(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

>>Mhm. >>The company Nutanix was founded as the world was coming out of the financial crisis in 2009 Cop Computing was still in its infancy but had shown the way for what was possible with automation and simplification of infrastructure provisioning and management at scale. Now what Nutanix did is it brought cloud concepts to data centers and created the market for hyper converged infrastructure, a software defined architecture that eliminated stovepipes in the heavy lifting Associated with traditional compute networking in storage management. Now in the first part of the next decade, Nutanix essentially set the standard for this new world, building a loyal customer base, reaching escape velocity and successfully going public in 2016. Fast forward to 2021 and much has changed. Cloud is no longer knew rather it's become a staple of the digital economy as we exit the isolation economy. The cloud is much different today. It's expanding to on prem and out to the edge. New connections are being made in hybrid and across cloud models and as such, connecting and managing infrastructure across these new clouds to create a facile experience for users irrespective of where the data lives. Has become a major priority for organizations. They don't want to waste time and money on making the plumbing work. But that's easier said than done as the market is evolving. So is Nutanix to meet these new customer challenges and opportunities and with me ahead of dot next the major event of the year for Nutanix customers is Monica Monica Kumar who is the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go to market for the company Monica always great to see you welcome back to the cube. >>Thank you so much. Dave I'm so happy to be here again. >>Okay, so you heard my little narrative upfront, what's your perspective on the cloud market and where your customers are in their journey? >>Well, as you said, Dave Cloud is a critical enabler for rapid growth for organizations now, it's no longer just uh you know, nice to have, it's become a must have for organizations to survive and thrive in this digital economy. Uh In fact I follow a lot of um surveys that are happening around cloud adoption and one of the key trends that's coming out is it's no longer just about I. T. Practitioners adopting cloud. In fact, 78% of C. X. O. S are looking to cloud to speed up transformation of the entire businesses. You know, 80% of business executives are looking to cloud to mitigate their risks of their companies and 87% of the executives view cloud as critical to achieving their corporate growth goals. So what we are now realizing is that hybrid multi cloud is becoming the preferred model Which means there is no one cloud that customers are using, they're using the right cloud for the right workload. In fact, according to Gartner Group, 81% of public cloud users are using more than two providers. So what's happening is increasingly businesses are relying on multiple public clouds and on premises to meet their needs and are looking for that flexibility and that's delivered by different cloud providers. Um We've done our own survey called Nutanix Enterprise cloud and that we do it every year and 86% of respondents in the last service said hybrid cloud is the ideal operating model. So the Net Net that we're hearing from our customers is cloud is not a destination, it's an operating model. Customers want the right cloud for the right workload and the right applications. >>Okay, awesome. So the world, great setup. Thank you. So the world is moving to multi cloud. I think there's not no debate on that and that is really the mainstream. That's the norm. Talk about where Nutanix fits into this new world. >>Absolutely. So we're at an inflection point as organizations are grappling with this complexity. Now, obviously you can imagine the more computing environments to use this complexity in running and managing those hybrid solutions across multiple clouds. When Nutanix is focused singularly on is making that cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on their business outcomes. We are solving the complexity of running and managing multiple clouds, just like we did for infrastructure and data centers a decade ago when we first started as a company. Now with the Nutanix start platform enabling our customers to seamlessly connect their private and public clouds simply move applications, data licenses across any cloud, optimize the work replacement and costs all while leveraging a consistent set of services, tools and processes. So for us it's really, really crucial that we give customers the choice to pick the hardware. Of the choice, the cloud of their choice, the virtual machines, they want to deploy the containers and data and help them realize their entire hybrid multi cloud strategy. It's all about giving our customers that peace of mind to deploy and operate the apps and data across multiple clouds with ease and flexibility. >>All right, let's talk about dot next my I think I'm pretty sure my first dot next was the first one ever, which I think was 2015. It was pre I P O. The focus is obviously evolving what's the focus this year? >>Well, dot next has evolved to become the industry's leading hybrid multi cloud conference. It's almost here. It's taking place next week, september 28th, 23rd and this year's event will bring together it and cloud professionals from around the globe to explore the latest trends, solutions, best practices and hybrid, multi cloud technology. Now we're obviously gonna, you know, future a lot of thought leaders from within the industry as well as in general, you know, people that impact our lives in a positive manner. And we're going to really focus on topics around hybrid multi cloud hyper converged infrastructure, private cloud ABM organization, you know, kubernetes containers, how do you figure out which after deploy where? So you're gonna see a lot of focus on hybrid multi colored solutions this year we're going to have lots of real world stories, hands on labs, best practices for practitioners. And again as I said all the tools that attendees need to go back and then put to practice some of the hybrid multi cloud strategies that they would learn and dark next >>talk a little bit more Monica about the what's in it for me for for attendees, what can they expect? What are they going to be able to take away from from this conference? >>Well, so as I said, a conferences both for business leaders and I. T. Leaders and practitioners. So for the business leaders, as I said, they'll get to hear from the latest industry visionaries around where the world of cloud is moving to, what are the latest and greatest innovations and hybrid multi cloud technologies uh and how can they make the businesses more competitive? How can they, you know, create more business value for the organization by using these technologies. For the IOT practitioners, they will go away as I said, learning from their peers in how they are adopting cloud, what are some of the myths around cloud computing. Get some information on deployment details and the benefits some of the piers are realizing since they moved to new tenants for example, in general, since they've adopted, you know, hybrid multi cloud solutions, they will also be able to connect with their industry peers, access democrat pounds. Uh in fact one of the major uh spotlights and not next will be the test drive live uh practitioners can get hands on our technology and really test drive it during the event itself and learn how to create a hybrid cloud within an hour, learn how to deploy databases with a click of a button for example, so lots of great goodies there and oh by the way we have some amazing external speakers as well besides our own, you know engineers, executives and so on. We have a whole roster of third party speakers too. >>That's awesome. Now, you know, one of the other things too is one of the ways you were able to reach escape velocity as a company is you had a strong partner ecosystem I presume is going to be a partner network participating as well. >>Yes, absolutely, thank you for reminding me about that partnerships is very, very, very, very important in Nutanix. You know, it does take a village, we have a full day dedicated to our partners and partner technology and solutions. It's called the part exchange. It's on Monday September 20, so again we hope that you all will participate but also you'll see partners are embedded uh in our september 21st and 22nd agenda and programme as well which is the main two days of dot next. So partners are in our life and blood, they're part of our ecosystem. >>That's great. What's next for Nutanix as you head into 20, >>Well before I go there, I do want to focus on a couple more featured speakers. So for those of you who are interested in cybersecurity, we will have Theresa Patton, who is the first female white house C I O and a leading cybersecurity expert. She'll be speaking. I'm actually interviewing her as well. We have Rachel, so johnny who is the founder of Girls who code and marshall plan for moms. We have Gary Vaynerchuk who's the ceo of Winner Media who is an author and entrepreneur. So I do hope that folks will plan to join if not for the core hybrid, multi colored content but also for these amazing speakers and last but not least. Hey, if none of this excites you then we do have some amazing entertainment. We have john taylor of Duran, Duran and the electric fondue coke, Romeo also headlining our day to keynote. >>So fantastic. I love it. Okay, go ahead please. >>Well I was gonna say so now let me talk about So what's next? Well for us, what's next is really helping customers realize their full hybrid, multi cloud strategy and empower them to make the right cloud decisions. So in fact one of the things you're gonna see us launch next week is also a new brand campaign. It's called cloud on your terms and you'll see that all over plastered all over dot next and so on. We are fully invested in our customer success to help them build, run and operate anywhere to help them easily migrate to public cloud or stay on premises if they choose to. And ultimately to make cloud complexity invisible for our customers, >>you know uh cloud your way kind of thing. I love that. And I and I failed to mention one of the first conferences I went to next, I met some developers and I was like whoa, cool. Because you guys one of the first that really truly do infrastructure as a code and bring that on prem and now it's going across clouds. So September 20 you kick off the partner day, is that right? And then the big keynote start the 21st right >>And go through the 20 >>third. Yes, >>yes. And we have a lot of on demand content as well around the keynote. So it's gonna be a packed packed set of agenda and days and you can choose whatever content you want to attend and participate in. >>Excellent. You guys always put under great program so go there register, we'll see you there, Monica. Always a pleasure. Thanks so much. >>Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. >>All right. And we'll see you at dot next. This is Dave Volonte for the cube. >>Mhm mm

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of A New Era In Database Management. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation with Nutanix. We're talking about A New Era In Database Management. To help us dig into it, first of all, I have the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nutanix Era Databases and Business Critical Applications, that is Bala Kuchibhotla. And one of our other CUBE alongs, Monica Kumar. Who's an SVP also with Nutanix. Bala, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you so... >> Great to be here. All right, so first of all, Bala a new Era. We, have a little bit of a punj. You've got me with some punjs there. Of course we know that the database for Nutanix solution is Era. So, we always like to bring out the news first. Why don't you tell us, what does this mean? What is Nutanix announcing today? >> Awesome. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, so today's a very big day for us. I'm super excited to inform all of us and our audience that we are announcing the Eratory dot two GA bits for customers to enjoy it. Some customers can download and start playing with it. So what's new with Nutanix Eratory dot two? As you knows 1.0 is a single cluster solution meaning the customers have to have a Nutanix cluster and then have around the same cluster to enjoy the databases. But with Eratory dot two, it becomes multi-cluster solution. It's not just a multi-cluster solution, but customers can enjoy database across clusters, That means that they can have their Always On Availability Groups SQL servers, their Postgres servers across Nutanix clusters. That means that they can spread across Azure Availability Zones. Now, the most interesting point of this is, it's not just across clusters, customers can place these clusters in the cloud. That is AWS. You can have Nutanix cluster in the AWS cluster and then the primary production clusters maybe on the Nutanix and primary enterprise cloud kind of stuff, that's number one. Number two, we have extended our data management capabilities, data management platform capabilities, and what we call them as global time mission. Global time mission with a data access management. Like racing river, that you need to harness the racing river by constructing a dam and then harness it for multipurpose either irrigation projects or hydroelectric project kind of stuff. You need to kind of do the similar things for your data in company, enterprise company. You need to make sure that the right persons get the right amount of data, so that you don't kind of give all production data to everyone in the company. At the same time, they also need the accessible, with one click they can get the database, the data they want. So that's the data access management. Imagine a QA person only gets the sanitized snapshots or sanitize database backups for them to create the copies. And then we are extending our database engine portfolios too to introduce SAP HANA to the thing. As you know, that we support Oracle today, Postgres, MalSQL, Mariadb SQL server. I'm excited to inform that we are introducing SAP HANA. Our customers can do one click sandbox creation into an environment for SAP HANA predown intense platform. And lastly, I'm super excited to inform that we are becoming a Postgres vendor. We are willing to give 24 by seven, 365 day support but Postgres database engine, that's kind of a provision through Nutanix setup platform. So this way the customers can enjoy the engine, platform, service all together in one single shot with a single 180 company that they can call and get the support they want. I'm super duper excited that this is going to make the customers a truly multicloud multi cluster data management platform. Thank you. >> Yeah. And I'll just add to that too. It's fantastic that we are now offering this new capability. I just want to kind of remind our audience that Nutanix for many years has been providing the foundation the infrastructure software, where you can run all these multiple workloads including databases today. And what we're doing with Era is fantastic because now they are giving our customers the ability to take that database that they run on top of Nutanix to provide that as a service now. So now are talking to a whole different organization here. It's database administrations, it's administrators, it's teams that run databases, it teams that care about data and providing access to data and organizations. >> Well, first of all, congratulations, I've taught for a couple of years to the teams at Nutanix especially some of the people working on PostgreSQL really exciting stuff and you've both seen really the unlocking of database. It used to be ,we talked about, I have one database it's kind of the one that everything runs on. Now, customers they have more databases. You talked about that flexibility is then, where we run it. We'd love to hear, maybe Monica we start with you. You talk about the customers, what does this really mean for them? Because one of our most mission critical applications we talk about, we're not just throwing our databases or what. I don't wake up in the morning and say, Oh let me move it to this cloud and put it in this data center. This needs to be reliable. I need to have access to the data. I need to be able to work with it. So, what does this really mean? And what does it unlock for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, I love to talk about this topic. I mean, if you think about databases, they are means to an end. And in this case, the end is being able to mine insights from the data and then make meaningful decisions based on that. So when we talk to customers, it's really clear that data has not become one of the most valuable assets that an organization owns. Well, of course, in addition to the employees that are part of the organization and our customers. Data is one of the most important assets. But most organizations, the challenges they face is a lot of data gets collected. And in fact, we've heard numbers thrown around for many years like, almost 80% of world's data has been created in the last like three or four years. And data is doubling every two years in terms of volume. Well guess what? Data gets collected. It sits there and organizations are struggling to get access to it with the right performance, the right security and regulation compliance, the reliability, availability, by persona, developers need certain access, analysts needs different access line of businesses need different access. So what we see is organizations are struggling in getting access to data at the right time by the right person on the team and when they need it. And I think that's where database as a service is critical. It's not just about having the database software which is of course important but how you know not make that service available to your stakeholders, to developers to lines of business within the SLAs that they demand. So is it instantly? How quickly can you make it available? How quickly can you use have access to data and do something meaningful with it? And mind the insights for smarter business? And then the one thing I'd like to add is that's where IT and business really come together. That's the glue. If you think about it today, what is the blue between an IT Organization and a business organization? It's the data. And that's where they're really coming together to say how can we together deliver the right service? So you, the business owner can deliver the right outcome for our business. >> That's very true. Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there. What we're trying to do is we are trying to bring the cloud experience, the RDS-like experience to the enterprise cloud and then hybrid cloud. So the customers will now have a choice of cloud. They don't need to be locked in a particular cloud, at the same time enjoy the true cloud utility experience. We help customers create clouds, database clouds either by themselves if that's big enough to manage the cloud themselves or they can partner with a GSIs like Wipro, WorkHCL and then create a completely managed database service kind of stuff. So, this brings this cloud neutrality, portability for customers and give them the choice and their terms, Stu. >> Well Bala, absolutely we've seen a huge growth in managed services as you've said, maybe bring us inside a little bit. What is free up customers? What we've said for so long that back when HCI first started, it was some of the storage administrators might bristle because you were taking things away from them. It was like, no, we're going to free you up to do other things that as Monica said, deliver more business value not mapping LUNs and doing that. How about from the DBA standpoint? What are some of those repetitive, undifferentiated heavy lifting that we're going to take away from them so that they can focus on the business value. >> Yep. Thank you Stu. So think about this. We all do copy paste operations in laptops. Something of that sort happens in data center at a much larger scale. Meaning that the same kind of copy paste operation happens to databases and petabytes and terabytes of scale. Hundreds of petabytes. It has become the most dreaded complex, long running error prone operation. Why should it be that way? Why should the DBS spend all this mundane tasks and then get busy for every cloning operation? It's a two day job for me, every backup job. It's like a hobby job for provisioning takes like three days. We can take this undifferentiated heavy lifting by this and then let the DBS focus on designing the cloud for them. Looking for the database tuning, design data modeling, ML aspects of the data kind of stuff. So we are freeing up the database Ops people, in a way that they can design the database cloud, and make sure that they are energy focused on high valid things and more towards the business center kind of stuff. >> Yeah. And you know automation is really important. You were talking about is automating mundane grunt work. Like IT spends 80% of its time in maintaining systems. So then where is the time for innovation. So if we can automate stuff that's repetitive, stuff that the machine can do, the software can do, why not? And I think that's what our database as a service often does. And I would add this, the big thing our database as a service does really is provide IT organizations and DV organizations a way to manage heterogeneous databases too. It's not like, here's my environment for Postgres. Here's my environment for my SQL. Here's my environment for Oracle. Here's my environment for SQL server. Now with a single offering, a single tool you can manage your heterogeneous environment across different clouds. On premises cloud, or in a public cloud environment. So I think that's the beauty we are talking about with Nutanix's Era. Is a truly, truly gives organizations that single environment to manage heterogeneous databases, apply the same automation and the ease of management across all these different environments. >> Yeah. I'll just add one comment to that. A true managed PaaS obviously customers in like a single shop go to public cloud, just click through and then they get the database and point. And then if someone is managing the database for them. But if you look at the enterprise data centers, they need to bring that enterprise GalNets and structure to these databases. It's not like anyone can do anything to any or these databases. So we are kind of getting the best of both, the needed enterprise GalNets by these enterprise people at the same time bringing the convenience for the application teams and developers they want to consume these databases like utility. So bringing the cloud experience, bringing the enterprise GalNets. At same time, I'm super confident we can cut down the cost. So that is what Nutanix Era is all about across all the clouds, including the enterprise cloud. >> Well, Bala being simpler and being less expensive are one of the original promises of the cloud that don't necessarily always come out there. So, that's super important. One of the other things, you talk about these hybrid environments. It's not just studied, in the public cloud want to understand these environments, if I'm in the public cloud, can I still leverage some of the services that are in the public cloud? So, if I want to run some analytics, if I want to use some of the phenomenal services that are coming out every day. Is that something that can be done in this environment? >> Yeah, beautiful. Thank you Stu. So we are seeing customers who two categories. There is a public cloud customer, completely born in public cloud cloud, native services. They realize that for every database that maintaining five or seven different copies and the management of these copies is prohibited just because every copy is a faulty copy in the public cloud. Meaning you take a backup snapshot and restore it. Your meter like New York taxi, it starts with running for your EBS   and that you are looking at it kind of stuff. So they can leverage Nutanix clusters and then have a highly efficient cloning capability so that they can cut down some of these costs for these secondary environments that I talk about. What we call is copy data management, that's one kind of use case. The other kind of customers that we are seeing who's cloud is a phenomenon. There's no way that people have to move to cloud. That's the something at a C level mandate that happens. These customers are enjoying their database experience on our enterprise cloud. But when they try to go to these big hyperscalers, they are seeing the disconnect that they're not able to enjoy some of the things that they are seeing on the enterprise cloud with us. So this transition, they are talking to us. Can you get this kind of functionality with Nutanix platform onto some of these big hyperscalers? So there are kind of customers moving both sides, some customers that are public cloud they're time to enjoy our facilities other than copy data management and Nutanix. Customers that are on-prem but they have a mandate to good public cloud ,with our hybrid cloud strategy. They get to enjoy the same kind of convenience that they are seeing it on enterprise and bringing the same kind of governance that they used to do it. so that maybe see customers. Yeah. >> Yeah. Monica, I want to go back to something you talked about customers dealing with that heterogeneous environment that they have reminds me of a lot of the themes that we talked about at nutanix.next because customers have they have multiple clouds they're using, requires different skillsets, different tooling. It's that simplicity layer that Nutanix has been working to deliver since day one. What are you from your customers? How are they doing with this? And especially in the database world. What are some of those challenges that they're really facing that we're looking to help solve with the solution today. >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, what customers at least in our experience, what they want or what they're looking for is this modern cloud platform that can really work across multiple cloud environments. Cause people don't want to change running, let's say an Oracle database you're on-prem on a certain stack and then using a whole different stack to run Oracle database in the cloud. What they want is the same exact foundation. So be so they can be, for sure have the right performance. Availability, reliability, the applications don't have to be rewritten on top of Oracle database. They want to preserve all of that, but they want the flexibility to be able to run that cloud platform wherever they choose to. So that's one. So that's choosing the right and modernizing and choosing the right cloud platform is definitely very important to our customers, but you nailed it on the head Stu. It's been about how do you manage it? How do you operate it on a daily basis? And that's where our customers are struggling with multiple types of tools out there, custom tool for every single environment. And that's what they don't want. They want to be able to manage, simply across multiple environments using the same tools and skillsets. And again, and I'm going to beat the same drum, but that's when Nutanix shines. That's a design principle is. It's the exact same technology foundation that you provide to customers to run any applications. In this case it happens to be databases. Exact same foundation you can use to run databases on-prem in the cloud. And then on top of that using Era boom! Simple management, simple operations, simple provisioning simple copy data management, simple patching, all of that becomes easy using just a single framework to manage and operate. And I will tell you this, when we talk to customers, what is it that DBS and database teams are struggling with? They're struggling with SLS and performance on scalability, that's one, number two they're struggling with keeping it up and running and fulfilling the demands of the stakeholders because they cannot keep up with how many databases they need to keep provisioning and patching and updating. So at Nutanix now we are actually solving both those problems with the platform. We are solving the problem of a very specific SLA that we can deliver in any cloud. And with Era, you're solving the issue of that operational complexity. We're making it really easy. So again, IT stakeholders DBS can fulfill the demands of the business stakeholders and really help them monetize the data. >> Yeah. I'll just add on with one concrete examples too. Like we have a big financial customer, they want to run Postgres. They are looking at the public cloud. Can we do a manage services kind of stuff, but you look at this, that the cost difference between a Postgres and your company infrastructure versus managed services almost like $3X to $4X dollars. Now, with Nutanix platform and Era, we were able to show that they can do at much reduced cost, manage their best service experience including their DBA cost are including the cloud administration cost. Like we added the infrastructure picture. We added the people who are going to manage the cloud, internal cloud and then intern experience being, plus plus of what they can see to public cloud. That's what makes the big difference. And this is what data sovereignty, data control, compliance and infrastructure governance, all these things coupled with cloud experiences, what customers really see the value of Era and the enterprise cloud and with an extension to the public cloud, with our hybrid cloud strategy. if they want to move this workload to public cloud they can do it. So, today with AWS clusters and tomorrow with our Azure clusters. So that gives them that kind of insurance not getting locked in by a big hyperscaler, but at same time enjoy the cloud experience. That's what big customers are looking for. >> Alright Bala, all the things you laid out here, what's the availability of Era rotically dot two? >> Era rotically dot two is actually available today. The customers can enjoy download the bits. We already have bunches of beta customers who are trying it out with the recall big telco companies are financial companies, and even big companies that manage big pensions kind of stuff. Let's talk about that kind of stuff. People are looking to us. In fact, there are customers who are looking for, when is this available for Azure cluster so that we can move some of our workloads to and manage the databases in Azure classes. So it is available and I'm looking forward to great feedback from our customers. And I'm hoping that it will solve some of their major critical problems. And in the process they get the best of Nutanix. >> Monica, last question I have for you. This doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same traditional infrastructure go to market for a solution like this. If I think back to, people think of HCI it was like, Oh! well, it was kind of a new box. We know Nutanix is a software company. More of what you do today is subscription based. So, maybe if you could talk a little bit to just how Nutanix goes to market with a solution like this. >> Yeah. And you know what, maybe people don't realize it but I'm hoping a lot of people do that. Nutanix is not just an infrastructure company anymore. In the last many years we've developed a full cloud platform in not only do we offer the infrastructure services with hyperconverged infrastructure which is now really the foundation. It's the hybrid cloud infrastructure. As you know, Stu, we talked to you a month ago and we talked about the evolution of XCI to really becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. But in addition to that, we also offer other data center services on storage DR Networking. We also offer DevOps services with application provisioning automation, application orchestration and then of course, database services that we talking about today and we offer desktop services. So Nutanix has really evolved in the last few years to a complete cloud platform really focusing on the application and workloads that run on top of the infrastructure stack. So not just the infrastructure layer but how can we be the best platform to run your databases? Your end is the computing workloads, your analytics applications your enterprise applications, cloud native applications. So that's what this is. And databases is one of our most successful workloads that's that runs a Nutanix very well because of the way the infrastructure software is architected. Because it's really great to scale high performance because again our superior architecture. And now with Era, it's a tool, it's all in one. Now it's also about really simplifying the management of databases and delivering them speedily and with agility to drive innovation in the organizations. >> Yep. Thank you Monica. Thank you. I I'll just add a couple of lines of comments into that. DTM for databases as erotically dots two, is going to be a challenge. And historically we are seen as an infrastructure company but the beauty of databases is so and to send to the infrastructure, the storage. So the language slightly becomes easy. And in fact, this holistic way of looking at solving the problem at the solution level rather than infrastructure helps us to go to a different kind of buyer, different kinds of decision maker, and we are learning. And I can tell you confidently the kind of progress that we have seen for in one enough year, the kind of customers that we are winning. And we are proving that we can bring a big difference to them. Though there is a challenge of DTM speaking the language of database, but the sheer nature of cloud platform the way they are a hundred hyperscale work. That's the kind of language that we take. You can run your solution. And here is how you can cut down your database backup time from hours to less than minute. Here's how you can cut down your patching from 16 hours to less than one hour. It is how you can cut down your provisioning time from multiple weeks to let them like matter of minutes. That holistic way of approaching it coupled with the power of the platform, really making the big difference for us. And I usually tell every time I meet, can you give us an opportunity to cut down your database cost, the PC vote, total cost of operations by close to 50%? That gets them excited that lets then move lean in and say, how do you plan to do it? And then we go about how do we do it? And we do a deep dive and PC people and all of it. So I'm excited. I think this is going to be a big play for Nutanix. We're going to make big difference. >> Absolutely well, Bala, congratulations to the team. Monica, both of you thank you so much for joining, really excited for all the announcements. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you >> Stay with us. We're going to dig in a little bit more with one more interview for this product launch of the New Era and Database Management from Nutanix. I'm Stu Minimam as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (cool music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Nutants. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broadening, enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Nutant forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Newtons. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broad and enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Newton forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely has been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and commercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know Stu well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hyperconverged infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said Stu is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. Well, I can tell you Nutanix Clusters is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HCI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executive of an airline right before that Monica and I spent time with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is through the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these VDI desktop-as-a-service capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on Trans Telecom, the local SP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for DR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on-prem and off-prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the Cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say, VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that are available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, end user computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idly and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there are three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters which you have on premises, the same exact Cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plane that we offer on-prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plane, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called Beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging Clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our Clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using Clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using Clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there isn't any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off-prem and off-prem is going to have tons of different variations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus SKUs to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, on-prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and apps to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew of partners, as you know we support VMware ESXi. We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at end of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So, Tarkan also we have the global size, of course, the Wipro and HCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring Clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yotta. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected Clusters with AWS it's a built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that BYOL is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the Clusters solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on-prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. Because you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Dheeraj our CEO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at Clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Stu, actually spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you drill-down and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, logistics capabilities starting with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yotta in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Doug Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like Wipro and we all deliver an end user computing service called desktop-as-a-service virtual desk, database as a service, digital data services we have, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage, have a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and infomercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know too well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new multi-cloud infrastructure, clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said too is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executives of an airline right before that Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is to the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these EDI disability service topic capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on (mumbles), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on Prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for BR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on Prem and off Prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers,. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, and there's a computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idlely and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there're three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up new data clusters which you have on premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on Prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on premises. We have an amazing tool called beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanics at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there's any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on prem, some of them off prem and off prem is going to have tons of different reactions. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skells to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew partners, as you know we support VMware is excited, We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course, the WebPros and FCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zinsser, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up still, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS it's built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that (indistinct) is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Durage RCO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Tsu, actually is spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you (indistinct) down and you find out, Okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, we'll just escapable these started with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like WebPro and we all deliver an end user company service called database service go to desk, database as a service, digital data services with MBA, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Artificial Intelligence, Monica Livingston, hey Monica, welcome to theCUBE! >> Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. >> So, AI is a big topic, but let's just get an understanding, Intel's approach to artificial intelligence? >> Yeah, so at Intel, we look at AI As a workload and a tool that is becoming ubiquitous across all of our compute solutions. We have customers that are using AI in the Cloud, in the data center, at the Edge, so our goal is to infuse as much performance as we can for AI into our base platform and then where acceleration is needed we will have accelerator solutions for those particular areas. An example of where we are infusing AI performance into our base platform is the Intel Deep Learning Boost feature set which is in our second generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors and this feature alone provides up to 30x performance improvement for Deep Learning Inference on the CPU over the previous generation and we are continuing infusing AI into our base platform with the third generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors which are launching later this month. Intel will continue that leadership by including support for bfloat16. Bfloat16 is a new format that enables Deep Learning training with similar accuracy but essentially using less data so it increases AI throughput. Another example is memory, so both inference and training require quite a bit of memory and with Intel Octane for system memory, customers are able to expand large pools of memory closer to the CPU, and where that's particularly relevant is in areas where data sets are enlarged like imaging, with lots of images and lots of high resolution images, like medical diagnostic or seismic imaging, we are able to perform some of these models without tiling, and tiling is where, if you are memory-constrained, you essentially have to take that picture and chop it up in little pieces and process each piece and then stitch it back together at the end whereas that loses a lot of context for the AI model, so if you're able to process that entire picture, then you are getting a much better result and that is the benefit of having that memory accessible to the compute. So, when you are buying the latest and greatest HPE servers, you will have built-in AI performance with Intel Xeon Scalable and Octane for system memory. >> A couple things that you said that piqued my interests are 30x improvement in performance, if you talk about that with respect to the Deep Learning Booster, 30x is a huge factor and you also said that your solution from a memory perspective doesn't require tiling and I heard context. Context is key to have context in the data, to be able to understand and interpret and make inferences, so, talk to me about some of those big changes that you're releasing, what were some of the customer-compelling events or maybe industry opportunities that drove Intel to make such huge performance gains in second generation. >> Right, so second generation, these are the processors that are out now, so these are features that our customers are using today, third generation is coming out this month but for second generation, Deep Learning Boost, what's really important is the software optimization and the fact that we're able to use the hooks that we've built into the hardware but then use software to make sure that we are optimizing performance on those platforms and it's extremely relevant to talk about software in the AI space because AI solutions can get super expensive, you can easily pay 2 to 3x what you should be paying if you don't have optimized software because then what you do is you're just throwing more and more compute, more and more hardware at the problem, but it's not optimized and so what's really impactful is being able to run a vast number of AI applications on your base platform, that essentially means that you can run that in a mixed workload environment together with your other applications and you're not standing up separate infrastructure. Now, of course, there will be some applications that do need separate infrastructure that do need alliances and accelerators and for that, we will have a host of accelerators, we have FPGAs today for real time low latency inference, we have Movidius VPU for low-power vision applications at the Edge, but by and large, if you're looking at classical machine learning, if you're looking at analytics, Deep Learning inference, that can run on a base platform today and I think that's what's important in ensuring that more and more customers are able to run AI at scale, it's not just a matter of running a POC in a back lab, you do that on the infrastructure that you have available, not an issue, but when you are looking to scale, the cost is going to be significantly important and that's why it's important for us to make sure that we are building in as much performance as is feasible into the base platform and then offering software tools to allow customers to see that performance. >> Okay, so talking about the technology components, performance, memory, what's needed to scale on the technology side, I want to then kind of look at the business side, because we know a lot of customers in any industry undertake AI projects and they run into pitfalls where they're not able to even get off the ground, so converse to the technology side, what is it that you're seeing, what are the pitfalls that customers can avoid on the business side to get these AI projects designed and launched? >> Yeah, so on the business side, I mean you really have to start with a very solid business plan for why you're doing AI and it's even less about just the AI piece, but you have to have a very solid business plan for your solution as a whole. If you're doing AI just to do AI because you saw that it's a top trend for 2020 so you must do AI, that's likely going to not result in success. You have to make sure that you're understanding why you're doing AI, if you have a workload that could be easily solved, or a problem that could be easily solved with data analytics, use data analytics, AI should be used where appropriate, a way to provide true benefit and I think if you can demonstrate that, you're a long way in getting your project off the ground, and then there's several other pitfalls like data, do you have enough data, is it close enough to your compute in order to be accessible and feasible, do you have the resources that are skilled in AI that can get your solution off the ground, do you have a plan for what to do after you've deployed your solution because these files need to be maintained on a regular basis, so some sort of maintenance program needs to be in place and then infrastructure, cost can be prohibitive a lot of times if you're not able to leverage a good amount of your base infrastructure and that's really where we spend a lot of time with customers in trying to understand what their model is trying to do and can they use their base infrastructure, can they reuse as much of what they have, what is their current utilization, do they maybe have cycles in off times if their utilization is diurnal and during the night they have early Utilization, can you train your models at night rather than putting up a whole new set of infrastructure that likely will not be approved by management, let's be honest. >> And I imagine that that is all part of the joint better marketing strategy that HPE and Intel have together to have such conversations like that with customers, to help really build a robust business plan. >> Yeah, so HPE's fantastic at consulting with customers from beginning to end, looking at solutions and they've got a whole suite of storage solutions as well which are crucial for AI and Intel works together with HPE to create reference architectures for AI and then we do joint training as well. But yes, talking to your HPE rep and leveraging your ecosystem I think is incredibly important because the ecosystem is so diverse and there are a lot of resources available from ISVs to hardware providers to consulting companies that are able to support with AI. >> So Monica, the ecosystem is incredibly important, but how do you work with customers, HPE and Intel together, to help the customer, whether its in biotech or manufacturing to build an ecosystem or partnership that can help the customer really define the business plan of what they want to do to get that for us functional collaboration and buy-in and support and launch a successful AI project. >> Yeah it really does take a village, but both Intel and HPE have an extensive partner network, these are partners that we work with to optimize their solution, in HPE's case, they validate their solutions on HPE hardware to ensure that it runs smoothly and for our customers, we have the ability to match-make with partners in the ecosystem and generally, the way it works, is in specific segments, we have a list of partners that we can draw from and we introduce those to the customer, the customer generally has a couple of meetings with them to see which one is a better fit, and then they go from there, but essentially, it is just making sure that solutions are validated and optimized and then giving our customers a choice of which partners are the best fit for them. >> Last question for you, Monica, we are in the middle of COVID-19 and we see things on the news every day about contact tracing, for example, social distancing, and a lot of the things that are talked about on the news are human contact tracers, people being involved in manual processes, what are some of the opportunities that you see for AI to really help drive some of these because time is of the essence, yet, there's the ethics issue with AI, right? >> Yes, yes, and the ethics issue is not something that AI can solve on its own, unfortunately, the ethics conversation is something we need to have broader as a society and from a privacy perspective, how are we going to be mindful and respectful while also being able to use some of the data to protect society especially in a situation like this, so, contact tracing is extremely important, this is something that in areas that have a wide system of cameras installed, that's something that is doable from an algorithmic perspective and there's several partners of ours that are looking at that, and actually, the technology itself, I don't think is as insurmountable as the logistical aspect and the privacy and the ethical aspect and regulation around it, making sure that it's not used for the wrong purposes, but certainly with COVID, there is a new aspect of AI use cases, and contact tracing is obviously one of them, the others that we are seeing is essentially, companies are adapting a lot of their existing AI solutions or solutions that use AI to accommodate or to account for COVID, like, companies that have observations done and so if they were doing facial recognition either in metro stations or stadiums or banks, they now are adding features to their systems to detect social distancing, for example, or detect if somebody is wearing a mask. The technology, again, itself is not that difficult, but in the implementation and the use and the governance around it, I think, is a lot more complex, and then, I would be remiss not to mention remote learning which is huge now, I think all of our children are learning remote at this point and being able to use AI in curriculums and being able to really pinpoint where a child is having a hard time understanding a concept and then giving them more support in that area is definitely something that our partners are looking at and it's something that (webcam scrambles) with my children and the tools that they're using and so instead of reading to their teacher for their reading test, they're reading to their computer and the computer's able to pinpoint some very specific issues that maybe a teacher would not see as easily and then of course, the teacher has the ability to go back with you and listen and make sure that there weren't any issues with dialects or anything like that, so it's really just an interesting reinforcement of the teacher/student learning with the added algorithmic impact as well. >> Right, a lot of opportunity is going to come out of COVID, some maybe more accelerated than others because as you mentioned, it's very complex. Monica, I wish we had more time, this has been a really fascinating conversation about what Intel and HPE are doing with respect to AI. Glad to have you back 'cause this topic is just too big, but we thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> For my guest Monica Livingston, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 2020, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's the CUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside, Stew Miniman. We're joined by Monica Kumar, she is the SVP product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube. >> Sure, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So the last time we met, we were in Anaheim at the last big Nutanix conference and you were fresh into the job, six weeks in, you (laughs) and now you're seven months in, this is after a 22 year career at Oracle. >> Yes >> So you're a tech veteran, but tell us a little bit about how it's going, what you've seen so far, why the opportunity appeal and if it's living up to what your expectations were. It's been an absolute adventure at Nutanix. It's been, actually it's going to be close to eight months now and it was a bit scary for me to take the plunge after 26 years in the tech industry, I've had a fulfilling career. But there was a, actually couple reasons why Nutanix was so appealing to me and it's been a fantastic ride so far. One was, this intense focus on providing technology that's so innovative, that it's geared to simplifying IT's live, and geared to its business outcomes. But there's a bigger goal for Nutanix, which really drew me to the company, which is this obsession with customer delight and providing outstanding customer experience. So here I am, almost eight months later, I'm living it, in the Nutanix world and hoping we're delighting customers as well as we go along. >> Monica, it's a very much a different company. I look at Oracle and Nutanix. Many of the Nutanix executives and team have background in Oracle, you know, Oracle, Software at its heart, and helped deliver one of the stickiest applications in Enterprise as well as a role in IT, I mean the DBA is there. Lot of discussion here at the show here about moving from the discussion of HyperConverge to HyperCloud. Give us your thought as to where you see your customers, today, kind of the state of the industry, and where you see Nutanix fitting in going beyond Hyperconverge into the broader Cloud discussion. >> Yeah I think that's a great question to set up the context. If I think about companies like Oracle, Nutanix, and some of the larger software companies that been around for a while, there's a lot of commonality, I think, between them, right. One is catering to enterprise customers, so even the Nutanix is only 10 years old, I was surprised as to how many big global 2000 companies, big brands actually use Nutanix today. So we've actually almost been born in the enterprise and now we expanding out to the commercial space. So by that what I mean is, when you're born in the enterprise, you know how important data centers are to our customers. They've invested huge amounts, in some cases billions of dollars to create these fully functional data centers that are hosting all the applications and data and all the business critical databases in the data center. And now, they're trying to figure out how do they bring agility and flexibility and speed while preserving all this investment made in the data centers. So I think from that perspective, we very much understand it's about helping our customers who've built big data centers on premises to bring Cloud agility to those customers, whether it's on premises or in public Cloud, and actually the combination of both is where hybrid comes in. >> So what is the status of things, in terms of where are most companies at right now, would you say. >> Yeah, interestingly, we've run a number of surveys and in 2018 when we ran the survey around HybridCloud, 86 percent of the survey respondents said that's the IT model they would prefer because they can exponentially enhance the computing resources, they can actually without investing money in wheeling in servers and storage and space and pulling, they can actually advance and expand the stack where they can deploy applications, right. So it's the most preferred IT model, however, there's lots of issues in making it a reality. And I think we can talk about that. Almost 70 percent said they would love to make it a preferred model, but they are unable to deploy it because of multiple reasons. >> Yeah, it's interesting when I think of what I've heard from customers for years and years, you go talk to IT and they say, "I don't have enough headcount, I don't have enough money," "I can't keep up." Yet, some of the new deployment models, Oh my gosh, you're going to put me out of a job, you know, I won't be able to do anything it's like, wait I thought you didn't have time to do any of the things you want to do and didn't have enough money. If we could make it easier, if some of the pieces could be invisible or just handled, you could go work on all of those other projects that you've been wanting to. How is Nutanix helping customers through kind of that transition to, as you said, they want agility, they want choice, they need to be able to have IT be a participant with, if not a driver for the business. >> Yes, you know, if you think about in the last decade, IT has been very focused on infrastructure modernization or what we call data center modernization. So whatever we have, we want to make it simple, cut costs so it's most efficient, and I think that's a great initiative to embark on, but it's almost very inside, inward-centric. It's about how do I make my life easy, make myself more productive, cut costs in my work. I think if we turn it around to customer delight and IT wanted to delight the customers, and really focus on becoming a service organization, that's when things start changing because now we are talking about consumerization of IT. In our lives, we all are so used to delight, our smartphone response as soon as we click something or swipe something, we get the answers. There're lots of things in life that have changed where it's instant gratification in a way, and I think companies are also asking and demanding that of IT. It's like hey if I want IT resources, I want it right away. So I think IT as an organization is changing and really focusing more on becoming a service organization and delighting their customers and that's where automation comes in. That's where cutting down all the manual tasks, which a machine or a robot or software can do, so the human being can focus on what's more important to them, what's more strategic, and I think that's where having and choosing the right platform comes in, so that IT can provide more resilient services and really provide services at the speed the business is demanding. So to me, I think that's where companies like Nutanix come in, where we can help IT become that service organization. >> So when you're talking about this evolution of IT, I mean, what does that mean for the skills that become the in-demand skills, what does that mean for how IT is placed within an organization and how it interacts with other functions, I mean how does this change really manifest itself. >> Yeah, and I think to your point as well too, I think IT has to become a change agent, no longer can IT just be in a supporting role and just help advance the business because I think now businesses are realizing that if they don't delight customers, they can't really grow. They won't stay competitive, so IT has to become the change agent to use technology to advance and grow the business, and I think from that perspective, if you look at IT admins, Cis admins, storage admins, data administrators, all of them need to start thinking about what is the next level of skillset, which makes me become more of a dev-ops or a data-ops person, or an IT-ops person. As it was to simply just administering something, simply badgering provisioning is not good enough anymore. There needs to be some element of programming, some element of continuous delivery and some element of bridging the gap between a public and private cloud solution, where apps can run on both places, where data can be in both places. So we do want the IT skillsets to evolve in a way that they can become more cloud engineers in my opinion, as opposed to staying administrators. >> Yeah, Monica, I had a great discussion with a customer earlier in the show, and he said that customers what we used to do in IT is follow the rules and what I don't want you doing in the future is following the rules, I want you to try things, I want you to try to break things and they felt that Nutanix was a platform that enabled them to be able to do that. >> Yes, absolutely, I think IT is in such a powerful position today to drive change, and really by uplevelling the skills, the IT administrators would realize they become more strategic to the organization but they even have better job prospects for themselves like individually right. I think they can do so much better in their career as well. >> Yeah, there's the great line that the executives say: what if we train our people up on new stuff and they leave, and the response is what if we don't and they stay. (laughs) >> Yes, I totally agree. >> The danger. So in terms of this evolution of IT as a functional unit in an organization and also as a human being who just works in the industry. We're talking about all these changes. How is it also changing the way organizations work? Do you know what I'm saying, in the sense of how is this evolution of IT driving change in the workplace. >> Absolutely, I think some of the old sidewalls are breaking. Just let's use Nutanix as an example when we first came out with a hybrid on which infrastructure solution, we broke the sidewalls between compute storage and virtualization. You know there was >> Altogether now. >> Yeah, exactly all together now, exactly. So there was either sys-admin, storage admins, already with using hybrid conversions, they started to work together. Now more-so, as dev-ops becomes, like I said you know, it's dev-ops , AI-ops, IT-ops, data-ops, I think we're going to start to seeing the organizations merging almost, right, and maybe there won't be a need for having a separate DBA versus a separate storage admin, versus a separate sys-admin. Maybe we are going to a place where it's going to be dev-ops or some ops, you know, all ops. That organization that's going to help create the platform for apps and data working together because the technology will be so seamless and so simple to actually use that they can focus on the process that they need to create with the organization to deploy the technology and benefit from it. >> Monica, since you've now been at the company almost eight months, I'm wondering if there's anything now being on the inside that you've learned that you'd say, Gee I wish more people on the outside understood this about Nutanix. >> Yes, absolutely I think the one thing which I knew coming in, but you don't really realize it 'till you actually realize it, and you internalize it, it really is the intense focus we have on customer success. I mean we live and breathe by that, every single person from executive level down and I give you a very small example. About two months ago, I got an email, this random email from somebody saying, "Hey I just bought Nutanix" "last week and I'm having some issue" "and I just saw you joined Nutanix, you know," "I want to reach out to you." At first, I thought hm, but I responded and I said, "Well I'm glad you reached out to me." "Is there anybody you're working with at Nutanix?" And turns out he was working with some channel partners and somebody he gave me a name. Within 24 hours, we had done enough trouble-shooting and trying to figure out what the problem was. I reached back out to him saying, you can get the part that you need, and within 48 hours he had a spot and he emailed me saying, "Thank you so much", and by the way this was a really small customer in terms of the size of the opportunity that we had, but it doesn't matter to us. Every customer counts, and every customer's success is paramount to us. >> So all hands on deck kind of base-- >> It is all hands on deck kind of thing, yep, so I can say, to me, even though I knew going into it that that's a Big Four philosophy, but to live it, it's a totally different level. >> Great, well Monica thank you so much and congrats on the new job. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stew Miniman, stay tuned on more of the Cube's live coverage of .Next. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

(enlightening music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE headquarters in Palo Alto, California, for a special CUBE Conversation. I'm the host of theCUBE here with my special guest, Monica Kumar, vice president of Oracle Cloud platform. Monica, thanks for joining me today. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So Oracle Cloud has got some great stuff goin' on, one of the things I'm most intrigued about, I've heard a lot about, is this autonomous database. I have a lot of questions, want to dig into it and really unpack that, so first take a minute to explain, what is the autonomous database? >> You know, before I do that, John, can I ask you a question? >> Sure! >> You use a smartphone, right? >> Yep. >> Do you know what happens every minute of when we use a smartphone and use the internet, how much data gets generated? >> No. >> Okay, I'm going to tell you. >> Alright, good. >> 16 million text messages happen every single minute, about four million Google searches, we're talking four million YouTube videos watched, about a million Facebook pages are open, and half a million Tweets. Now think about the impact of all this data in just one minute. Somebody, somewhere, is finding this data useful, and can actually extract some value out of it. Now, you might have heard this also, that in the last two years, the world's 90 percent of data has actually been created, and it's doubling every two years. >> So my kid's LTE bill, that's why, they're watching Netflix, that's why I'm paying all this extra bandwidth. (laughs) This is a real world. I mean, I can imagine my iPhone, I got multiple apps on there, lot of power being used, but that's just one piece, like when I'm buying with Apple Pay, or I'm doing things around, there's a lot of mobility involved, what's the value of all this? >> Well see, there's also a lot of devices, I mean we talk about IoT. By the year 2021, or in about the next five years, there'll be 50 billion devices that will be collecting data, analyzing data, sharing data. So what we're talking about is the sheer volume of the data that's being generated. And ultimately, every organization is trying to figure out how to extract insights from this data, how to make their businesses run better because of those insights. Whether create new revenue streams, maybe optimize for efficiency, deliver better customer services. So that is the problem we are dealing with today is, how do we get more value out of that data? >> So how does it all work, I mean autonomous driving, you see cars around, Uber's been trying to do it, other people have fleets, cars all over the place. Autonomous database, I mean it sounds like it's self-driving, which implies that's what cloud is all about, automation. How does the check work, what's goin' on under the hood? >> Yeah so let me explain to you, I mean this is where Oracle comes in. We've been in the data and information business for over four decades. This is what we've done. We've actually been solving the hard problem for our customers when it comes to data management, and using data. And now with this new whole deluge of more and more data, who better than Oracle to solve this problem? And one of the more important ways in which we can solve this problem is by automation, is by the use of machine learning. So that's where we're moving as a company, is you're moving to adopt and embed more and more machine learning across our entire cloud portfolio. And one of the biggest things we're doing is what you're talking about, autonomous database, which is exactly that, it's combining machine learning with the decades and decades of the database optimizations that we've been putting out in the industry. It's the power of that combination, which has culminated into what we call autonomous database today. >> Is autonomous database on-premises and Cloud, or both, how does that work? >> Yes, Oracle's always been about choice, so definitely it's both. And I'll explain to you the cloud offering, in fact, you eluded to self-driving cars. It's very similar to that. So there are three core attributes of autonomous database. It's self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing, and let me explain to you what I mean by each of those. So self-driving is really the database provisioning itself, upgrading itself, patching, tuning, monitoring, backing up, all of the functions that are very manual today, are all done by autonomous database itself, so that's the self-driving part. Self-securing, applying all of the security patches by itself so the user doesn't have to worry about it. And the self-repairing is really focused on maximizing uptime, productivity. So today we offer with autonomous 99.995 percent uptime, which means 2.5 minutes of downtime or less per month, per month, which includes, by the way, both planned and unplanned downtime. So that's what autonomous database is, it's using the power of machine learning to automate all of the manual tasks that a human being is doing, which is really not of high value, which is really very administrative type of work. >> So I can see some of the time things are great for customers, what other benefits do those customers have in terms of having this, obviously automation takes away a lot of, makes free time, but what specific benefits do you guys see coming out of this for customers? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think for businesses it's all about outcome. So there are three major benefits of autonomous. The first one is reducing cost, it's making sure that the administrative times, I'll give you an example, we now with autonomous can cut off the administrative time by 80 percent, the cost of administering a database. So that's real hard savings for the customer, and they can then take that and put into something else that more strategic to them. It's about reducing risk. The risk of breeches, which could cause reputational damage to companies, which could cause, shareholder value loss. So the fact that we are reducing risk with autonomous technology is another big benefit. And the third, and the most important one, is really innovation, the time to innovation, the time to insights, more productivity for the customer. So those three, in my opinion, are the top three benefits >> To organizations. >> Now being agile, having flexibility, the cloud certainly brings that scale out mentality, that server list we hear things like that in the industry, so certainly very relevant, and machine learning makes that automation happen. Love that message. The question I would have for you is okay, in my mind, I'm trying to think, how would I buy this, how would I use it? What are some of the offerings that you guys have, is it turnkey box, is it software, how do you roll this out to customers, how do they consume it? Take us through the offering itself. >> Sure, today we offer autonomous in our cloud in two different offerings. One is autonomous data warehouse, which is purely for analytics, so you can actually create new data warehouses, or data mods to get insights from your data. The second one is transaction processing, it's autonomous transaction processing, which can be used to develop applications, to deploy applications, high-performance workloads, mission-critical workloads in the cloud. So those are the two ways we can do, in fact, we have many customers who are using our technology today in our cloud. But like I said, this is also going to be available in on-premises as well. >> That's awesome. So, when you get into the customer examples, who's using this now? Is it shipping? What's the status of it? I mean this gets a lot of attention, and the press articles are great. We covered it on SiliconANGLE, what are the customer examples? >> Absolutely, so of course it's shipping, and it's the first and only self-driving database in the industry. We have many, many customers for the last few months who are using it. I'll give you a few examples. We have a major Enterprise car rental company who is using it, and they were able to cut down their time to provision databases from two weeks to eight minutes. Now what does that mean? That means they can now roll out projects faster, and improve their customer services and offers they are making to customers. We have another customer who is in the shipping and oil industry, and they've cut down their time to querying complex data sets from 20 minutes to a few seconds. Again, which means they can get access to insights much faster to make decisions. And they've also eliminated downtime from patching because everything is done online, patching is done automatically on the database while it's running online. And then we have another customer who's a managed service provider. They're now able to provision their customers 10 times faster. So that means they can grow their business, they can provision more customers, their current customers can be happier because they are supporting them better and faster. >> What are some of the comments and messages, to kind of go off tangent for a second here but, I mean, they go "Wow, this is amazing"? What's some of the feedback you're getting? What are they saying, what are some the anecdotal comments? Share some color around that. >> Sure, I mean one of the big comments is "Wow! Me, I'm a DB, I thought this was "going to take my job away, but actually, "to the contrary, it's making my job easier." DBAs are now realizing they can actually manage many more databases efficiently in the same time that they were doing before. And secondly, they don't have to be involved in manual drudgery tasks, they can now offload all of that to autonomous database, and they can now focus on more strategic tasks. They can become a partner to the business, they can focus on application life-cycle management, on data security, on data architectures. So that's the one reaction we are getting is like "Wow, I didn't realize how much of my time "I was spending doing maintenance stuff, "which really adds no value to the organization." So customers are seeing a lot of productivity gains. I think the second thing is the speed of innovation. The fact that it would take them three months, six months, to deploy new projects, and now they can do it quickly within a few minutes is actually unbelievable to them. >> This is a real good point, I just want more double-down on that real quick, because one of the things we're seeing is, across all the events we go to, that message of the fear of "Oh my god, "I'm going to lose my job" or "I'm going to be automated away" actually isn't true. If they get re-deployed in other easier jobs, I don't want to say easier, but all the mundane tasks can be automated, that's a good thing. The security thing about the patching and self-updating, that's amazing. But the skill gaps is a huge problem CIOs face is that they need more people. And cloud architects are the number-one demand jobs, so I mean this must be really refreshing to hear that when you say "Hey, you were doing "a DBA job before, or something else, "now you're a cloud architect." Are you seeing the cloud architect role become important, and if so, what are they doing? What's the role of a cloud architect, and how does this fit into that? >> Yeah, I think the way we describe it, I think it's close to cloud architect, but think about it from administering data, or managing databases to actually using databases to mine insights, it's a different mindset. So you're becoming a data professional from a data administrator. So as opposed to having a job of managing a database, that's not important, what's important is you use the database to get insights and make your business smarter. So now we are working with, for example, our DBA stakeholders, which have been our Oracle family for four decades, to help them re-skill, to new ways of thinking, to becoming data professionals, to becoming data architects, and like I said, focusing on things like data life-cycle management, how do you work with application developers, how do you work with lines of businesses when your line of business comes to you and says "Hey, I want a database tag deployed for XYZ", the ability for them to say "Of course, I can give it to you in minutes." as opposed to saying "Oh, you'll have to wait two months." Imagine that. >> Yeah they're helping people, and they're also, more important, they're powerful. >> Right, right. >> Okay, Oracle OpenWorld is happening, and so one of the conversations we're hearing, and certainly this is consistent throughout the industry, the role of security. I put my skeptic hat on like okay Monica, tell me the truth, is it really self-updating the security patches? What about the phishing attacks? There's a real paranoia on the security. Take me through the security, while you guys are comfortable with the security, what's the big message and what's the big feature of why it's so secure? >> Right. But before I do that, let me paint a picture for you. We all know the opportunity that comes with Cloud, it presents huge opportunities to organizations. But with every opportunity, there comes a challenge that needs to be solved. And like you said, security is a big challenge. We are talking about massive scale of security breeches happening in the industry. We are talking about bad guys having access to very sophisticated technologies to wage this war against us, the organizations, to get access to core data. And we are talking about the number of security issues that are happening multiplying and compounding, and I'll give you some data points. There are 3.5 million cyber security jobs that are open in the next couple years. We don't have enough people to fill those jobs, even if we did, we can't keep pace with the amount of security threats and challenges that we need to navigate and address. >> And by the way, that's a data problem by the way, too. >> Back to your data is the central value proposition. >> Exactly, and also the other point I want to give you, which is equally important is of all the breeches that have happened, 85 percent actually had to fix available, and yet it wasn't applied and the breech happened. So again, we are talking about human beings who are very busy >> The human error on the patch side is huge. Spear phishing and also patches are the two number one areas of security. >> Right, but also people are busy. You kind of say "Okay, I'm going to do this later, "I have so many other 10 things to take care of first, "and I'm going to apply this patch later." Now what happens is, that's why we need to throw automation and machine learning at this problem. I don't think we can solve it by throwing just more and more human man-power on it. We need to combine the power of human and machine to tackle this security problem, and that's what we're doing with autonomous database. Not only can we predict a breech before it happens, we can actually fix it before it becomes an issue. And that's what I'm talking about with the whole self-securing notion. That's the power of autonomous database. >> A few Oracle OpenWorlds ago, Larry Ellison said on stage, I'll never forget this, I actually loved the line, other people kind of gave him some heat for it, but he said "Security should always be on. "Off is the exception." Has that view permeated through Oracle? >> Oh, Oracle was built on that view. We have, if you look again at our history, and our customer base, we are supporting the largest and the biggest governments in the world. We support from federal governments, to state governments, to public sector, to every organization who cares deeply about security, and it's not just a government issue, it's every organization has to safeguard the data of their customers. I mean that's the law. Every single organization cares about it. Oracle was built on that, that's the foundation that we are built on. So for us, security is very important, that's the first design principle of our data management, and all of our technology solutions. >> Well you guys are in the middle of all the cloud action, for sure, we're covering you guys, it's great to have you on theCUBE. Monica, thanks for coming and sharing your story. Where can people find out more information on the autonomous database, this awesome new product? >> Well, it's going to be all over oracle.com, so I'd say go there at first and from there you can navigate to a lot of great content on autonomous database. We have customer studies, we have free trials, so you can take us for a spin. It's like driving a self-driving car, it's self-driving database. >> It's a Tesla. >> Yeah, it's like the Tesla of databases, exactly. >> Monica, thanks for coming, I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation, we are in Palo Alto at our headquarters, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (enlightening music)

>> From the Amazon Meeting Center in downtown Seattle, it's theCUBE. Covering Imagine A Better World. A global education conference sponsored by Amazon Web Services. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown Seattle at the AWS Imagine Educate Show. It's a public sector show. It's the first time they've ever done it really focusing just on education as opposed to the regular public sector show or the AWS Summits and re:Invent that you're very familiar with. We're excited to be here. One of the big themes here is colleges partnering with high schools. And we're excited to have our next guest really talk about how that's working in this program. We have Howard Stahl. He's a professor at Santa Monica College. Howard, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And with him is Koda Kol. He's a teacher at Roosevelt High in East L.A. and also an adjunct professor at Santa Monica College. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, let's just jump into it. There's a big conversation about training people for the next generation of cloud skills. It's good for the kids, it's also good for the employers, it's good for Amazon, it's good for their customers and their partners. How are the kids feeling about this? How is this program being accepted by kids? Is it cool, is it something they want to do? How hard of a sell is it? >> The students are engaged. They're learning something that is immediately relevant to societal's demand. Our students, they're setting up, spinning up web servers, file servers, even VPN, and the VPN servers is going to disrupt the way schools strategize and implement security, because now when they go back to the high schools they're bypassing all these web securities using VPN. >> Right. >> But they really do love it. The students seem to really drink it up. >> They get it. >> Yeah, they do. >> So is there a particular classification of app or of all the different things that you're teaching 'em, database, security, this or that, that resonates more than others or what is it that connects to what they do every day that makes them think, "Hey, this is cool, I engage "these things every day. "What a great career to get into." >> Yeah, I think, they see Amazon in their daily life every day. Delivering them stuff, making them buy stuff, having them deliver things. And they can see as they peel apart the layers and see behind the scenes how Amazon actually gets that done. >> Right. >> And it seems immediately relevant to them. >> Right. >> And so the student interest has been fantastic. >> Been fantastic. And Koda too, I think it's always the thing too with, especially the kids when they're in high school, 15, 16 right, they're starting to get a little bit of attitude. "Why should I read 400-year English novels Dad, "how's that going to help me in my job?" or "Why am I taking chemistry, I don't want to be a doctor? "I get it I got to take it to get into college "but I don't really want to take Chemistry." This is probably something a little bit different in terms of direct visibility into the application. I mean, those other things have applications too, you just don't see it when you're 15. But this they can see, right? They can see how it's going to directly impact them in a positive way. >> Yes, and it also puts everyone at the same playing field. Students that normally fail their English classes, Math classes, now they're in the same classroom and learning content where everyone is on the same page. So, you got your high performing students also with your students that are failing a class, trying to discover what they want to do in life. >> Right. >> They're together, they're working together. Find a common interest and excelling, engaged and asking for more. "Where can we take more classes? "This is what I want to do, "this is where I want to be." >> That's great. Another thing, we were just at a high school competition called Technovation earlier this week where mainly girl's teams from all over the world building applications. Same kind of a thing. Get 'em involved in an application that they can really see a difference and they get it. And I wonder if some of your kids talk about, everybody wants to be mission driven today, and kids want to do stuff that has a higher impact on society, right? We've got four different garbage cans we have to sort our stuff in 'cause we want to be renewable and take care of the environment. Do they see that software is the easiest way to make a huge impact globally, do they get that? >> They get that, they see it. They're instantly creating servers in 5-10 minutes. Going on their servers, setting up websites. They see the relevance. They're taking advantage of the technology. >> Yeah, that's great. So Howard, I wonder if you could speak a little bit about how a partnership with AWS enables you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do if they weren't helping in this whole process? >> At SMC we've been working with AWS for about four years now to spin up this program. The partnership has been fantastic. AWS has been really giving and helpful. They helped train faculty. So we got professional development from them. Now, as part of this program students get credits on the platforms. Faculty get credits on the platform. They've been helping us with advertising and all kinds of other great things and it's really been a wonderful, wonderful partnership, really fantastic. And that industry connection really makes a big difference in making the program succeed. >> You mentioned something I want to follow up on in terms of the staff. We talk a lot about the kids here and the impact on the kids and their education, but I'm curious to get your take on how this has impacted the staff. This new classification of learning if you will, around cloud computing specifically. This subset of computer science which has had a hard time squeezing in between science and math, especially at the high school level. But how are the staff, the teachers taking to this? Do they see this as a great new opportunity? A bunch of new skills to learn? That's got to be kind of invigorating for them, I imagine as well. >> I think so. I think it's really invigorated people who've been around. It keeps us on our toes, makes us learn new things. It's very exciting for many of us and it has been great. And the wonderful thing about computer science is that it changes a lot. As I often say in math, "They haven't invented any new numbers." But in computer science, what I learned when I was in school. Oh my gosh, things have changed a great deal. And so there's a commitment to keep current. And in the community colleges definitely we try to keep our curriculum current with what industry needs. >> Right, I think it's a really great statement on the role of community colleges, in a very specific role to help match skills with needs in jobs. I mean just really concrete, really straightforward, really kind of a simple mission. >> Yeah, and Amazon actually has connected us with local employers near SMC that have helped us validate our curriculum and actually are very interested in hiring the graduates out of our program right away, 'cause there is such a dearth of industry talent in this particular field. >> Which is great, just to close that loop, right. And if I recall, your certificate program is the model now that's been rolled out to all 19 of the L.A. community colleges. >> Yeah, so this program has really spun up, and become much, much bigger than just one particular college. So we developed a number of classes at SMC and a certificate, and we're using that now as a model throughout L.A. county to bootstrap AWS skills in all the local community colleges. 19 other colleges are working with us. >> Right, right. Agreeing to run the same classes at their institutions. And that's very exciting as well. They've also agreed to find local partner high schools to work with as well. So we're really trying to build a hub of AWS experience down in L.A. in what we call "Silicon Beach". >> Right, right. And then the goal ultimately is to get an associate program, right, over some period of time when you get whatever the certification is, or that process. >> Yeah, so we're working on building an AA Degree in cloud computing as well. >> That's great. Koda, you look like you had something to jump in there. All good? >> All good. >> Okay, good. So I want to give you the last word in terms of what would you say to educators that are not in L.A. about what this type of program has brought to you, and more importantly your students in your everyday life at Roosevelt High? >> It has changed the lives of many students. It's changed my perspective on how I see education because in fact it was a little difficult getting the students to be engaged initially, but ever since we launched this cloud computing every student, we can't get enough classes, sections, open. We open one section up and it gets filled. The students are in class. They want to learn the material. It's a good time to be in education. I love it. >> Well good. Well thanks for sharing the passion, it comes through. >> Well the passion starts with our department chair, Howard Stahl here. He's very passionate and it resonates with all the staff members, which resonates with the students. So now we have the synergy that's happening that we hope to eventually distribute to all the other campuses, and make a model. Use Santa Monica as a model. >> Great. Well Koda, Howard, thanks for taking a few minutes. And, really enjoy this story. I look forward to the follow up next year. >> Thank you. >> Alright he's Koda, he's Howard, I'm Jeff! You're watching theCUBE from downtown Seattle at AWS Imagine Education. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE covering DevNet Create 2018, brought to you by Cisco. (techy music playing) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage here in Silicon Valley. We're in Mountain View, California, for Cisco's DevNet Create. I'm here with Lauren Cooney, our analyst here with Wikibon, of course. Our next guest is Monica Houston, director of Hackster Live, Hackster IO, Hackster.io, open source hardware, really kind of creating a great community model. Really started from a great idea. Great to have you, thanks for coming, joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, we're here at Cisco Live, so no better place to talk about hardware and software coming together, but first talk about how Hackster started, how it grew, where it is now today. >> Okay, so Hackster got started about four years ago here in San Francisco. The founders, Adam and Ben, they said they wanted to make a community for people that were interested in building open source hardware. Adam had actually come from starting his own hardware startup and realized that there were very few resources for people like him that wanted to build electronics, and so started a community. I got involved, started... We actually bought a DeLorean, drove it around the country and did hardware hack-a-thons in 12 different cities in the US. >> And so where's it today in terms of numbers, community members, and you're based in Seattle, is that right? >> I'm in Seattle. >> Okay. >> Yeah. >> So, what's the community look like, what's the numbers look like? >> There are half a million people on our site and 15,000 open source projects. >> John: Wow, awesome. >> Yeah. >> That is totally awesome, what projects do you see being the most popular on your site? >> Lots of home automation, home automation's a really popular topic. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> We also get a lot of some pretty cool, like, music synthesizers, amplifiers. All kinds of stuff, yeah. >> That's great, now, say I'm like a... I, you know, have coded before but I'm not necessarily truly a developer. Like I'm a moonlighter, per se. >> Monica: Sure. (laughing) >> How could I get involved in this? >> Oh, man, there's tons of resources. So, actually on our site you can sort by difficulty. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> So, if you want to find some beginner projects you can sort by difficulty and find only beginner projects. Also we have tutorials, so tutorials, getting started projects. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Like, so you buy an Arduino or you buy a particle board and you want to learn how to use it you can search for a getting started project on the site. >> Lauren: That's great. >> Yeah. >> How are you, like... So, you're at DevNet Create-- >> Monica: Yeah. >> With Cisco and what are you doing here? Like, what are you talking about, what are you really interested in? >> So, I have a project called Breadboard to PCB. I'm actually... So, I was a front-end web developer and then I got into all this, so I'm fairly new to it as well. I've been doing it for about six years. I'm not an electrical engineer. (laughing) I have to tell myself, but I'm doing a project called Breadboard to PCB. I made a PCB last year, sort of taught myself how to do that and realized it's actually not that hard and I want to spread that around to people and make them realize that they can build their own PCBs, too. >> That's terrific, that's awesome. Are you and Cisco, DevNet looking to share content or anything like that that might be cool? >> Yes, definitely. (laughing) >> Lauren: Okay. >> Yeah. >> All right, and is there any more you can tell us about that or is that still in the works? >> Still in the works, yeah, we offer... So, we have all these different partners, like Microsoft, Intel, hopefully Cisco as well-- >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> That do, they have, their hub is hosted on our site and people share their projects there with full instructions of a template. We actually go through and make sure everyone shares their code and their schematics. So, they're very well put together projects. >> Lauren: Great. >> Talk about some of the most exciting things you worked on, because one of the things I love about the open source culture is the creativity kind of comes out of nowhere. (laughing) We were just talking, before you came out, about my son, how he's been hacking his own thing. With this culture now you have so much online information. You go to YouTube, there's always a how-to. These communities have great resources. You guys got a robust community. So, there's always that natural, organic, "Whoa, look what this person did." >> Monica: Yeah. >> Can you share some stories around some killer things that happened. Not "killer," good things or just some things that are just creatively cool that you never would've thought would happen. >> Oh, man, so Allen Pan is a maker, I think he's based in LA. He has a YouTube channel, Allen Pan, and he did this really cool... I guess The Last Airbender is a popular movie and he did this flame activated, or punch activated flamethrower on his wrist. So, you try this at home. (laughing) Might be a little dangerous. >> What's his YouTube channel? >> I believe it's Allen Pan, is his name. >> So, there's some creative stuff, so people just tinkering around but there's also some serious hardware engineers. >> Monica: Mm-hmm. >> Any businesses starting out of this? Have you seen any, like, good ventures emerge? >> There's been a few things that I forgot about. There was a really cool watch that was Kickstarted that if you're a cyclist you can wear it and it tells you, like, which way to turn based on your GPS. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> There was some really nice Bluetooth, very elegant, like, Bluetooth controlled lights, that with different colors those are nice, yeah. >> So, what are some of the things you guys are doing in the community that you think's notable that you could share, people might be interested and like, how do you guys organize? There's some things that you guys do differently. What are some of the community activities that, you know, are standard. You know, the normal thing, you have meetups and whatnot, but like, how do you guys run your community, what are some of your guiding principles. Can you share how things work? >> So, we are always open, so you can go to our site and there's no, you know, there's no pay wall or barrier to view all of our content because our content comes from our community, and like, they're the ones that are... We're encouraging them to really document their work. Also, yeah, so we do hardware hack-a-thons where we try to make sure-- >> John: Yeah. >> Everyone's very... We're very beginner friendly, I guess. That's one of our goals is to make sure that people are coming from all different... You know, it's the artists that are making cool projects and-- >> So, when new people come in-- >> Mm-hmm. >> They get welcome letter, kind of community email haze or chat, all that stuff going on, all that's in place. >> We have a news feed, we have discussion, comments on the project that we moderate a bit, so yeah. >> So, Hackster.io. >> Hackster.io, yeah. >> All right, what's the coolest thing you guys are doing right now that you think we should know about? >> So, sort of related, actually this weekend I was at a workshop to learn how to make my own fire projects. (laughing) I like fire, (laughing) yeah. >> John: A pyromaniac community. I want the flamethrower fist thing. >> Yeah, I know. (laughing) >> Lauren: Over here is, yeah. >> I'm instantly like maybe on YouTube or something, I want that. That's a great party trick. >> I think it's great. >> Until something lights up. >> Right. (laughing) >> All right, so what are you doing here at Cisco? What's the focus here, obviously great culture they're building here. Very developer, not a lot of Cisco Kool-Aid being injected here, but much more of an outreach for Cisco, what's your focus here? >> This is all new for me, actually. So, I did not realize that this has got such a huge developer community and was really involved and like, this is a great conference. >> Lauren: That's true. >> People are so nice. >> Yeah, and the internet of things is a big hardware-- >> Yeah. >> Focused market. >> Yes, yeah. >> So, they've got all the software there. >> It's only getting bigger, yeah. >> Cool. >> Mm-hmm. >> Cool, all right, so what's new in Seattle? Give us an update on what you're doing. >> All right, it's still raining there. (laughing) >> That is actually very good to know. (laughing) >> You have Microsoft up there. >> Monica: Yeah. >> You have Amazon. >> Monica: Mm-hmm. >> University of Washington, so you have kind of a nice, kind of geek culture developing up there. So, yeah, good open source hardware vibe up there? >> Yeah. >> What's the community like in Seattle? >> Yeah, I run meetups, there's lots of people that come out to different hardware meetups and there are, like, a lot of new, cool hardware startups. Like for instance, Glowforge is a laser cutter that was Kickstarted recently. >> Lauren: Yep. >> There's some other really neat... DiGo is a home automation light switch. >> Lauren: Mm-hmm. >> Yeah, there's some pretty cool startups. >> So, if someone wants to join your community, what would you say to them if they're watching this video right now, hey. What are they, what's it like to join, what are they going to be... What's the vibe like, what are some of the things that are involved? What's the value for someone watching, that might want to join this, totally into tinkering with hardware? >> One thing is a great format to share your projects, and also to document your projects. Documentation is really important and I like to say that a project doesn't exist unless it's documented. (laughing) >> John: Yeah. >> So, documenting it and then we'll boost your project, we'll share it on our social media and it'll get lots of views. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's an open, it's a nerd culture. I mean, by the way, robotics is the hottest thing going on. You can't get involved, a lot of the younger generation are absolutely enamored with robotics, just at all levels. From, you know, you've got drones, which is super cool, right. Then you've got all the kind of stuff that's, it's all about hardware, hardware. >> Well, this is great, I'm on the site and I'm looking right now at the mind control drone. >> Monica: Oh, yeah. (laughing) >> That is, you know, my question is does that really work? Can I, you know, can I actually do something. You know, take this and learn from the site and actually build that? >> There are, and there are some developer, I guess it's EEG or EKG, EMG is another one, that you can really, you know, you can think left or think right and it will go left or right, it figures it out, yeah. >> That is so cool. >> Are people meeting up on the site and doing work together. Is it like a collaborative kind of hub going on there? >> There are some people that are doing that. Yeah, there was a few people on our site that were doing work on the, what was it... Elon Musk's thing, the... Hyperloop. >> John: Yeah. >> There's, like, the Hyperloop contest, and so a few people on our site were doing some work for that. >> Lauren: That's great. >> So, yeah, people are meeting there, yeah, for sure. >> Monica, great to have you here in theCUBE. Thanks for sharing about Hackster.io. We're going to check it out and thanks for the tip on the YouTube channel. We'll get the fire flamethrower. >> Yeah, make your own flamethrowers. >> John's going to be busy this weekend. (laughing) >> I'm a pyromaniac, I keep playing with matches all the time. So, thanks for coming on, I really appreciate it. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Hackster.io, we are theCUBE here live in Mountain View, California. Cisco DevNet Create, the Computer History Museum. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techy music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando Florida it's theCUBE covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Jeferick. We are joined by Monica Bailey and August Goldman. Monica is the Chief People Officer at GoDaddy and August is the Senior Vice President of Customer Care. Thank you both for joining us. >> Thank you, it's great to be here >> So let's start out with the numbers because you're a big number crunching company and you are collecting data and you're also sharing some data, so talk a little about what you have found. >> Yeah, well for the last few years we've been tracking how we pay men versus women because we really care about making sure we're paying all of our employees really fairly, and so we're happy this year to be able to say that for every dollar a man makes in the company a woman in a similar job also makes a dollar. And so that's great, that's the goal. The goal is fairness for all of our folks, so we're really excited about that. >> So how long did it take you to get there? >> So we started it three years ago with our CEO Blake Kirby onstage here at the Grace Hopper Conference which was in Houston at the time in front of 12,000 folks, and we showed the numbers. We showed pay parity and it wasn't parity at that point. >> Was it close? What are we talking about here? >> It was $0.96 cents, $0.96 per dollar, so it was close but it wasn't parity. And here's what's interesting, we've always said we need to be comfortable with uncomfortable data. I think we've talked about that before on this stage, and even if the data is not what you want it to be expose it, dig into it. What we've done together is we've found out what's wrong. >> Okay so how did you go about finding out what was wrong, and then also fixing it? >> Yeah well we looked at a few things, so first of all, we looked at different populations so we'd look at how are our technical employees paid, how are our non-technical employees paid, how are our leaders paid? And so we definitely see things when we look into those groups of employees, But we also just took, let's take the slice of our biggest set of jobs, our engineers, pretty applicable for this audience here today. So, we took a look at our engineers and said How are our entry level developers paid, men versus women? And we're also this year looking at our minorities as well. It's really important to not just stop at gender and look at how all your employees are paid. So, yeah, we definitely have made great progress on that. I don't know if you want to speak to it. >> So here's what's interesting, when we dug into this data that Monica is talking about we actually found that software development engineers one, and two, women were paid more. More. In those roles. So we said 'Oh, well that's fantastic' Well, guess what? The population size by percent of three, four, five, and six, the women dropped off. Fell off. And then we said well wait a second, what might be happening here, and all of a sudden, something came up in the data that we were just, we wouldn't have known unless we dug into it. Women stayed longer in those roles. They didn't ask for promotion. >> They stayed longer in the ones and twos. >> The ones and twos and guess what? If you stay longer in a role every year you get a little merit increase, every year you make more, eventually you'll make more, versus someone who is clipping through the levels at a good pace. So because of that, Monica put it something, You want to talk about promotion flagging? >> Yeah, we tried an experiment two summers ago and we took a look at this phenomenon of women and also some introverts, not just women, right? But it tends to be women aren't pounding their fists on the table for a promotion. So as a result their promotion rates are lower. So we went in and said let's try a little experiment called promotion flagging, let's just say hey, a good performing SDE, Software Dev Engineer, They're normally in role about 12 months or 18 months, a good one, before they get promoted, sometimes longer, good ones, too, but that's just on average When does the first time a good performing person would get promoted, and we said that will be our flag to managers, just to say hey, you're going through review, don't forget, all these folks have been in level a certain amount of time. Because some folks aren't begging you and demanding a promotion so let's consider everyone equally. And the goal wasn't really to promote more people, the goal was, let's just not forget anyone in the process, because that happens, unconsciously people just, they're forgetting folks across the industry. So they did that and it was amazing. The result was amazing. Also I should say, though, our goal was to make sure everybody got really actionable feedback to grow their skills and their impact at the company and their likelihood of a promotion down the road, which is exactly what we're going for because that makes your company better, so we love that. But the cool news is, because we've been following this data really closely because we're very nervous, because I also don't want to suddenly treat one of my populations not as well as they were being treated before. So we are really excited that men's promotion rates stayed unchanged. Women's promotion rates were jumped by a third. So just by merely saying don't forget all your folks please and give them good feedback, we saw that women got promoted 30% higher rate than they had in years prior, and so that's pretty cool for us. >> So I have two very specific questions: One, is there low-hanging fruit that somebody else watching this can see where there was the big disparity that was the easiest to fix? And two, you keep talking about reviews. There's a whole lot of conversation about the annual review process and how broken it is. You mentioned 18 months. Have you changed your, or maybe you changed it before, but has this forced you to look at the typical annual review process and reevaluate? >> Alright so I'll take the first if you want to grab the second Because the first one's easier so I'm just trying to get the first one she can do the hard one. That's why she's the head of HR now. She took my job by the way (laughs). >> I wasn't going to ask that. >> You weren't going to ask that, how can you not ask that? >> Stay with the easy question though. >> Okay, the first one is exactly what Monica was just talking about and that is actually flag folks in role after a period of time, and say you know what, both men and women, flag them and say, review them for promotion. Review for promotion. It's very simple, it's very easy. After a year of level one, maybe 18 months of level two, just say hey, have a look, is this person ready? And if they're not ready, what should they do to get ready. >> And that's the actionable feedback >> And here's what's interesting, here are the stats, which is really cool. So, two years ago we had 6% of our software development two were women. Last year was 15%. This year, 31%. 31% of software development two are women, and our software development one is now up to 41%. So you see we're building our pipeline so we're getting them in. Now the question is, once they're within the company how do we develop and grow them and promote over time? >> It begs the question, what are the threes? >> Oh, it's 13%. So you can see it's dropped off. So no, give us a year or two, we'll be back on the stage. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And the goal is then 30, 40%, so, you know give us a few years. >> That's a great little actionable item though, just to make sure that you're paying attention to the people that aren't paying attention for themselves. >> And they did it as an experiment and are you going to now scale that to the rest of the company? >> We have scaled it to level twos and level threes and this year we'll probably scale it to a level four so each time we add another level we look at the data and see how it works. At some point folks are allowed to do an awesome job in the jobs they're in so we're not an up or out kind of company, some places are like that, so at some point we'll probably stop saying, 'should you promote this person to be leader of the universe?' because they're pretty great. But Jeff, you asked a great question about performance reviews, and I'm super passionate about this topic, so we were selected by Stanford's Clayman Institute as their partner a few years ago to basically conduct experiments with. They choose one company a year to say hey, are you open-minded enough to try some crazy stuff with us and see if there might be a result that we can share with the industry afterwards. And so we just felt so happy they chose us, and we shared tons of our data with them, they saw our employee survey, they saw redacted performance reviews, they got to sit in on our most senior talent review which is a calibration session to hear how are we talking about all of our employees. And the Clayman Institute, they care about the advancement of women in leadership, but my first meeting with them, I'm like, look, I super care about the women in my company, but I kind of care about all my employees in my company, so like, I need to make sure we're being really fair to everybody, and they're like, 'that's what we care about, too' and I'm like, okay, phew, first hurdle we passed. Anyway they're stunning foot partners and what they, after doing tons of this analysis, what they said was, tackle what almost no company has tackled. Tackle unconscious bias that lives within the people, processes, specifically around career advancement. So again, that's promotion that we talked about, that's also performance review. So we're like, that's us at GoDaddy, we're like let's try it, who knows what's going to happen, let's just see, so we jumped right in and basically what the found is at GoDaddy we care about what you do and how you do it, so those are, so what is sort of career ladder levels you hear companies talk about, and here's a general expectation, and how do you do against your goals. Great. And how you do it is how we collectively work together to get good stuff done at our company, right? And it sort of lives within our values. Our values don't live within a big poster that are shiny, and people kind of walk by and go ha, that's not what it's like here. We literally pay people to live our values, and to demonstrate that because we think it makes us better as a company and more impactful. So we took a look at these values, and I'll be honest I had created with the best of intentions basically some competencies, too many, that lived under these values, and when you have way too many things for people to keep track of, it's almost like having nothing at all. Which a lot of companies have also done, blow it up, put it in the hands of managers, let's assume they'll all do the right thing consistently, which doesn't happen. So what we did with the Clayman Institute is we interviewed about 20 of our leaders and we did some focus groups, and we said, look, these are the six behaviors that line up against three of our values central to performance. These behaviors are critical for all of us. It's stuff like, do you share information with other teams, or do you look for ways to integrate your work across your team or across multiple teams, depending on the scope of your job. Do you work fearlessly? Do you include others in conversations so you're driving innovative solutions and working fearlessly for your folks. >> And you know what it's not? Your style, how do you approach others, are you bossy, nothing about that, nothing about approach. You could be an introvert, an extrovert, all different styles. These are actionable behaviors around how we're going to get stuff done and be distinctive in our company. >> So, what is your advice to other tech companies when they are writing their values and thinking about how they want their employees to live out these values? >> Well it's interesting, number one, it has to result in business results, right? So, it's really easy to have a really fun time writing these but they have to make a difference in your company and mean something, otherwise why would you want to reward them? Right, they're just nice otherwise. Two, they really collectively should drive the culture of your company. So when you look at it en masse, if you see, if I get everyone doing these things, is that the culture that drives my company? Is that going to attract and retain people, and drive again the business result we want? So to me those are super, super important. But the Clayman team will take you to camp and help you with all this stuff but really also, is your language equally accessible to men and women? To introverts and extroverts? To all of your employees, to minorities, to different employee populations, because some things like, 'aggressive drivers get things done.' Now, I know a lot of women by the way, who are very aggressive drivers and get a lot of things done but certain language is sort of unconsciously attributed to men more than women, and so if you have one role model for what success looks like and it happens to be subconsciously a man that you think about, women are disadvantaged. So they really, we went so deep with them. So my main advice is, if you can, frankly I'd just become a member of the Clayman Institute fan club and try to get some consulting help from them, but there are great folks out there that do this kind of work for a living who are really helpful, because it's really hard to take a look at yourself objectively. >> Well actually I was just going to mention that, so when Monica mentioned we had monitors sitting in our most senior review of the top 150 people. When we calibrated them together a group of 30, of the next 150, we actually had two monitors sitting and writing, when are we talking about style. When are we being inconsistent between one VP and another VP And we actually, the first year, we didn't get an A. The first year we did not get an A, by any shot of the imagination. >> It makes me feel better to say probably most companies wouldn't, right? But we did not and we were brave. >> If you don't measure it you can't make a change. We've had Lori a couple times on theCUBE but the Cayman Institute does fantastic work. >> Lori was the one who guided us, and they're amazing. And I think what's interesting, we're all well-intended, wonderful executives, I mean we are well-intended, wonderful people. You look around the room, I'm going, 'we don't have bias, we're great, we're going to get an A, bring monitors in, bring them all in, this is going to be great.' At the first year they're like, mm, no, look how many inconsistencies you did over the day. And they showed us the data and we just sat there and went >> Did they record it 'cause tape don't lie >> They did not record it but I can tell you they typed faster than I could >> Lot of data, lot of data >> They came in the next year. So we did a hard look at ourselves, we talked about doing it differently, they came in, the same two people, the next year, real different. And by the way, we will continue to have them every single year. >> Well you need the reflection back. Well August, Monica, thank you so much for being on this show. It's always so much fun to have GoDaddy here on the Cube. >> Thank you >> Great. We will have more from Grace Hopper in Orlando, Florida just after this (techno music)

>> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in downtown San Francisco at the Mission Bay Convention Center at Node Summit 2017. We've been coming to Node Summit off and on for a number of years. And it's pretty amazing, the growth of this application for development. It really seems to take off. There's about 800 or 900 people here. It's kind of the limits of the facility here at Mission Bay. But we're really excited to be here. And it's not surprising to have me see Intel is here in full force. Our first guest is Monica Ene-Pietrosanu. And she is the Director of Software Engineering for Intel, welcome. >> Thank you, hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. It's definitely exciting to be here. Node is this dynamic community that grows in one year, like others can. So it's always exciting to be part one of these events. And present about the work we are doing for Node. >> So you're on a panel later on Taking Benchmarking to the Next Level. So what is that all about? >> That is part of the work we are doing for Node. And I want to mention here the word stewardship. Intel is a long time contributor in the open source communities. And has assumed a performance leadership in many of these communities. We are doing the same for Node. We are driving, we are trying to be a steward for the performance in OJS. And what this means, is we are watching to make sure that every check in that happens, doesn't impact performance. We are also optimizing Nodes, so it give the best of the hardware, Node runs best on the newest hardware that we have. And also, we are developing, right now new measures, new benchmarks which better reflect the reality of the data center use cases. The way your Node is getting used in the Cloud. The way Node is getting used in the data center. There are very few ways to measure that today. And with this fast development of the ecosystem, my team has also taken this role of working with the industry partners and coming up with realistic measures for the performance. >> Right, so these new benchmarks that you're defining around the capabilities of Node. Or are you using old benchmarks? Or how are you kind of addressing that challenge? >> We started by running what was available. And most of the benchmarks were quite, let's say, isolated. They were focused on single Node, one operation, not realistic in terms of what the measurements were being done for the data center. Especially, in the data center everything is evolving. So nothing is just running with one single computer. Everything is impacted by network latencies. We have a significant number of servers out there. We have multiple software components interacting. So it's way more complex. And then you have containers coming into the picture. And everything makes it harder and harder to evaluate from the performance perspective. And I think Node is doing a pretty good job from the performance perspective. But who's watching that it stays the same? I think performance is one of those things that you value when you don't have it, right? Otherwise you just take it as granted, like it's there. So, my team at Intel is focused on top tier scripting languages. We are part of this larger software organization called Software and Services Group. And we are, right now, optimizing and writing the performance for Python, No-gs, PHP HHVM, and for some of the top tier languages used in the data centers. So Node is actually our interesting story in terms of evolution. Because we've seen, also, an extraordinary growth. We've seen, it's probably the one who's doubled for the past three years. The community has doubled. Everything has doubled for Node, right? Even, the number of commits, it depends on which statuses you look-- >> They're all up and to the right, very steep. >> Yeah, so then it's a very fast progress which we need to keep pace with. And one thing that is important for us is to make sure that we expose the best of our hardware to the software. With Node that is taking an interesting approach. Because Node is one of, what we called CPU front end bounce. It's having a large footprint. It's one of the largest footprint applications that we've seen. And for this we want to make sure that the newest CPUs we bring to market are able to handle it. >> I was just going to say, they have Trevor Livingston on it from HomeAway. Kicked off things today. We're talking about the growth. He said a year ago, they had one Node JS project. And this is a big site that competes with, like, Air B&B. That's now owned by Expedia. Now they say, he said, they had, "15 projects in production. "22 almost in production, and 75 other internal projects." In one year, from one. So that shows pretty amazing growth and the power of the application. And from Intel's point of view, you guys are all in on cloud. You're all in on data centers. You've all seen all the adds. So you guys are really, aggressively taking on the optimization, for the unique challenges and special environment that is Cloud. Which is computing everywhere, computing nowhere. But at the end of the day, it's got to sit on somebody's servers. And there's got to be a CPU in the background. So you look at all these different languages. Why do you think Node has gone so crazy? >> I think there are several reasons. And my background is a C++ developer, coming and security. So coming into the Node space, one thing amazed me. Like, only 2% of the code is yours, when you write an application. So that is like-- >> Jeff: 2%? >> So where is the other 98% coming from? Or it's already pre developed. It's an ecosystem, you just pull in those libraries. So that's what brings, in addition to the security risks you have. It brings a fantastic time to market. So it enables you as the developer to launch an application in a matter of days, instead of months or a year. So time to market is an unbeatable proposition. And I think that's what drives this space. When you need to launch new applications faster and faster, and upgrade. For us, that's also an interesting challenge. Because we have, our super road maps are not days, right? Are years? So what we want to make sure is that we feed back into the CPU road map the developments we are seeing into this space. I have on my team, I have several principal engineers who are working with the CPU architects to make sure that we are continuously providing this information back. One thing I wanted to mention is, as you probably know, since you've been talking to other Intel people, we've been launching recently, the latest generation server, Skylake. And on this latest generation Nodes. So all the Node workloads we've been optimizing and measuring. So one point five x performance improvement, from the prior generation. So this is a fantastic boost. And this doesn't happen only from hardware. It happens from a combination of hardware and software. And we are continuing to work now with the CPU architects to make sure that the future generation also keeps space with the developments. >> It's interesting, kind of the three horsemen of computing, if you will, right? There's compute, there's store, and there's IO. And now we're working, and it's interesting that Ryan Dahl, it's funny, they brought up Ryan Dahl. We interviewed him back at the Node JS, I think back in 2011? Still one of our most popular segments on theCUBE. We do thousands of interviews a year. He's still one of the most popular. But to really rethink the IO problem, in this asynchronous form, seems to be just another real breakthrough that opens up all types of capacity in compute and store. When you don't have to sit and wait. So that must be another thing that you guys have addressed from coming from the hardware and the software perspective? >> You are right on spot, because I think Node, comparing to other scripting languages brings more into the picture, the whole platform. So it's not only a CPU. It's also a networking. It's also related to storage. Also, it makes the entire platform to shine if it's optimized to the right capability. And we've been investing a lot into this. We have all our work is made available is open source. All our contributions are up-streamed back into the mainstream. We also started an effort to work with the industry in developing these new workloads. So last year at Node Interactive, we launched one new workload, benchmark, for Node. Which we called Node DC. With his first use case, which is an employee information system, simulating what a large data center distributed application will be doing. This year, now at Node Summit, we will be presenting the updated version of that, one point zero, this time. It was version zero point nine, last time. Where we added support for containers. We included several capabilities to be able to run, in a configural manner, in as many configurations as needed. And we are also contributing this back. We submitted it to the Node Foundation. So it becomes an official benchmark for the Node Foundation. Which means, every night, after the build system runs, this will be run as part of the regressions. To make sure that the performance doesn't degrade. So that's part of our work. And that's also continuing an effort we started with what we call the languages performance portal. If you go to languagesperformance.intel.com we have an entire lab behind that portal, in which every night we build this top tier scripting languages. Including Python, including Node, including PHP, and we run performance regressions on the latest Intel architecture. So we are contributing the results back into the open source community, to make sure that the community is aware if any regression happens. And we have a team of engineers who jumps on those regression center root causes and analyzes it. So to figure it out. >> So Monica, but we're almost out of time. But before I let you go, we talked before we got started, I love Kim Stevenson, I've interviewed her a bunch of times. And one of the conversations that we had was about Moore's Law. And that Moore's Law's really an attitude. And it's kind of a way to do things more than hitting the physical limitations on chips, which I think is a silly conversation. You're in a constantly, the role of constantly optimizing. And making things better, faster, cheaper. As you sit back and look at, kind of, what you've done to date, and looking forward, do you see any slowdown in this ability to continue to tweak, optimize, tweak, optimize? And just get more and more performance out of some of these new technologies? >> I wouldn't see slow down. At least from where I sit on the software side. I'm seeing only acceleration. So, the hardware brings a 30%, 40% improvement. We add, on top of that, the software optimizations. Which bring 10%, 20% improvements as well. So that continuously is going on. And I am not seeing it improving. I'm seeing it becoming more, there is a need for customization. So that's where when we design the workloads, we need to make them customizable. Because there are different use cases across the data center customers. So they are used differently. And we want to make sure that we reflect the reality. That's how they're in the world. And that's how our customers, our partners can also leverage them, to measure something that's meaningful for them. So in terms of speed, now, we want to make sure that we fully utilize our CPU. And we grow to more and more cores and increase frequency. We also grow to more capabilities. And our focus is also to make the entire platform to shine. And when we talk about platform we talk about networking. We talk about non volatile memory. We talk about storage as well as CPU. >> So Gordon's safe. You're safe, Gordon Moore. Your law's still solid. Monica, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and good luck on your panel later this afternoon. >> Thank you very much for having me here. It was pleasure. >> Absolutely, all right, Jeff Frick checking in from Node Summit 2017 in San Francisco. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage, extended coverage of the V IP gala event. Earlier in the day, we were at the Monaco crypto summit, where we had 11 years, all the fault leaders here in MoCo coming together. It's a global event. It's an inner circle. It's a beginning, it's an ELG overall event. It's a kernel of the best of the best from finance entrepreneurship government coming together here with the gala event at the yacht club in Monaco. And we got a great lineup here. We have Sherman elder wish from decentralized investment group here with me. She and I was just talking and we're gonna have a great conversation. Welcome to the cube. Thank >>You so much. Thank you for having me. >>It's kind of our laid back to not only have an anchored desk, but we're kind of have conversations. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is, you know, the technology innovation around decentralized, right? You've been an entrepreneur 9, 9, 9 years. Yes. Plus you're in a region of the world right now where it's exploding. You're in Dubai. Tell your story. You're in Dubai. There's a lot of action what's happening. >>So to Dubai is, is really the bridge between the east and the west. And it's grown. I've, I've had the privilege of witnessing Dubai's growth for over 16 years now. So I've been based in Dubai for 16 years. I'm originally from Jordan, lived in 11 countries. You can call me a global nomad home is where my suitcases and where I, you know, where I'm, I'm literally with my friends and community and the work that I do. So I've been there and I've witnessed this grow through working with the government there as well. So nine years ago, I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship. I specialize in art and education. Also, I work extensively now in decentralized with decentralized investment group. So we specialize in defi game five and also digital assets. So it's a beautiful time to be in Dubai right now. And witness that growth in web three, there's going to be a summit that's actually happening in September. And so it's attracting all the global leaders there with the government there. So they're really investing in, >>You know, the date on that. >>Sorry, >>You know the date on that? Yeah. Oh, >>September. They're going to be September, either 27th or >>28th. So later in the month, >>Yes. Later in the month of September. Okay. So it's very exciting to be a part >>Of that. Well, I love you're on here cause I want, first of all, you look fabulous. Great. Oh, thank you. Great event. Everyone's dressed up here. But one of the things I've been passionate about is women in tech. And I know you've got a project now you're working on this. Yes. Not only because it's it's needed. Yeah, but they're taking over. There's a lot of growth. Absolutely. The young entrepreneurs, young practitioners, absolutely young women all around the world. Absolutely. And we did a five region women in tech on March 7th with Stanford university, amazing. And Amazon web services. And I couldn't believe the stories. So we're gonna do more. And I want to get your take on this because there are stories that need to be told. Absolutely. What are, what are the, some of the stories that you're seeing, some of the, some of the cautionary tales, some of the successes, >>Well, you have, I mean the middle east right now is really a space, especially in Dubai, in the UAE, the growth of women in entrepreneurship, the support that we have from incubators, there, there is a hunger for growth and learning and innovation. And that is the beauty of being there. There are so many incredible stories, not one that I could say right now, but each and every story is exquisite and extraordinary. And what's really amazing is that you have the community there that supports one another, especially women in tech. I'm, I'm actually one of the co-founders of made for you global, which is a tech platform, which attracts entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, and really helping them kind of grow to their potential or maximize their potential. And we're actually going to have it on web three as well and integrate it within the blockchain. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of passion for, for growth in women, in tech and, and there's so many incredible stories to come, not just one, so many. And I invite you to come to Dubai so I can introduce you to all >>These incredible. So I'm really glad you're inclusive about men. >>Of course, we're inclusive >>About men, >>You know, men and women. I mean, it's a community that brings together these ideas. >>Yeah. I will say I had to go the microphone one time because I love doing the Stanford women in data science, but they, and we have female, a host. I just wanna do the interviews right there. So smart. I said, Chuck, can we have the female interviews cuz you know, like, okay, but they included me. Oh yes. But in all serious. Now this is a major force because women entrepreneurship make up 50% of the, the target audience of all products. Absolutely. So if, why, why isn't there more developers and input into the products and policies, right? That shape our society. This has been one of those head scratching moments and we're making progress, but not fast enough. >>Absolutely. And you know what, especially after COVID, so after COVID we all learned the lessons of the hybrid models of being more flexible of being more innovative of being making use of our time more effectively. And we've witnessed like an increase in women in tech over the years and especially in web three and decentralized investment group invest heavily into women and in tech as well, >>Give some examples of some things you're working on right now, projects you're investing in. So >>We're, well, everything that we do is inclusive of women. So with game five, for example, we specialize greatly in game five through our subsidiary company, based in the us, it's called X, Y, Z, Z Y it's gaming. And actually many of our creative team are women who are the developers behind the scenes who are bringing it to life. A lot of basically we're trying to educate the public as well about how to get meta mask wallets and to enter into this field. It's all about education and growing that momentum to be able to be more and more inclusive. >>Do you think you can help us get a cube host out there? Of course, of course they gotta be dynamic. Of course smart of course and no teleprompter of >>Course. And we would love for you to come so that we can really introduce you to >>All well now, now that COVID is over. We got a big plan on going cube global, digging it out in 2019, we had London, Bahrain, Singapore, amazing Dubai, Korea. Amazing. And so we wanted to really get out there and create a node, right? And open source kind of vibe where right. The folks all around the world can connect through the network effects. And one thing I noticed about the women in tech, especially in your area is the networking is really high velocity. Absolutely people like the network out there is that, do you see that as well? Absolutely. >>Because it's a, it's a city of transition, you know? So that's the beauty of Dubai, it's positioning power. And also it's a very innovative hub. And so with all of these summits that are coming up, it's attracting the communities and there's lots of networking that happens there. And I think more and more we're seeing with web three is that it is all about the community. It's all about bringing everyone together. >>Well, we got people walking through the sets. See, that's the thing that about a cocktail party. You got people walking through the set that's good. Made, had some color. Rachel Wolfson is in the house. Rachel is here. That's Rachel Woodson. If you didn't recognize her she's with coin Telegraph. Oh bless. I don't know who they, the Glo is as they say, but that's how he went cool to me. All right. So betting back to kinda what you're working on. Have you been to Silicon valley lately? Because you're seeing a lot of peering where people are looking at web three and saying, Hey, Silicon valley is going through a transition too. You're seeing beacons of outposts, right? Where you got people moving to Miami, you got Dubai, you got Singapore, you got, you know, Japan, all these countries. Now there's a, there's a network effect. >>Absolutely. It's all about. And honestly, when I see, I mean, I've been to Miami so many times this year for all the web three events and also in Austin and GTC as well. And what you see is that there is this ripple effect that's happening and it is attracting more and more momentum because the conversations are there and the openness to work together. It's all about partnerships and collaboration. This is a field which is based on collaboration communities. >>Awesome. What are some of the advice advice you have for women out there that are watching around being an entrepreneur? Because we were talking before we came on camera about it's hard. It's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart. Yeah. As Theresa Carlson, a friend of mine used, used to say all the time entrepreneurship was a rollercoaster. Of course, what's your advice don't give up or stay strong. What's your point of view? >>Honestly, if you're passionate about what you do. And I know it sounds very cliche. It's really important to stay focused, moving forward, always. And really it's about partnerships. It's about the ability to network. It's the ability to fail as well. Yeah. And to learn from your mistakes and to know when to ask for help. A lot of the times, you know, we shy away from asking for help or because we're embarrassed, but we need to be more open to failing, to growing and to also collaborating with one another. >>Okay. So final question for you while I got, by the way, you're an awesome guest. Oh, thank you. What are you what's next for you? What are you working on right now? Next year? What's on your goal list. What's your project? What's >>Your top goal? Oh my gosh. >>Top three, >>Top three, definitely immersing myself more into web three. Web three is definitely the future getting made for you global on the ground and running in terms of the networking aspect in a female entrepreneurship, more and more giving back as well. So using web three for social good. So a lot more charitable, innovative kind of campaigns that we hope to host within the web three community to be able to educate, to innovate and also help those that are, that need it the most as >>Well. Shaman, thank you for coming on the cube. I really appreciate it. And thanks for coming on. Thank you >>So much. >>I'm so grateful. Okay. You watching the queue, we're back in the more coverage here at the after party of the event, it's the VIP gala with prince Albert and all the top guests in Monica leaning into crypto I'm John furier. Thanks for watching.