>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by two guests this segment. We have Mayur Shah. He is the Global Head, Data Center and Software Defined Everything SDx at Wipro. Thank you for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> And Thenu Kittappa, Director GSI Sales at Nutanix. Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we're talking today about fluid ITs. Wipro, of course, is an Indian multinational corporation based in Bangalore. You gave us a talk yesterday here at Nutanix .NEXT. Tell our viewers a little bit about how you view fluid IT. >> Sure. So we believe that the kind of transition the industry is going through, the pressure businesses are getting in terms of having their offering aligned to the customer expectations, they're digital natives, and so and so forth have digital transformations. They are also under tremendous pressure of innovating much faster than they used to do before. And the same pressure has been put back to the IT. How IT support that kind of changes and agility, which business would need in general. We believe that now, previously we used to have a plan for five years and a roadmap and we used to forecast what kind of architecture mission may end. But now it's time for us to give that back to business. There are a lot of uncertainties and how we can handle those uncertainties that's main reason why we are thinking little out of box in terms of getting things fluid. >> Mayur, I like that comment because part of the transition used to be I bought a product and I thought about how many years did I depreciate that product for? So I want to get your, what are you seeing and how is it impacting your customers? Nutanix talks about building experiences, so are they meeting that goal? How is that helping with both what you're doing and ultimately your end customers? >> So, what we believe is as you rightly say the end user customer's experience, business agility, and their competitiveness for customers at the prime, right? So the way we are now aligning our offerings, aligning to customer needs, changing our models of measurement from SLS to business level BLS. Those are the things which we are doing for aligning to the businesses and ensuring that they benefit in terms of many of our offering are now experience-driven. So SLS and BLS are also experience-driven, so we in our virtual desk offering, we offer the customers based on the experience problem, the penalties are assigned. So we proactively manage the end user experience without them even knowing it. So those are the few examples. >> Thenu, I have to imagine this is a big piece of your job is the traditional channel used to be how do we get beyond selling boxes, selling services, consulting and everything, but the SI is more about that whole experience. >> It's actually a whole different experience. It's been a great show for us from that perspective. We have a lot of our partners starting up, giving us the support we need from the SI community. Wipro was a sponsor, so it's been great. And to be honest, that's exactly what we're trying to do with SIs here. We're taking the solution and outcome based approach. Let's talk to the customer, what their business needs are. Let's see what kind of solutions we build to fit that. It's not just Nutanix. How does Nutanix work with HPE? How does Nutanix work with the networking, SDN? Let's give them an outcome-based solution. And let's support it with the right level of experience. So essentially, just in time to market is the goal that we're trying to achieve with partners like Wipro. >> Thenu, can you give us some examples of what, the kinds of conversations that you're having and then how it influences you when you go back to your company and you go back to Nutanix and you are then in the war room trying to figure out what kind of next new architectures and designs you can provide. >> So normally when we work with customers and with GSIs, you start with the core problem of what are you trying to solve over here, right? You have a five year plan. Are you trying to grow to a certain extent? Are you looking for your VDI to cater a certain security needs or certain financial needs? And so, then, it comes down to what is the business requirement here? Is it scalability? Is it reliability? Is it security? Is it financial modeling? You might be sitting with a customer who says, this is a great option, but I don't have budget to do this. I want to transform myself to the next level of technology, but I don't have a budget. And when we have these joint customer conversations with partners like Wipro, they say, great, let's offer a solution. And here, by solution, we not only cater to the technology, but we're also looking at where you need to end up in five years, what kind of business models and commercial models we can do to support you and what are the right products we can bring to you so that you only concern yourself with the outcome. You don't care about the infrastructure stack underneath it. Let's make everything invisible for you. But they just take our invisible story to a whole different level. >> Mayur, when I think about the transformations that customers are going through, the education and training is often a big piece of that. Where does that fit in to what you're doing, what services Wipro offers, education there, and how much of it does the simplicity of Nutanix involve in that? >> It's a great questions. So what we actually, and it helps us a lot, when we bring in the complex technologies for our end customers, they also have the owners and they need to get appreciative of what we are offering. With Nutanix's simplicity it's all given. They know that things work and things work super simple. Now whatever we bring on top of that, that's where it adds a lot of value without missing too much of time for enabling our end customers, and that gives outcome. So we are, as a whole, as a solution, we are able to give that outcome confidence and experience to customers. >> So what kinds of conversations are you having at this conference, in terms of what kinds of learnings are going on? You're talking to fellow customers of Nutanix and able to say hey, what you're doing over there, maybe we could try something similar at Wipro. >> Yeah, so one good part what I've seen people are using platform for variety of use cases, variety of business applications. Now we at Wipro, we have mastered some of them, but not all of them. But we see a lot of customers speaking about how they are using massive scale for HyperCloud, for instance. They are using it for databases, applications, mission critical applications, and we feel now it's time for us to branch out into that. >> I'd actually like to add to that. All the conversations we've had is amazing with customers. You think you built a product to meet x use cases, and then the customer comes back and says, you guys did great with being on these X use cases, but guess what? I found out this X plus 1 use case, and it's perfect. And that is what we take back and say, okay, is there a market around this, which we can then commercialize and make it easy to consume? >> What would you say, so you're based in San Jose, and you've been with Nutanix for five years now. What would you say are some of the differences that you've seen from US customers versus here we are in Copenhagen, European customers, and also Indian customers? >> Oh, that's a difficult questions. You're really putting me in a difficult position here. But in general, I would, you know, our European customers look to innovation, but they also look to baked in solutions, and more tighter integration and collaboration with partners. The US customers want to be on the cutting edge of technology. They're very high risk-takers, so when you're defining a solution and a model that works for them, it's a completely different ball game in terms of how much risk they are willing to take, what price point they want to do, and then they're also very, very particular about I want Vendor A, B, and C to work together. Go make it happen. With a lot of the Indian and the Asian customers, and even our European customers, they're more SLA based. Mayur, what do you think? >> Absolutely. I think we see a clear, here in this area of Europe, they are much mature, the second and third level of outsourcing people. They are aware of SLAs, they are aware of the services. They expect a little more than what we do and we, let's say if you compare back to India and US in some time, they are the first time or second time outsourcers, but here's the difference, they clearly wonder about the outcome. >> Mayur, the announcements that we've had this week. Are there anything that you're looking to take back to your customers, or anything that either announced or some of the previews they've been giving that you're especially excited about? >> Sure. So I think there's a great timing. I was just talking last night. We are doing investments, innovation investments for three years, it's a three years plan. And exactly the synergies so well. The announcement, what we have heard here are kind of synergizing what we are doing in the road map. For example, we and the fluid IT what she told, is all about delivering those next generation future-proof architecture, leveraging those announcements. The era, we are working on databases as always, which covers the mission-critical application, and things in a much advanced way. We believe in our road map here, we calling it a service theater, which actually delivers the experience and outcome. So there are synergies they talked about insights. And we are talking about delivering those real time, predictable stuff, based on, and our vision is to give intent with everything, so you have to just define the intent and things will fall in place. So there are a lot of synergies and we definitely take back few of them, which is databases as a service, insights, IOTA, Edge, a few key things we will take from here. And of course the HyperCloud, the AWS migration. >> Well, Mayur's being very, very humble here. One of the announcements that we did make over here at the conference was Wipro has standardized with Nutanix on their virtual desk solution and we're going back to both our customers, their customers, and our field with this offering. So the virtual desk is their own IP. They've done very well in the past with virtual desk, but as they are looking to do more standardization, get in to the next generation solutions, we worked very closely with them to build a Nutanix and HPE-based stack with Centrix, to offer this as a turnkey solution, which they've already done, but with better economics and time to market. >> And do you see that as sort of the future? >> Yes. That pretty much becomes a fundamental building block based on which almost all of our other solutions are going to to get built. The next one coming up will be database as a service, similar constructs. How do you make database consumption and Ops transfer to the end user? Followed by IoT, now IoT is a real different ball game because everything is customized. A lot of customers like to go dabble in it, but at the end of the day you need to build a solution around it. >> Thenu, and actually one of the questions we've had is we look as Nutanix moves beyond just infrastructure software to some of the application software, seems that the GSIs would be a critical player for building services. >> Yes! We actually have this really funky graph, verticals, base our AoS, where do GSIs fit in. It's the solution and pulling everything together, and making it more of a customer business case based offering, as opposed to a customer piecing itself. It's becoming a big ask with G2Ks, right? They're not doing large RFPs, they're actually doing very business-based SLAs, and now the control lies with the business owners within large customers. So it fits very well with our story. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much Thenu and Mayur. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .Next coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Pure Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to Pier 70 in San Francisco everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman and this is theCube. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. A lot going on here at Pure Accelerate 2017. Siva Sivakumar is here as the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, and Mayur Dewaikar is the Product Management Lead for Converge at Pure Storage. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be here. We've heard a lot this morning about Converge, the Cisco partnership. We just had a couple customers on that are doing FlashStack. So Siva, let's start with you. Thoughts on Accelerate? >> This is probably the coolest event I've been in many years. >> Different venue, right? >> The ambience, the venue, and the fact that Warriors won last night, it's just joy, it's awesome today. >> Dave: Oh, you want to talk hoops for a little bit? You know, we can do that if you guys. We're Patriots fans so we know. We're not just winning fans. Two out of the last three, it's good. It's good to be a winner, isn't it. >> Yep, absolutely. >> Well, Mayur, give us your thoughts on Converge. You guys are talking about Converge a lot today in FlashStack. We just heard from some customers. Talk about the strategy. What are you guys trying to accomplish there. >> Yeah, so we launched the FlashStack program about three years ago and what we were starting to see in the industry was that there was a very clear preference from customers to buy full stack solutions. So we thought that was an opportunity for us to take our storage business and move it into an adjacent market, which was Converge. And we thought we had really addressed a lot of the storage pain points that people were seeing with the existing Converge solution so with our flash performance and the simplicity that Pure brings to the table, we thought we had an opportunity really to team up with Cisco and build a solution that can be sufficiently differentiated and something that people would really love to try out. >> Mayur, I wonder if you could help clarify something. A lot of times people hear converge and they think coming together. When I think about the solutions that both Cisco, UCS, and Pure, there's lots of software and it's really a distributed-type scalable architecture so how am I both converged and scalable? >> So what we're basically doing is we are trying to, we're bringing best of breed solutions together, right. So I think there's a lot of synergy between the way UCS is architectured and Pure is architectured. So we're both stateless architectures on the compute side and the storage side and what we're doing as part of the Pure Storage for or FlashStack Converge program is that we're really doing these things together with a unified management platform, which really brings everything together. So it really simplifies the deployment, it simplifies the day-to-day management of the entire stack, which is really what people are looking for. >> Yeah, so Siva, we've heard a lot today about Converge, we heard some comments about hyper-converge. What's the difference between converged and hyper-converged? >> I think if you look at the evolution in the industry, these are big ships or the big ways customers want to consume. The genesis of all the work around convergence, if you will, that started it all was the customer started to realize, "I have bigger problems to solve from an IT perspective. "I would rather not solve infrastructure "problems all by myself. "I want the vendors to solve this. "I want the vendors to give me an experience "that is far more turnkey so I invest my time "and resource on higher artifacts" that are more in a business critical from their perspective. That truly allowed us to look into convergence as a strategy and bring together certain use cases and value propositions that is very critical to IT. High availability, scalability, multi-side deployment, which are all critical for an IT to solve. We solve it first ourself as a joint architecture. We validate that and then we provide blueprints that both our customers can choose in and our partners can choose. We had a very big channel partner community. Lot of our partners leverage the work we do to deliver great value to our customers. While Convergence was heavily centered around heavy-based storages that the market was absorbing, the evolution of storage to include more in the software-defined work, created another set of categories that allows customers to say, you know what, my interest is much more on the simplification and start small and those types of models, it propped a new industry at a new paradigm in the industry. From our perspective, there's a huge value in convergence. It's a 7 billion dollar business and IDC thinks it continues to grow. And we absolutely believe we have a purpose built on a ground-up platform that was built for Flash, that's the Pure Storage architecture, is truly here and truly is a big part of our strategy-building dive. And of course, as more use cases are coming to the compute side, we are here to embrace technologies like hyper-convergence because that's obviously something that's great for a software vendor to embrace as well. >> So from your standpoint, I think of you guys as software heavy, software led, but you're not participating in the so-called hyper-converge. Is that because you don't want to own that part of the stack, you'd rather partner for it. What's your point of view there? >> Yeah, so I think from our standpoint, we believe that there is basically use cases both for hyper-converge and converge infrastructure, right. We believe that with the program we have at Cisco, we can basically provide a very good, a very compelling solution of FlashStack. And Cisco already has a solution in hyperflex that addresses the hyper-converge use case and we really see both of these co-existing in a lot of customer environments that are use cases where NCI absolutely shines and then there are use cases where we believe FlashStack is really the right solution. >> But it's interesting you haven't sort of chased that trend, you're more focused on your areas and you're doing very well with it. Is that fundamental to the strategy or is it just sort of you guys are focused elsewhere. >> Yeah, so I think for us, for Pure Storage, I think we are looking at the Converged market really as there is a lot of existing business there that can be had. Which is really tied to legacy storage platforms coming up for refresh as part of the Converged infrastructure deployments people already have. So that in itself is a fairly large opportunity for us and we believe that with the messaging we have, which is you can consolidate a lot of your workloads on FlashStack. I think the platform that FlashStack is providing is really very well-suited for the use cases that Pure Storage has traditionally played in. Which is really the enterprise workloads, in my opinion. >> Is it fair to say that Convergence 1 data, and of course Cisco was heavily involved in Convergence 1.0, you kind of arguably created it along with some partners, but is it fair to say it was just too complex for a lot of customers? And are you trying to take that to the next level? Can you add some color to that? >> Yeah, I can answer that. I think Convergence 1.0 was truly about idea operational simplification. Because they truly wanted to consume these best-of-breed technologies without having to deal with so much of technology consumption itself but as a system-level consumption. But apparently what happened in the industry is obviously the evolution of cloud. Cloud brought a completely different paradigm of how you consume an infrastructure in itself. I mean, email is an infrastructure now because you buy from a cloud winner, you get your VM in an email. So that's a very different way of consumption model which created additionally requirements for more simplification. The turnkey experiences and things like that led to another category. But if you look at FlashStack, what we are doing is we are bringing this simplification model into FlashStack as well. We recognize, while building the best-of-breed is a great idea, and great market for itself, simplification is never lost. People love that as well. So we're looking at bringing together as close to a single pane of glass as possible with such strong technology play to deliver some of the simplification in this model as well. So you're truly trying to bridge the gap and offering something that customers really want to see. >> Yeah, simplification's definitely a big piece of that wave of both converged and hyper-converged. When I think back, when we launched all of these solutions, it was, okay, that Day Zero, I should be able to speed that up and the Day One, the stuff afterwards, we should be able to make that easier. How are you measuring that these days? Any customers you can speak to as to how they dramatically shift that, kind of keeping the lights on versus really being able to focus on the business. >> Yeah, so I think if you really look at a Converged stack, there is three distinct pieces in it, right. So there's compute, storage, networking. And I think Cisco did a phenomenal job with the UCS and UCS manager platforms in helping really put a cookie cutter approach on deploying compute. So if you look at what was remaining, networking was always kind of the low-hanging fruit. Storage was very complex. So with Pure coming in to the picture, we have really simplified the overall deployment and management of storage. So we were talking from days down to a few hours to get storage going and get the entire FlashStack infrastructure going as a result. And then what we're doing is, we're using a lot of existing tools that exist in the ecosystem. So great example of that is UCS Director which is being used very prominently by customers to deploy their entire data centers. We are integrating with that and in addition to that, we're also integrating with a lot of hypervisor level tools like Recenter or hyper v-level tools. And the benefit is that customers are getting to use the tools that they're already used to with the simplicity of UCS and Pure to really simplify the overall deployment and also management of the entire stack. >> So really, the problem you're solving is one of IT labor intensity, right. IT labor is too much IT labor, it's too non-differentiated, it's too expensive. Is that fair? >> Well, yeah. So fundamentally what we are solving is providing you a platform. A platform and an experience that IT wants, IT desires, but that also is optimized so that it can easily provide a platform experience but then the workload and the diversification you see in the market and the one side is an article database. You don't touch for four years kind of a thing. On the other hand, you have a container which you use for two seconds. So you really have a complete range of use cases. Each demand something different from a platform. Our strategy and our goal is to provide a single cohesive platform that uniformly works across all of these use cases from an IT operations and management standpoint. You realize the challenge is quite complex but the solution is a huge value for our customers and that's really our journey in solving this problem. >> Can you share any, what should we expect to see from a kind of joint-engineering deployment going forward. We heard in the keynote this morning, said some really you know, the cloud native, AI, ML type deployments. We're talking less about virtualization, more about containers and microservices. Where should we look to Cisco and Pure in the future? >> So, I think there's an interesting demo on the floor. It really talks about something that's cutting edge. NVMe over Fabric, so the next big innovation from Pure is NVMe, all NVMe, right. That is, obviously, no performance goals there. It's absolutely a screaming box. We have a Cisco adaptor technology that can deliver high performance, low-latency iO transport on top of a fabric, on top of an Ethernet fabric to talk ENVme from the host. Just the power of how much you can do iO subsystem from a compute perspective onto the network and talking to the storage and the ability to bring a superclass performance on a storage perspective is absolutely a next generation cutting edge and vendors like this coming together truly solves the industry's next big problem. Who better to solve a fabric, network, bandwidth issue than Cisco? Partnering with best-of-breed from the storage. Then that's one, just sort of a technology and architectural play if you will. But on a use-case workload type of scenarios, we've done a lot of the traditional use cases quite a bit in the databases and the VDIs of the world. But we are now looking at the next generation of use cases. Containers, microservices. How do I make the docker environment integrate seamlessly with the FlashStack? Now, this is already different, this is a very different paradigm. How do I enable FlashStack to be very simple to consume kubernetes. Because these are use cases where the developer who is much more focused on clouds does not really think there is an infrastructure underneath. He doesn't even care about it. So we need to give him that experience so that it's a seamless way of deploying and managing these DevOps environments as well. So that's the next wave of work we are doing is to provide that agility factor coming out of the FlashStack. and if conditional architecture is being built for this, it obviously helps. >> And you see NVMe over Fabric as kind of one of those foundational aspects, right. >> That'll be another architectural cog in the same context of what we are trying to do. >> Are you, with FlashStack, able to preserve that same experience for customers? The Evergreen experience, the never have to migrate your day, I mean all that wonderful stuff. Does that translate into the partnership? >> We are. So, we are taking a lot of the same goodness we have with the storage platform and we're extending that into FlashStack. So we have, very similar to Pure, you can almost non-disruptively upgrade pretty much everything in the UCS stack and we have special programs now with Cisco to which we can provide people the option to also get new gear every couple of years. Very similar to the Evergreen Storage Program we have through Pure Storage. >> So is it fair to say, well, first of all, is that unique to Pure or is that something that Cisco sort of has innovated on? >> It's, from a storage perspective, Pure, I think truly created the easy button for storage which is nonexistent. It's one of the hardest problems to solve. >> But what about the other pieces? >> And Cisco obviously pioneered the fabric-based stateless compute, which is still a standard in the industry of how to do the easy button for compute is truly what we brought to the table that really revolutionized the industry. I absolutely think that's where the architecture individually are building technology that are great. When you combine that and jointly engineer the solution and provide the turnkey value for the customer then the absolute value is manifested in a very big way. And I think that's our journey. We are hear, obviously we are hearing a lot of great customers coming in but the more customers we hear, the more we learn. >> But you've substantially sort of recreated that experience to a great degree. >> Siva: Absolutely, absolutely. >> I think that's a huge differentiator for Pure. You don't hear a lot of other companies talking about it and when you talk to your customers, they always point to that. You know, the migrations are just such a painful, horrible experience. >> Yep. >> So, good stuff. Alright, we have to leave it there, gents. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. >> Mayur: Thank you. >> Pleasure, thank you. >> Alright, take care. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Pure Accelerate 2017. Be right back.