, I'm sure you do, about the impact of machines? Machines have always replaced humans. They seem to be now doing it at a cognitive level. What are your thoughts and the state of education in this country in particular? >> Well, I mean there are two ways to answer that, half-full, half-empty. I'm an optimist, and I think that these kinds of things I'm talking about actually will serve to make education more personalized by individual. When I look at the things like Khan Academy, right, and the impact the Khan Academy has made in public school systems, and you squint at it so that you only see the shapes and forms, here's what it's done. It's allowed the teachers to focus on the students by exception and where they need help as opposed to mass kind of education, an entire classroom. That's been one of the big effects of Sal Kahn's work. So I'm optimistic about machines, contextuality, and the intersection of all of that when it comes to education. Because I think the more context a teacher has around a student, what's going on at home, what's happening in other classes, extracurricular activities or lack thereof gives them a better ability to actually teach them, and gives them a better ability to learn if the systems are set up to make that connection. >> And we're optimists too. I mean, I think the observation is that the industry has marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades, and that's what's driven innovation. And it's not driving innovation anymore, it's the combination of technologies. We think that creativity, teaching, I don't know if you could teach creativity, I guess you can-- >> Yes you can. >> Why can't you, right? That seems to be the new frontier of education, in our view anyways. That make sense to you? >> It makes total sense. By the way, you travel the world and you characterize various educational methodologies and priorities around the world. I mean, a lot of people throw rocks at the educational system in the U.S. It's actually a system that promotes creativity more than any other educational system in the world, okay? You go to certain countries in Asia and they promote knowledge and knowing facts and being able to state facts and correlate fact, all right? And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that, it's just that you're not driving a creative sort of process, you aren't teaching creativity. So yes, I'm optimistic about where we're headed in the sense of how this age of contextuality can actually propel us forward as a nation around education. >> And that's, Stu, why I hear so much criticism about teaching the test. You got little young kids and you hear a lot of that backlash. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. Mark, I want to go back. You talked a lot about kind of generations and journeys. When we look in the IT space, the pace of change is just faster than ever. What advice do you give to, how do you get, by now, by the time you're relevant, you're almost irrelevant soon after. So how do you plan for that? >> So first of all, I think you always have to start with an opinion about the future that you believe in so strongly that you're willing to make bets, okay? And some of the bets, there are low-risk bets, there are high-risk bets. Mark Leslie talked about transformation, et cetera, today, and that's really about having an opinion about the future and making a bet. And he gave some great case studies. But if you look at those case studies, you ask the CEOs, the leaders there, they didn't think they were high risk because they thought the greater risk was not betting, right? And it's because of their opinion of the future. So I think you have to start there. Too many, my observation, opinion, is too many people read too many books, too much of the net and form their opinions based upon what they read as opposed to forming an opinion on their own through some amount of introspection and experience, okay? And I think that, I'll give you an example. I remember, it was probably 1999. I was newly CEO of Citrix and I had a whole faction of our dev team saying, Mark it's all about WAP. (host chuckles) I was like, what do you mean it's all about WAP? It's like, it's all about WAP. I said, what's WAP? Well, it's the wireless, I can't remember what it stood for, something protocol. Access protocol. (crosstalk) So okay, I said fine, all right. Let's meet on that like next week. Okay, fine. So over the weekend, I go somewhere and I bought a WAP phone, a Nokia WAP phone that supported WAP. So I get on there over the weekend and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, fine. I go to the meeting next week, sit down, and the whole team comes, it's all about WAP, here's why. I said okay, let me start with a question. Can everyone showed me their WAP phones? No one had one. And I pulled mine out and I said hey, let me give you a demo. So yeah, you form an opinion about something and then you can, and so I said we're not spending one nickel on WAP, right? Right. So I think that's the number one advice I would give. Because then when you have a belief and an opinion about the future, you feel they're low risk for the right reasons. >> I want to ask you as a CEO, a former CEO of a public company, you heard Mark Leslie talk about, today, the short-term focus. A lot of people talk about that. Ever since I've been in the business, people talk about, particularly US companies, short-term focus, Wall Street, now you're seeing activist investors. Maybe it's gone to a new level. I presume you agree, but it's worked. United States is dominant, and they've always had the short-term focus. Have we gone beyond a point though of rationality? >> Well, I think this is a semantical problem. So I think I probably don't agree with Mark, all right? And along the way, when people said public CEO, go with the PE guys, do that. Well, why would I do that? Well, because you don't have the short-term focus like the quarterly thing. I was like, are you kidding me? (host chuckles) You don't know PE guys, first of all. Secondly, I disagree because you're measured as a public company against the expectations that you set. So if you set the wrong expectations and miss them, then you're in trouble. If you set the right expectations, whether those expectations are financial, strategic, operational, and you exceed them, there's no problem with it. And our system is successful because there's a quarterly rhythm to measuring the path of companies that are public. And so there's no law out there that says every time you measure, it has to be something prescribed. It is prescribed, it's prescribed by the CEO and board-- >> Dave: And the expectations that get set. >> And the expectations that get set. So I was CEO of Citrix for many, many years. And when I retired, it was my 70th earnings report, all right? And I figured, I figured 70 years in jail is enough. I applied for parole a few times and it was denied. But seriously, the idea of a quarterly report against the expectations you set is not a bad thing. >> Yeah, Michael Dell talks about the 90-day shot clock, but I bet you he has a 90-day shot clock internally. >> Sure. I mean, absolutely. >> I don't know if this is the case, but it seems to me that some of the companies that I observed today, that are successful, in particular, Nutanix, I would put service now in that category, Tableau, Splunk, they seem to be highly transparent, maybe more transparent than I'm used to. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention before. Have you observed that? Do you think it's just a function of their success and their size, allows them to be more transparent than-- >> I think that... I think that's a big change that's taken place. So more newly public companies like Splunk, for example, have to be more transparent around the core metrics they use to measure success. So if you look at some of the, like Adobe, hugely successful transformation story. They did it through obviously the right strategic mechanisms to move to a different business model, but they had to create a level of transparency to get there in order to successfully make that transformation. Companies like Splunk started there, all right? And so that is the standard for a more of a subscription cloud-based SAS-oriented type business model. And investors reward that, I think. And so therefore, it's confirms, it's like positive strokes to transparency, which I'm all for. >> I wish we had more time to talk about things like culture. There's so many different different topics, but we'll leave it at what's next for you, what are you spending your time on, any fun projects that you're working on? >> Yeah, I'm spending all my time on technologies that increase contextuality. So for example, one of them is a web psychographics company. So when you surf the web now, their web analytics really does more demographical kinds of things, right? But the science of psychographics actually takes a lot of that and actually figures out what's the why, your behavior, what's in your head. So I think that's a context that's important to add, again, to make the technology more invisible. Spending time on autonomic security, security that actually not only dynamically sees attacks and discontinuities, it fixes them and then tells you later, okay? Spending time on something really exciting called human location analytics, which basically is technology that can passively track human motion, and very precisely, so that as people occupy various spaces and have paths and interactions, systems around it can respond. So like in a retail environment, maybe if you're spending a lot of time at an N cap, somebody will come and help you. And if you combine some of these things, the psychographics and the human location, you'll get the right kind of help and so forth. And that all becomes invisible and we just have a great experience. >> Combining innovations, right, taking advantage of this invisible digital matrix. >> Yeah. And the thing that I'm really psyched about, and most people that have known me for some time know that I have a particular weakness for things that have round rubber tires, okay? So deeply involved in a company, an e-bike company that is called Vintage Electric Bikes. It's an e-bike you love and you want to ride because of the joy that it gives you, all right? So yeah, so things that... Greater context, so technology can be invisible, and things that bring out emotional kinds of pleasure and joy. That's where I'm spending my time. By the way, it's fun, which is the first bar I have. Number two, great people, the second bar, all right? And then the third bar is I think they actually, these things are important for a better world and creating opportunity for people, et cetera. And I like doing that. >> Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE and delighting our audiences. It was really a pleasure having you. You look great, you sound great, congratulations. >> Mark: Thanks, thanks. Having a great time, thank you very much-- >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE. We'll be right back. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live! From Anahiem, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next, here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Potti, he is the chief product and development officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Glad to be here. >> So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage there was many many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? >> Yeah, I mean (inaudible) so in fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always teases me that all I do is essentially change the timeline but the same slideshow is up. But you know, something about vision being consistent and we sort of have broken that up into two major phases, the first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to being an experience. What do I mean by that? Essentially, everyone knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon, or Google, or (inaudible) and ultimately, our belief has been that if we do an honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively But bring cloud to the customers rather than having the customers go to a destination, Then they can essentially get maybe 60 or 70 percent of that experience but maybe at a tenth of the price or a tenth of the time. And most human beings as you guys know, is that once you get 60 or 70 percent, You're happy and you move on other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion solves one of clouds biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift, gets in the way, that I've gotta change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've gotta lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do but, like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60 % then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix looking at public cloud as more of a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste amazon outside the more they want amazon inside. And so, so, that's really the first act of the company. A series of products that allow us to build out a full blown IA stack but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one take operations. So, that's the first act. And the second act which is much more a longer term bet for the next decade or so is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to replatform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps and when they redesign their apps Do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud? Or do you want to do it in something that can moves across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. >> John Furrier: So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core business is humming along, solid, but the growth is gonna come from essentials which is the enterprise in multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product officer, you have the keys to the kingdom, it's all on you. >> It's in my guide to work out. >> So you're a team. But this is a big pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about a software company as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software things start to be different so as you start thinking about the act two the convergence of clouds. That really is a key part of it, what you did for the data center, HCI, >> Yeah, totally. >> You're doing HCI for the cloud. >> Yeah, like what does that actually mean? >> So explain that concept. >> No, it's a great question. So, and some of this, obviously, we are struggling through ourselves. But we are not afraid of making mistakes in this transition as you've seen other the last year, we've gone from being in the plans company to a software that runs on third party to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds. All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go but to your point I think, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said "Look I'm gonna release office, "on Mac or Ipad before I even do it on Windows," that kind of thinking has to permeate and pretty much, in my opinion, every technology will end up going forward. A good example of that is look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they built on Nutanix on premise but their idea was look they don't wanna be in the data center business tomorrow without changing the apps they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric because they provide a bunch of other services as well as data centers. So, a recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS not on AWS for a reason is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance only company. >> What does this mean for your customers and your partners because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements, very successfully off the tee, in the middle of the fair way as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend, others taking a different approach, you know that is, owning it all. >> Yeah yeah, in fact I would say that look, in some way, internally we joke about ourselves, as we have to prove the... You know, we always used to think about ourselves as a smart phone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center. But we had to prove that model by owning the full stack like Apple did, but over a period of time, to democratization happens, by distribution. And so in some ways, we have to become more of an android like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and the security of an apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where, We're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspur, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want an experience. And now the lastest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentailly super micro like appliance goodness one click from away upgrades, support, everything. But with a HPE backed platform, that both companies can benefit from. >> You know, one of the big complaints from customers, I hear, on theCUBE, and also privately is there's so many tools, and management software, I've got management plane for this, I got this over here, >> For sure... >> So there's kinda this toolshed mentality of, you know, a new hire, learn this tool for that software, people don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So, how do you see that, how do you address that with going forward, this act two, as you continue to build the products what's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? >> I mean, think it's no different than I think how we sort of launched the company in the first place which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyper-convergence has done, it just we're doing this not just for infrastructure but for clouds because when you use Nutanix you throw away old computer, you throw away old storage, you throw away old (inaudible) I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together ten tools into this magical fabric, I mean it doesn't work that way. But that's hard, because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner is ready to do that they've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey we're on, it's a right of passage for us, we have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. >> So you mentioned Steve Jobs, he also said, when he was alive, in an interview, on the lost interviews on Netflix, I watched that recently. He said, also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies, and change the game, much more significantly then managing a process improvement which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60s, 80% changeover with software. This is part of your strategy, how do you guys see Nutanix in the future, with the software lead or approach, changing the game for IT? >> I think clearly, software is fundamental, I mean the whole point of us, our product was I think, we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere, by the way. It doesn't run in air, it runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but, most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software which is essentially also, when you go back to the Apple thing, because a lot of software renders out that too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than just going to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next 5 years. >> Rebecca Knight: I want to ask you about innovation and your process because here you are, you're the Chief product officer at this very creative company, I wanna know, what sparks you're creativity, where do you get your ideas? Of course you're gonna say, "I talk to customers, "and I find out their problems", but where do you go for inspiration? >> Yeah, I think it's an age old problem I'll give you my personal answer, I don't think it's representative of everyone in the company obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix each of us have their own point of view and things, right? We have this term of "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos". Right? To some extent. That has been done well at other companies like Google, and so forth. So, I've always believed in a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others. More than talk. Whether it's listening to customers, listening to partners, listening to other employees with other ideas and have a curated way to do that because if you only listen to customers you build faster horses not carts, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's the what I would call a generic theme and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from signal from the noise by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen that's the first thing I would say. The second thing which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the... The first one applies to maybe 1% The second one, probably applies to .001% which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth the ability to see around corners and anticipate, you know, my old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton who was the CEO for Citrix, used to always ask this question "Do you know why Michelin has three stars? "The first star is for food, obviously, "there has to be good food. "The second star is for service. "The third star, not many people know why it's for" According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, I haven't really eaten in too many Michelin three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? So to me, that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. Is that second dimension of intuition. More so than even, listening to customers. >> It's seeing around those corners, and knowing which way the winds are blowing. >> Totally. >> One of the other things that we're talking about a lot about, here on theCUBE, particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix...we had Dheeraj on this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down, how would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? >> So I think, we... I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, a couple things that you'll see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder, or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from 0 to ninety, right? And the folks that continuously learn, stay. If they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders. So, continuous learning, if it can be applied, to the generic company becomes an amplifying effect now. People can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things, that otherwise they aren't born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix I think, inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension, which I think, everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, you know those four words sort of capture the, a sense of, the playful, authenticity. But I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And, we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think is easy to say, but very hard to do. >> John Furrier: You learn through your mistakes as they say, learn through failure. So, you mention intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi cloud on premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition, of course we keep on, at the first private cloud reports dominion and team, they got that right. The waves are coming and they look different. There's gonna be more integration we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are gonna come in to the landscape of the tech industry? >> Yeah, I mean I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and have something left over, I will say one thing though, is I think the gain in multi cloud is going to move up the stack, okay? That's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought. Is whose going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because, Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks, some of them are Sass stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest Sass companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. >> How about the Edge? What does the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant, you've got power, you've got connectivity expanding, Wifi 6 around the corner, we've seen that. 5g, okay, I buy it. But as it really starts to figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. What's your intuition tell you? >> Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in, I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but, my intuition tells me, the more things change, the more they'll remain the same, in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smart phone. You know, its got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, talks to services in the back end, I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that make sense. >> John Furrier: Yeah, exactly. Then data, big part of it. Big part of your strategy, the data piece, >> Of course, of course, yeah. I mean I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think in the next 5, 10 years. >> John Furrier: Awesome. What's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees, what's some of the trending conversation? >> I don't know, this conversations pretty interesting! (laughs) >> Of course! >> Rebecca Knight: We agree! (Laughs) >> My intuition is telling me this is a good conversation! Hope it comes out good! >> Keep using that word man. >> I love it! >> Anyway, always great to be with you guys. >> Sunil, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> And we're back, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest Christian Pedersen, who's the CEO and founder of Zentura, a service provider based in Denmark. Christian, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so tell us a little bit about what led you to create the company, a little bit about your background, and then we'll get into it. >> My background is from Citrix, I'm a Citrix consultant, back from the ages of the wind frame and all the old stuff, and in 2006 I founded Zentura with a focus on Citrix consulting services and all the stuff around Citrix, and quite fast, we saw the trend in the market to become a service provider so we started up with some of our on prem customers and moved them into a traditional hosting virtualization platform. >> So did you start as hosting? Were there certain Citrix services that you were offering to your customers? Walk us through that kind of progression. >> Our product is something we call Business Cloud. It's a brand of the Citrix platform, and it's a full service platform for our customers. So everything is around Citrix. The connectivity to our platform is Citrix based, yeah. >> Okay, and how big, do you have multiple data centers? How many customers do you have? Give us some of the speeds and feeds. >> We have two data centers and we have roughly 3,000 people connecting into our site on some customers. We're mainly focusing on legal and accounting customers, with special demands for 24/7, yeah. >> Okay, and all of your customers are in Denmark, correct? >> All of our customers are in Denmark. Some of them have branch offices in the U.K., and in Germany, and one in Russia. >> Okay, so why don't you bring us up to speed as to, when did you start looking at Nutanix, what lead you kind of down that path? I'd like to understand a little bit about kind of, the problem statement, the criteria, what lead to that? >> The beginning, as we were Citrix house, then of course we started with SAN server that made really good sense for us because it was a Citrix product. And quite fast, it became really complex. And, the development of our platform was quite fragmented over the years. So we really needed to, I've seen Nutanix at Synergy from the beginning, and I saw on the keynote where Mark Templeton roll in a block of Nutanix. So just doing VDI and I said okay this is VDI and what really was, a huge game-changer for me was when Nutanix introduced AHV because I really liked many of the concepts about putting the whole stack into the cloth so you don't have, you don't rely on external management. You don't rely on that many components. You don't have sequel as a back end. We were evaluating a lot of stuff, a lot of products, how we could simplify our current environment. Because, we had huge issues. >> Yeah so you're Citrix client, were you running Zen before, what was your environment before? >> Our existing environment was a mix. We had eight clusters, some of them on Zen, different versions, because the upgrade part was a pain. It required a lot of downtime, and we only security patched on critical patches. We didn't do major release upgrades because we had so many issues with it. And some years before we introduced Nutanix. We switched to, half of our stack to VMware, because that solved some of our issues. They have a good way of handling and migrating data inside their own platform. But quite fast, the cost became an issue for us because the cost, as a service provider, of course you just pay in bids and you pay per usage but still the cost was just going sky-high. >> Okay, so it was AHV, was that the catalyst to get you to Nutanix then? >> Christian: Exactly. >> It wasn't kind of a hyper-converged, or it definitely wasn't VDI. >> I'm quite old in this field, and I really like the idea of having a say on all things and I was not easy to convince that this was a good idea. It's like in the past when you know, when people are switching from regular computers to a SAN, everybody says, "Oh I want my data on my computer." >> Yeah, trust me, I worked on a lot of the early SAN stuff, rolled that out. >> Exactly. >> And Wikiban, we actually created the term Server SAN which was all of the functionality and things that you loved in a SAN, we're just going to do it on the server, is really what that is. >> Christian: Exactly. >> As opposed to, Nutanix started out, "Oh there's no SAN." And I'm like, No, no no, you're going to scare off all the people that used it. That was also my biggest concern, it really was. But, when Nutanix started with the VMware we did a business case on it and it wasn't feasible because we still have the VMware and licensing costs and also now we have the Nutanix licensing cost and it was not easy to create the business case because the customers, they don't care what we put underneath because they only look on cost. And, if I add something to my stack, then I only add some cost, and maybe I can do something a bit more efficient but that's it. >> Okay so have you swept the floor now, EHV everywhere? Or you know, what's up? >> Yeah, we did a full turn for replacing everything, all legacy. We did, inside our business we did a survey with all our employees, and said okay, instead of doing just a business case bit by bit, you know how you do normally, to compare licensing costs and all that. We said, okay we want everything in this business case, not only products. So all the consultants went out with the, the main issues were all the complexity because it was not easy, we had people on network, we had people on storage, so we always have to ask another one if you want to provision something and the sales guys need to go to the tech guys okay do we have enough storage for this? And what about the IOS, and yeah. There was a lot of issues with this and also working at night on all the change windows and doing all the storage, Tetris moving workloads, because customers were unsatisfied on this platform, we can move it to the new platform. We had so many issues with this. So we actually ended up just, we discussed internally and said, okay if we're going to do this then we are going to do it 100%. It's not just putting Nutanix inside and move something. So internally in the board we discussed and said, okay it's now or never, because this is going to be our window of opportunity to grow and expand. So we discussed and we agreed on a total replace. Everything, network, everything. So we switched all our existing infrastructure and migrated all the legacy workloads onto Nutanix in a four to six month time frame. And we didn't have extract of that time so it was quite manually. >> Yeah, so obviously you're here so it went okay. Take us through, what did you learn, you know, four to six months is not a short period of time, so, you know, looking back, what lessons learned, what would you recommend to your peers to make things even better if, what would you change if you had to go back? >> What I would change that I didn't do it before, because it would have made sense. Actually we had quite new equipment, we just bought a new SAN one year before that. It wasn't even old, that was an issue. But the cost of the existing, even though we had bought it, the cost was getting too high. We were using too many hours on maintaining this and-- >> The best time to do this would have been a year ago, but the second best time is to do it now. Don't push it off for another year. >> Exactly, exactly. And what, yeah, we should have done it before. But I don't think Nutanix was mature for this at the moment. But now, one year before this, I was actually convinced. >> So, AHV, there's, they think they're approaching, about a third of customers are using AHV now. >> Christian: Yeah. >> You said it's mature now, you're happy with it. What more do you want to see out of AHV, where would you like to see them continue to add features and maturity? >> Yeah, as a service provider, of course AHV has some limitations compared to all of the other stacks because the multi-tendency is a big requirement for a service provider. But we're taking it kind of from another approach to it. Because they have all the AVIs, so we can just do it ourselves. We have all the AVIs exposed, right now we're working on a billing model because in our business case it was not only IT, it was also the management and all the accounting and all the other things. If we can optimize those, the whole business case would look even better. So we're working on a model where the system automatically bills the customers and everything sends status reports to customers. So before they get an invoice they know if they want to to change something. Because our solution right now is fully managed. So it's fully managed from our side, because we have some issues with the multi-tendency stuff. >> And what management stack are you using today? Is it in-house or, you know, what are you using? >> What? >> Management stack are you using? >> In-house, yeah. >> Yeah, pretty typical for a service provider. >> It is, yeah. >> Have you looked at some of the management tools from Nutanix or? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm paying a lot of attention, I'm calm. >> Yeah. >> Because it really makes really, really, good sense for us. >> When will, what does it need for you to be able to consider it even further? >> I need to play with it, I need to try it out. I've only seen some sessions. I also saw it last year and I've been following it closely. But from a slide to getting in production, it takes some time and I really need to play with it. It looks really amazing. >> Most service providers spend the time kind of building their stacks though, going from, I've got it, to that is challenging. >> But now we're really moving and we can see how much time we use on a day-to-day basis. I think we cut the time to one-tenth of what we would do before. We had a lot of things-- >> Stu: You're saying for managing? >> Yeah for managing infrastructure and doing changes because if you have a really fragmented solution then you have a lot of people you need to involve because, he knows best about this cluster, and all the differences in this cluster. And that was also one of the biggest pains. And also the Nutanix strategy, this is, as I said to all the employees, this is the final migration we're going to do, ever. Because now, it's rip and replace. And now we can see in the past, we used the senior consultants for expanding clusters and adding new clusters and doing network, doing a lot of stuff. Right now we moved the, down in the chain, so it's the regular support guy. He can put in a note right now and he can do the expand of the cluster. We do it in a regular service window. Now it's not an extraordinary service window, nothing. >> Alright so, Christian, you're so happy with the Nutanix? You're not only a customer, you're also a channel partner? >> Exactly. >> What lead to that? What services were you already offering for there and what lead to you look to move down that path? >> We saw a lot of synergies because we could also, we could extend the enterprises, and use cases. We had Nutanix and if we could sell Nutanix to some of our customers, maybe we could do some replication and DR for our customers as a service. Now Nutanix, of course, is moving to what's the A type, but that's our idea and we already have some customers signed up for disaster recovery as a service, on our AHV platform, and that made really good sense. And also, we did a lot of work in certifying all our employees, and why don't we, we have spare time now, why don't we use our knowledge and sell this product? It makes really good sense. And what I really also like about Nutanix, is there's not a one-size-fit-all. Because everybody needs, somebody can go public and somebody go private, and we have a lot of enterprise Citrix customers, because we have a small part of our company also through Citrix consulting, because that's our background. So we have a lot of potential customers there. >> Yeah, so I've watched over the last five years, there was a real tug back and forth between VMware and their service providers. They tried to, it was, vCloud Air, you're going to be a great partner. Oh wait, we're going to do it ourselves. Wait, we're going to do partner program. Oh wait, now Amazon and a couple of big ones are there. How is Nutanix as a partner for service? You mentioned Xi, is that something they'll partner with you on or is that something they're competitive on? >> And how do you look at that? >> Definitely. >> The main difference between, if you see all the other cloud providers and you see VMware and the other providers, this is one stack, it's still the same. You're not going to have to create a lot of stuff to adopt this. It can be quite easy for us. I see it as a possibility for us to of course sell this. We can be a reseller, we can just have one account and we can provision the customers' VMs in the Cloud. It sets us in a much better position than we were before because if we team up with AHSA or some of the other public cloud providers we are not in control anymore. It's easy to deploy and it's easy to work with if you know how to do it. But it's not that easy. Yeah. >> Well Christian Pedersen, really appreciate you sharing with us everything that you're doing at Zentura and your customers. Love to hear the inside at Denmark and what's happening there. I'm Stu Miniman, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next 2017 in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music) (engine roaring)

[Announcer] - Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back in D.C., welcome to NextConf, this is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. Dheeraj Pandey is here, he's the chairman and CEO of Nutanix. Long time CUBE alum. Great to see you again. >> Pleasure. >> So you know, I love your style, up on stage yesterday. Very philosophical, always have been humble. You sort of said, "I'm going to stay humble," and it appears that's the case. But yet, there's so much excitement around here, you have a lot to be very proud of. How do you feel? >> You know, there's no finish line in this company building, just like there's no finish line when you have a family, it never ends actually. Nutanix is a family, and we are trying to make it a bigger, happier family with more customers, more partners, more employees. I feel good, but I think this company is good right now, it's not a great company. We probably will have to spend another decade to make it a great company actually, so. >> How do you, as the chairman and CEO, how do you define "great company"? >> Great companies, for one, actually take really good care of their stakeholders. You think about employees and customers and partners and also Wall Street, so I think at the end of the day we have barely begun the journey in some of these things. Customers, sure, we have quite a few of them, but I think we can do so much more for them. At some level, even in the largest accounts, we're barely scratching the surface actually. Same thing with employees, you know, we have almost 3000 employees but still, we could do so much more for them as well in terms of wealth creation, in terms of building careers. Very early days. Same thing with Wall Street as well, very early days actually. >> Dheeraj, you're always opening to listening to feedback, but you mentioned, you've now got a lot of constituencies. I know I've interviewed you and said well you know, there's the 90-day shock clock but, we can't get distracted, we need to focus. How do you, you know, what is the filter, how do you, what do you take in and internalize to translate into the direction of the company? >> You know I talk about two things. There's delight, there's waste. Delight for main street and make sure you're cognizant of the waste with Wall Street, because if you keep growing they won't bother you. What they bother you with is waste. How are you growing, what does efficiency look like at scale? So I just learn "growth at any cost". I think these are all timely reminders for any company, so that it doesn't get too painful when recessions hit you, because there's highs and lows of any company that you have to go through. So I believe that waste is the larger ego of delight, and if you can do a really good job of delighting our customers, our partners, our employees and then figure out how to deal with all of this with waste in mind, I think we'll do a pretty good job. So what matters the most is delight, but not without figuring out what's waste-like. I think you have to keep looking at these "KPIs" and say how are we really doing at scale with respect to distribution, marketing, product development, product engineering. Now we have a pretty large engineering workforce as well. How can the company be delightful for them if you don't have "two-pizza teams", if you don't have APIs and microservices in which they actually talk to each other, still feel like they're the CTO of their company, because they all want to make independent decisions and design trade-offs and things of that nature. I think we talk about this thing which is a really important abstract thing, it's called the paradox of growth. I learned this from some of these folks who have done this book called The Founder's Mentality. Growth creates complexity and complexity kills growth, so just be aware of what you really vied for can kill you as well, and continue to release complexity to organizations in the way you deal with your customers, and I think those are the things that really matter. I look at employees as customers, I look at customers as customers, I look at partners as customers. If you have the customer-centric view, you'll probably continue to simplify things under the cover. >> One of the things that you see in great companies is early on they're able to articulate a vision, see that vision, execute on it obviously and continue to grow their team, I mean that's a big part of your job. You've dramatically, well first of all, the team that you started with was quite large. Cloud expands that enormously. So maybe talk about your vision and how you're seeing that through. >> Well I think from very early on, the mission was invisible infrastructure. And that is an infinite mission because again, no finish line actually. You can make things invisible and then probably say we still aren't invisible enough and you have to make it more invisible. When you have downer to four clicks you have to say how about three and two and one click? And finally get rid of the click because machine learning can come in and automate more things as well. So how more and more things go from humans to machines and how the human-man-machine interface becomes less frictioned is the vision of this company. Now, all of this is not just graphical UI because the systems have to work, they have to be scalable, stable, reliable, available. So the back-end has to be very robust but then without a front-end it's really the same as a man-machine interface. Also the machine-machine interface, because APIs match for a lot as well, you know. If you're only thinking about man-machine, then you've lost a lot of this automation and machine learning capability as well, actually. >> I think back to some of our earliest conversations, you always talked about Nutanix is a software company and the challenge of our day is building distributed systems. The tooling and the way we build things today are very different from when you started the company. If you were starting from a bare sheet today, would you be born in the cloud, you know, how would things like containers and microservices change the way, or, and how are you taking from where you are today, which it started out in virtualization, is that a core, you've got AHV driving a lot of the pieces, versus some of those who are models? >> Yeah, I mean, look, VMware was building an operating system, but they needed a shield of EMC to go sell and distribute that. We had the compute virtualization piece that came a little bit later, but the storage virtualization, the control plane pieces, we needed to shield them, and we shield them in appliance, and that became our form factor the could give us the control of our own destiny, and that's what the appliance did to us. But you always knew you were building software, actually. And many people told us early on, just don't build appliances at all, and we would've been killed, we probably would have to sell this company early on, because it's really hard to build an OS company early on when you don't have a brand and nobody's willing to support you and customers are like, you know, if nobody else is willing to support you, how do you really build an operating system, actually? So I think if there's a method to the madness, we always knew we had to be hardware-agnostic, that's why we never built NVRAMs and FBGAs and things like that. And over time when Dell came forward and said look, you should OEM your product, I think it was a very natural decision for us two and a half, three years ago. I think there's been this controlled release of goodness of this operating system that basically not mean like oh we never thought about it, we always thought about hardware-agnosticism, hypervisor-agnosticism, all those things were there from day one in this company. But you know the question of whether we would start in the cloud today? Honestly, all companies have to start where they are in order to make money, and continue to navigate the shifting sands of time actually. I mean, you sell books, then realize it's not good enough, you go and sell, you know goods with e-commerce, and that's not good enough, you sell computing. We started an office productivity company, go and do a desktop operating system, then you go and do databases and server operating system and then all sorts of things for the family room and so on and then finally do a cloud. I think there's no, you know, change is the only constant you know, if you were to think about it, and companies that actually survive and thrive, they start someplace, and their thing, every three, four years, you just find the adjacencies, and keep navigating, you know, how the market is actually shifting and changing. >> There's a strange aura around your company. Now maybe it's the allure of the product, I don't know, but you have a lot of companies now coming into this ecosystem. We have Chad on next from Dell EMC, you know, arguably one of your larger competitors, okay, but they're here and they're happy to be here. So, it's, I say, maybe it's product, but it's also part cultural. And I'm guessing that your philosophy is it can't be a zero sum game. It's got to be a win-win for the partner, so I wonder if you could add any color to that. >> Yeah, that's a great point by the way, bring up this idea that you can be all things to all people. Somebody asked me in this analyst meetup, how about just go and build a firewall? We can, there's too deep a space in there for us to go build everything, so we need to have open APIs, where others also make money. And by the way, when you have a really flourishing ecosystem, the word of mouth, that they're also making money, the word builds a larger ecosystem, a larger operating system and so on. That's what Apple 2.0 was, because in 1.0 they were all about it's me, it's mine, no one else can do anything, and then they saw Microsoft, and how it was really building this burgeoning ecosystem with APIs, APIs, and more APIs. 90 was Microsoft's decade because of APIs actually, and partners and ecosystems, and Apple learned from them by the way, so when they came out and said we built a device, they said no no no, we've also got to build iTunes, because that's ecosystem, and then they built iCloud and app store and things like that. So I think there are lessons galore in the last 20, 25 years where if you're not a good API-driven company, you're probably not a long-lasting company actually. And the idea of a platform is incomplete without those APIs and the ecosystem itself. >> There's a change in accountant coming which is going to make you, I guess, to restate the software that you've sold through the OEMs will probably have Wall Street look at you a little bit differently. We've talked in the past before about how much you want to sell as Nutanix, how much you want to sell with partners. What's that mix that you see today going forward? How much of your product will you see, hardware, software, services, what's a good mix for you? >> Yeah, I think it's a, it's a good opportunity for the company to really think about revenue 2.0, because revenue 1.0 was what we had sort of planned out four, five years ago and 2.0 is a time when we have different form factors. We have ELAs that we started doing in the last 12 months. We're selling software in CISCO and now software in HP. Obviously Zai will happen in subscription as well. Now we have markable routes to market, you know, obviously the OEMs have actually matured, both OEMs have matured. So the question is of how do we really make it simple one more time? Because obviously there's more routes to market, so as a company we're saying now we can sell more software, and with a new accounting change, which is called ASC 606, software will have to be recognized in the same quarter, we can't defer it arbitrarily. And in some ways it's a good thing, in some ways it's bad because it takes away our goodness of the waterfall, because we could have deferred more revenue, as a company we've deferred a lot, I mean, folks know we have about $465,000,000 of deferred revenue right now, because of how good we were in actually postponing this instant gratification of cutted quarter and so on. So I think some of that will have to be brought into the current quarter but in some sense it's a good thing because we can then take the gross margin of that software and sell more appliances, so I think there's some mixing that'll happen with different margin profiles that'll have to come and kind of work with each other to say can we still grow as a company beyond a billion. >> But these are income statement gymnastics, not that you're playing, but that you're able to- >> Well, there's something about guard rails of the gross margin, because Amazon, what did Amazon say, look, your gross margin, my opportunity, right? So if you just let unbridled software go and sell itself, then our gross margins will be starting to creep up, but what if you kept it within the guard rails of around 60%, and then went and sold more appliances, because the software gave us the luxury to buy growth? I think those are the kind of architectures we are actually looking at right now. >> And the knobs that you might choose to turn, but it will have an impact on the income statement from an operating profit standpoint, I mean, right? If you're going to recognize all that deferred revenue up front you know- >> Just in subscription, we can actually do one-year terms and things like that, but obviously we don't want to completely throw the baby out of the bathwater, because a lot of subscription is a good thing, and Zai will provide subscription. Hopefully as we do this Cisco and HP on software, we can do one-year terms. >> It doesn't seem like these are distractions to you, I mean, Michael Dell always talks about the 90-day shock clock. With you, you sat down with Stu after the IPO, I was struck by your comments of "look, I'm not going to get all wound up about the stock price", you know, you're not going to obsess over it. Now it's easy not to obsess when you're growing at 60, 65% a year, but it doesn't seem like it's been a big distraction for you. >> Yeah, I think it's, just like a growing customer base can be a distraction, can be a strength, you know, because you could say, well, they're asking me not to innovate at all, and have the brute force figure out a way to have velocity and quality, because existing customers want quality, because they don't know what else you can be, like, give me a faster horse, right? And then you know from within the area we innovate that's where velocity matters. Same thing is true for Wall Street as well. Main Street wants both, Wall Street is saying look, as long as you can keep growing and grow wisely, I'm not going to touch you, actually. >> I want to ask you about your customers. We've had some great customers on. Most of the customers I've talked to that are Nutanix are what I'd call, you know, they're in the early part of the adoption, they're people that, they're taking some risks, we heard NASDAQ talk you know, forget about the fear, you've got to go forward. As you grow, how do you stop, you know, the enterprise buyer from trying to shift you, change your model? I loved that you're doing things like, you know, many companies are trying to switch to, you know, consumption models to pay as you grow, but as you try to grow that customer base, how do you pull them ahead or how do they not, you know, hold you back? >> Well I think as long as we have an authentic product, customer service, sales motion relationship they'll like us. And I think obviously there are different kind of sub-functions in the customer itself like procurement versus ID versus the business user and so on, and it's a constant hussle, there's no, again way to say that it's going to be a perfect world one day. If you can keep building great products, have great customer service, and we know that our sales motion is easy because it can, it can be a really good product and have really good customer support, but customers might hate transacting with you. I think that's the last piece that matters, and I think as computing becomes a real consumer market, that's what's happening you know with cloud, you can go and buy a computer like the way you used to buy your toothpaste or mouthwash or shampoo. I think it's becoming even more customer-centric, even more customer service-focused and so on. So I think the changing landscape of computing keeps a lot of vendors honest actually. Now, that doesn't mean that everybody will innovate, enough of them will say look, I'm done, and I think one of the things we've done well in the last five years is that the thesis of the product market fit. Like well, we know this is the product direction, this is the vision of the company, it has actually stuck. You know, people have said "I like what you guys are saying," actually. Over and over and over again, I mean, combos and acquisition, people are like "I love this". HP was one of those really audacious ideas, people said "I love this, now that I see it, I love it, when I didn't see it, I was skeptical". So I think a lot of the thesis of the company around innovation have worked in our favor. I think if we keep having that luck with ourselves, good things will happen. >> So Dheeraj, your positioning of the company has usually been a little bit ahead of the market, you know, for years it was like, ah, what, that HEI thing is a niche, and it's not really much that different, oh, enterprise cloud is nothing more than, you know, kind of vapor you know, what are the misperceptions you see today that you'd want to clarify for the market as to who Nutanix is today and where you're going? >> Well the first one is that we are a hardware company, because we are a hardware company, even though we sell a lot of software within the hardware and obviously we do a lot more software these days. And the fact that HEI's the destination, where HEIs basically was a mere milestone like five years ago or something, you know, we talk about I'd say about five years ago imagine a lot of the competition is talking about SEI today, when people are saying the compute storage form factor is interesting but not that interesting because I need to figure out how to converge clouds now, not just converge devices within my data center, I need to figure out OPEX and CAPEX, how do I meld those things, how do I burst, and things like that, you know. So the story keeps evolving because the consumers, the customers, and the competitors continue to evolve the market as well actually. So I would say that people have to look at us as an OS company, and the more they try us the more they realize why we are an OS company. They look at our networking R&D, they look at our security pieces together, storage, hypervisor, and now Zai, I think, you know, good things will happen. >> I inferred from your keynote yesterday that you're on a mission to change the operating model. Certainly Amazon has changed the operating model as we well know and it's translated into their operating profit, you know, their marginal economics as we've talked about in the past are compelling, software-like for services. As you change that operate- first of all, did I get that right? Are you on that- >> I call it a consumption model. >> Consumption model, great. So where do you see that going for customers? They're obviously taking labor costs out, how far can they take that- how much can you sort of automate in that process for your own company, taking those labor costs out to drive your margin? >> I think again, now going back to this idea of invisible infrastructure, just like it has no finish line, automation has no finish line. We used to automate 50 years ago as well. Automation as a word has existed for 200 years you know, since the industrial revolution actually. So again, there's no finish line in automation, there's no finish line for what machines can do compared to humans and I think they've constantly evolved, I mean, 200 years ago we were primarily agrarian, we would do agriculture and nothing more, and today we are doing a lot more things with our brain and I think we're becoming a more evolved species actually. So I think as machines do more, humans will also figure out a way to continue to do higher level things, so I think the best part about this company is that what we have chosen has no end to it, and the more we think we automate, the more we'll have to automate some more actually. And not just within the realm of compute, virtualization, or storage or networking or security, but also migration, portability, you know, what does it mean to really look at things on and off premise and things like that, so a lot of work is around that. Application automation is a big part of it as well. >> When I hear you say there's no finish line, it reminds me of Jeff Bezos, he says, "there is no day two, we will always be in day one". The two concerns I have, that is, number one, you can't have your employees constantly be charging, you know they run to the point where they're going to burn out and I hear Amazon is a challenging company to work for. Secondly, every customer I talk to, like, boy, they can't keep up with the six week release cycles that are coming at that, you know, remember when it used to be 18 to 24 months, you know, that was nice, we could do upgrade cycles when we want. How do you internally and with customers manage that pace of change and avoid burnout or over-complicating the environment for your customers? >> That's a great point actually, because obviously, if you don't have delighted work, it's hard. For them right now their delight, for Amazon employees, it's stock pricing. That's the only delight they have. But I look at it as a marathon of strengths. You basically have to sprint, take some rest, like after this we'll rest a little, and then say let's go and do another sprint, because NIS is another sprint, you know, and then reading all this stuff is another sprint, so I think if we can keep looking at that, and plus even do a little bit of baton-passing that'll happen, you know, I think as a company, we were all in San Jose and now some of the baton has passed to Seattle, some of the baton has passed to RDP Durham and Bangalore. We build this distributed workforce where different teams are coming in and saying "now I can run with it as well", like Bangalore could not have run with this six, seven, eight years ago, because everything was here. You know, RDP and Seattle were too small for us so I think there's critical mass emerging where the overall morale of the workforce is actually just as good as it was like five, six, seven years ago. Now, people talk about burnout a lot, but I also believe that a lot of this is choice. People who are saying "I know how to blend work and life". It's becoming hybrid, there's no such thing as work separate, life separate, it's melding into each other right now, and it's really becoming like this where people who are working smarter saying "I can figure out what that means in terms of balance". And millenials are again one of those who were born with all these things from day one. So the devices have been with them from day one, actually. They're saying "well, I can't not interact with the machine some time or the other". So I think that a lot of this is evolution for us, I mean, the eight to five way of looking at work, which is "batch processing", is now becoming multitasking and so on, so what happened to operating systems 30, 40 years ago is what's happening to humans as well actually. >> You know, we're out of time, but I wanted to share with our audience, one of the unique things about this conference is that you have advisors. A lot of people hire McKinsey and it all stays, you know, behind closed doors. Condi Rice, Robert Gates, Stephen Hadley, Deepak Malhotra, these are advisors to your company and we've met them all, many have been on theCUBE. You share with your community, your advisors, and you put them in front of your community and it's great content. I've really not seen a company be that transparent with its advisors before. Deliberate? Just sort of happens? >> It's always been like that actually, you know because the more a company learns from them, honestly, the more we've gotten out of them in turns of ROI, if you just think of it from a left wing point of view, but the right wing is that people want to build careers, not just wealth, they want to build careers, they want to actually be with folks that they can look up to you know, when the going gets tough. How do you remember somebody's words? Not just in books, but you know, in flesh and blood, you're like, wow, I talked to Condi Rice, I talked to Bob Gates, I talked to Steve Hadley, these people told me exactly what they went through, and I think there's no substitute to experience actually. To me, people like Mark Templeton and Frank Slootman, they all are great sources of energy and aspiration and ambition as well. >> Outstanding. >> No compression I've heard on experience, right Dave? >> That's right. Dheeraj, I feel calm just hanging out with you here, so thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure to see you, and thanks for having us. Alright, keep it right there everybody, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from .Next, be right back. (electronic music)