(cheerful music) >> Hello. Welcome to this special nutanix.next coverage, theCUBE. We are in our remote studios in Napa today, with some two great guests talking about hybrid multicloud what that costs them. Tanu Sood, who's the senior director of product marketing, attending. Great to see you, and Saveen Pakala, VP of product management for platform at Nutanix. Great to have you on. A lot of cool things happening with hybrid cloud architectures. When people want to have more cloud and want it more invisible, they want it faster, they want it on multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. So welcome to theCUBE coverage. >> Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having us here. >> Tanu if I start with you first on the, on the, what is driving the hybrid multicloud architecture? Is it just the fact there's clouds out there or are specific things that you're seeing that customers really want that's a need for their business? >> So you're right, John, over the past few years, we've seen cloud investments really taking off. In fact, last year in the midst of the pandemic, when the economy was showing a downturn, cloud spending was up by 30%. So organizations are looking to cloud for speed, for scale, for elasticity and for app modernization. However, the same organizations would also tell you that there are some workloads that will continue to stay on-prem either in the near term or permanently. So what they're really talking about is this hot notion of hybrid cloud, which is interoperability between their on-prem investments, their existing investments, and their public cloud investments. In fact, I would say Gardner in 2020, they did a survey and 75% of organizations actually talked about hybrid cloud being the preferred ID operating model and an overwhelming majority of those 80% who had public cloud in their infrastructure, They had two or more public cloud providers in their space. So that's the multicloud aspect of it. So whether it's happening as a happenstance audit to deliberate ID strategy, what we are seeing organizations take on, is this hybrid multicloud infrastructure. >> It's interesting. It's so funny to see the dynamics of the evolution, cause it's like, oh yeah, we got some thought, I want more cloud. I want more cloud. I want more cloud. Wait a minute. I want to give up the on premises piece. We've got Amazon, we've got- okay, we've got multiple things happening. How do you pull it all together? So Saveen, I got to ask you the blockers. What it is holding back? Because I mean, it's kind of like it happened, right? People replatforming with cloud, they're not giving up their data centers and or the on-premise component. >> Yeah. What's the blocker. Is it inertia? >> Yeah. Is it time? Is it evolution? Is it skills? What's that, what's holding everyone back? >> Yeah, you know, John, over the last several months quarters, what we have seen is that there are four typical issues that sort of come up. When customers start to look at their hybrid multicloud journey, the first one is, how do I move my on-prem applications, workloads to public cloud? Do I need to refactor the applications as I do that? How do I move that application from one cloud to the other and potentially move it back to the data center? And because the other link platform are disparate between these different destinations, it's usually very challenging. The next question then you come up with is Hey, after I move the application to the public cloud, what about management? Right? It, it is going to be different. It has its own island of infrastructure. The management tooling is different, the skillsets required are different, processes are different. So that becomes another challenge. Then comes the service levels. I'm still responsible for all the service levels, from a backup perspective. DR, security, performance that, you know, I was responsible for on-prem. I'm still responsible for those in the public cloud. And then lastly, I would say, you know, customers want to know that their investment is protected, right? As they move the workloads all around, they want to know that the licenses would follow them. They can actually take advantage of the licenses. they've already procured and not have to procure something new just to run the same workload. So those are some of the challenges that we've seen come up. >> I mean, it's always good to chat with you guys because I remember covering Nutanix back in 2010, there was kind of a new thing and everyone got on the same bandwidth and copied the hyperconvergence. And it was very similar on a whole nother level. It seems now there's another inflection point. I want to get your reaction, Tanu. You can, you can weigh in. That'd be great too. And get your reactions. Well, this whole shift from design thinking, which has been great for, for a decade or so to there's a whole other kind of conversation around system thinking and systems thinking is about platforms and it's about outcomes. But now with what you guys are discussing and launching this year, that next, is it's a systems concept. It's distributed computing. This is kind of a new kind of mindset. How do you guys see that evolving in the customer base? And how do you talk about that? Because this is something that is coming up, kind of like that design thinking mantra. It's like systems thinking, think about the impacts. Can you guys weigh in on your reactions to that? >> Oh yeah. So, you know, when you look at the systems level problem, right, it's really that of having the same platform, you know, be available at that multiple locations, wherever you want to run your workloads. That's not the underpin Penang or the foundation, if you will, of your system. And we've done, done just that with clusters, we have basically taken our hyper-converged infrastructure stack plus the hypervisor, plus the management stack, you know, that was running on-prem and we have essentially made it available on the public cloud. Right. So, so that's really the special thing about that is that it's a single infrastructure and single management plane across your private cloud and a public cloud, which really helps organizations to accelerate the hybrid cloud journey. >> And it was the impact for customers could be next, if you have that single layer, it's unify. >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, you know, the problems and the challenges that I mentioned earlier, customers will be able to address all of them with, by leveraging something like flustered, sorry, customers will be able to deploy their workloads on private cloud or public cloud without having to, you know, have disparate management models, right. They can have a single, simple and consistent management model between private cloud and public cloud. They are, they will be able to meet the same service levels that they've been able to on-premise, whether it's VR, whether it's backup, whether it's security, whether it's performance and all along knowing that their investment is protected with Nutanix. As you know, we have licensed for affordability of owners, software licenses between private and public cloud. So these are all the benefits that are, that are very real. And, you know, customers really value when they think about overall problem statement, they have a can. >> And what's your reaction to systems mindset, system thinking in terms of customers and other, A list, if you're looking at hybrid cloud. >> Yeah. So John, as you talked about, right, we started from a place of making infrastructure invisible. You just taking a read that complexity of infrastructure. And now we have evolved it to the next level where we are really making clouds invisible. This whole idea of you could be sitting on any cloud, it could be private cloud, it could be any public kind of, multiple public clouds. You don't have to worry about the complexity. There's the software layer, layer that's sitting on top of that. That's really making that underlying layer invisible to you so that you can just get about doing your job. It's all about business outcome at the end of the day. >> By the way, I love the invisible mindset because that's also like, that's what DevOps infrastructure's code was supposed to be; make things invisible, make them programmable. And we got to see serverless and functions coming out. People are really getting excited by the ease of ability to just provision resources. This is a major wave, that's going to have a major impact to enterprises. How has this specifically impacting this hybrid cloud architecture? What do you guys do to make that invisible? Because customers are all like, no, one's deny- denying it's happening. They know like, okay, we know what's happening, like, but they don't know what to do. They're like, how do I start? Who do I hire? What do I change? What do I automate? These are questions. How do you guys see that? >> Yeah, look, I think customers repeatedly tell us that, Hey, ultimately I invest a lot in really making my enterprise IT repeatable, reliable and predictable, right? So after they're invested in the process, the tooling, the people, they want to be able to leverage that regardless of, you know, where the IT direction takes them. When it comes to public cloud, they won't be able to take the same investment that they've made and be able to leverage them and capitalize that on the public cloud. And that's really, you know, the problem statement that we're really focused on. Just making sure that your point to making the infrastructure invisible has to do with, you know, having a platform that hides all the complexity underneath and provides a simple, consistent, you know, framework, if you will, for the applications and the management, the people and the tooling. >> Saveen, tell me about Nutanix clusters. What's that about? What's the value? What's the pitch there, what's it- What's it all about? >> Yeah. In a, in a, in a nutshell, you know, clusters is simply Nutanix software stack delivered on public cloud. Really it's a, it's, it includes our ECI or the POS hyperconverged infrastructure, AHV hypervisor, and prison management plan. And it's the same stack that we have been, that we actually introduced 10 years ago, run by thousands of customers. And they've taken the exact same reliable, big stack. And we had available on the public cloud. And with that, you know, customers get some of those benefits that we talked about earlier. >> And it, talk about the use cases because everyone's talking about day one, day two operations, shift left for security. If I bring that stack into the cloud, what is the use cases that emerge just for the customer? >> Yeah, so John, that definitely some patterns that have emerged with customers you will have with cloud. And in fact, our viewers, won't be surprised to hear that disaster recovery is foremost. A lot of organizations are starting with disaster recovery on public cloud with mechanics clusters. This helps them avoid maintenance and investments in a secondary data center, just purely for disaster recovery, but it also gives some geographical separation and it gives them the regional cloud options so that they can still meet the data residency requirement, which as you know, is very key for especially companies that based in MIA Interestingly, most of these organizations that are looking at disaster recovery in public cloud using Nutanix clusters are also leveraging their investments in clusters and their cloud instances to drive capacity bursting. So using it when Dev desk or seasonal on-demand bursting. So when you're not using it for fail-over, for disaster recovery, the same cloud investments are being optimized for cloud capacity bursting. And then finally this workload migration, right? So either it's for data center consolidation or migration, or for app modernization. Our customers are looking to migrate some of their workloads to the cloud, but they want to do that quickly or in a timely fashion. So the idea is that you migrate them as is without any app refactoring right away with clusters, and then once you're on the cloud, then you can refactor at your own pace. You can modernize some components of your applications on an as needed basis. So those are the three use cases that we are seeing disaster recovery, capacity bursting, workload migration, but then to your point about day one and day two, operations. Day two operations that are really, really key. When you have public cloud investments, private cloud investments, and multiple public clouds in the mix, it could be really complex to have your IT operations in play, right? So this notion that Saveen alluded to earlier of a unified infrastructure and management plane that oversees your public cloud, multiple public cloud and private cloud in infrastructure, as well as provide operations, not just for your VMs, but also for your containers and storage is key for our customers. So, so this whole notion of easing up on day zero and day one operations, but also day two and day end operations is top of mind for our customers. >> That's really well put, I think that, that'll tying that layer, that horizontally scalable control plane, whatever you want to call it, it really creates a lot of value from the blocking and tackling meat and potatoes disaster recovery, to enabling the migration and replatforming, and then refactoring of those apps. I mean, this is the modernization trend. This is what people are talking about. So this is what people want. This, this is hard to do. And seems hard. Maybe it's easier with you guys. What, what's, what's holding it all back? Because these...I'm sold. I mean, I've been preaching this for years. Like this is finally coming at scale, and then, is it, is it multi-cloud that's the bottleneck or is that not yet fleshed out? Is it more, architectures are not ready? The containerization or the state stateful data apps? Aren't the tools aren't there? Can you guys give me a sense of why it's not going faster? Or is it going faster? >> Yeah. So maybe I'll chime in and let Tanu as well. So we, we introduced clusters late last year and we have seen a lot of momentum and a ton of interest from our customer base. And, you know, for the use cases that Tanu just talked about, that's already happening with many customers that are already well on their hybrid multicloud journey. And, you know, ultimately it comes down to just, you know, where the organization is in their journey. And, you know, especially if you're a Nutanix customer, very familiar with the stack, you know, for them taking the next step, taking, you know, with clusters in AWS, it's actually not that big of a jump, right. And, but if you're not on the platform, then you know, you, you know, some of the challenges we discussed earlier are the things that get in the way. >> It's almost like day one operations tend to is like innovation and day, day two operations is rain it in, you know, get the value. >> Yeah. >> Day one, get going and do some experimentation and day two, make it all operate cleanly. >> Exactly. >> You know, oftentimes, you know, we have conversations even in the forest. So second conversation, the topic gravitates towards app refactoring. When you know that there's a much more heavyweight and complex time consuming project. You can actually get to cloud without pre-factoring and do it at your own pace. And, you know, on your own terms, really. >> I think the migration thing is a huge thing. I mean, at that, I see a lot of that. And then once they get to the cloud, they go, Wow, I could do a lot more here. >> Yeah. >> And that just spawns more. It's a step function value there. And then as open source continues to grow, oh my, it's just, it's just a successful and we don't overthink it, just get to the cloud, understand the distributed nature of the on-premise piece. And boom, then go from there, you see that, that accelerated value distraction. >> And as Tanu said earlier, I mean, we are taking a much, much more of a holistic and uplevel view of management in this hybrid multicloud environment, including non Nutanix environments, right? So we're not stopping at just a Nutanix environment. So just to be answer, you're talking about containers, you're talking multicloud, but also talking about non Nutanix environments that you may have and, you know, give you that one sort of, you know, one single plain of glass, if you will. >> It's DevOps happening at the Dev is I've always been there, now, the OS is getting stronger and stronger. Now it's changing too the intelligent edge is around the corner. That's just another edge. That's just another premise in my mind. So again, this flexes with what you guys are thinking about. So I think the edge brings up a lot of action too. Big time. Exciting news. Let's extend this into the news. So you guys have some exciting news. Talk about what's new, what's the big stories what's breaking. What's exciting. What's the top stories coming this year? >> Sure, sure. So since we launched clusters late, late last year on AWS, we have focused on a couple of things. One is expanding the availability, right? So we have added multiple regions. Now the total number of regions, AWS regions that we support is 23. We also recently added support for AWS gov cloud for a US federal customers. And we have FedRAMP moderate authorization. So that's, which is very key for that customer base. We also added some really new and exciting capabilities such as elastic VR. Some of that Tana already mentioned. Hibernate and resumed, which is a very unique capability from clusters where you can hibernate and our clusters and, you know, give up all the betterment in order to compute, but still have your data intact in as three, just so you can resume it very quickly whenever the need arises again. And you know, last but not the least, we are super excited about bringing clusters to Microsoft Azure. This has been a long and strong partnership with Microsoft. And as you heard in the keynote, we are actually starting the preview at this event, and, you know, opening up to the customer so that they can get that firsthand feeling for the product and work with us in bringing the product to GA. >> And John- >> Multicloud world. Oh, sorry. Tanu, go ahead. >> No, so this is exactly what I was going to say. This is multicloud coming to pair, right? So we talked about hybrid cloud and now here we are with multicloud options for you. >> What's interesting is that everyone always, you know, as the trends change, you know, this is changing, that company's shifting and you guys have evolved beautifully. And I think the way people are leveraging cloud really shows their strengths and run the cloud actually highlights the strengths. If you play it properly, you can survive. I mean, look at snowflake. They don't even have a cloud. There are data cloud now. So, you know, if you bring, if customers can bring their, their architecture to the cloud, they can actually do a lot of re, rearchitecting and rechanging to modernizing their business. This is something that's kind of only in the past few years, that's come up. This is quite a big trend. Do you guys see the same thing happening faster or is it just we're inside the ropes? And we love it so much. (laughs) >> Yeah. Like I said, earlier, organizations that are at different levels of the journey, but we're seeing happening all around us. And we're embracing that. We're actually embracing that trend, Enabling that trend because we truly believe hybrid cloud is the more practical reality. And we want customers to have the cloud on their own terms and not feel like they have to, you know do something just because they're forced to, or they're not able to, cost-effectively or even technically for that matter. >> Oh John >> Okay, well- Go ahead, Tanu, sorry. >> I was just going to say that our CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, puts it really well. The cloud is brilliant operating model, right. So it really should not be about variable workloads. It should just be an easy operational model for you to engage with. >> Yeah. I think you guys have a great strategy. And I think the invisible really rings true with me as well as that horizontally scalable control plane, because the innovation is happening, but the operations have to be reigned in and support the expansion as well. Which means you have to kind of focus on the fact that you've got to reign in the data and you've got to make it invisible. If you look at Lambda functions, and you've got serverless trend booming with the edge, it's got to be invisible and programmable. It just has to be. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> Great stuff. All right. Final question for you both, if you don't mind. Tanu we'll start with you. >> Okay. >> What's the big story this year at .next? If you had to summarize it and tell your friend that you're driving in the elevator up to the top floor, what's the big story that should be talked about? That's being talked about this year at .next? >> Taking unified infrastructure and management and having Azure in preview is really the big news here. So go to nutanix.com/azure, to learn more, show us your interest there, sign up for a test drive. It really is a very easy way for you to experience a product in action. And you'll just see how simple it is to deploy a hybrid cloud with clusters on Azure and under an hour. >> Saveen, final word for you. What's the big news? What's the takeaway? >> Yeah, look, I, I would say that, you know, your cloud on your terms is really the big news. That's driving everything they're doing back in the office billing products and ultimately, you know, delivering or making that whole hybrid cloud journey a reality for our customers. >> Tanu and Saveen, thank you for coming on, sharing that commentary on theCUBE coverage at .next. Thanks for coming up. >> Thanks so much John. Thanks for all. >> It was our pleasure. >> Thanks for watching. More coverage, stay tuned. (cheerful music)

(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>>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

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to .NEXT everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day two of .NEXT. Dr. John Bates is here. He's the CEO of TestPlant, and author of Thingalytics. Sir, welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks. >> Nice to have you on. >> Nice to be here. >> Thingalytics, everybody's talking about things. >> This thing, that thing, the refrigerator, the iode things. What's Thingalytics? >> Well, things, i.e. connected devices, sensors and so on. They're not very interesting unless you actually do something with them. So you search through all that data that's coming out for the opportunities and threats to your business, for example, and then you act on it, while you've got time and perhaps, beat your competitor. So, Thingalytics is about smart, big data analytics, and the internet of things coming together. >> Okay, and what's the premise of the book? >> Well the premise of the book is, you know, everybody thinks, I mean if it's one message from it, it's IoT is not so hard to get into. So get started. You know, start small, and here's some lessons of how you can do it. And here's some stories from different industries of how thought leaders, you know, like Coca Cola, or GE, or many different companies, Medtronic, in different industries have actually got started and really been extremely disruptive in what they've done. >> And is this getting started, is this all for companies, or are you seeing individuals that can also participate? >> You know, I do have a chapter in there about the Smarthome. So, obviously that's the aspect where the individual is going to come. But you know, I think it's really the real winner in this will be the industrial and the enterprise, Internet of Things. I guess that the key message is for business leaders. >> Do you think that given that there's, the internet of things requires things, and there's so many things that are installed by these big, industrial companies that the whole IoT thing will be maybe less of a disruption than it will be an evolution of companies like GE, and Siemens and Hitachi, and guys like that. Is that a reasonable premise, or will we see a whole new wave of companies? Certainly we'll see startups come in, but will they attack these big industrial giants, that have been around for a hundred years? >> You know, this is a really great question, and I think that, at the moment, the opportunity is in the hands of the big buyer. You know, keynoting at .NEXT, Bill McDermott coming in to do his presentation. I sold my IoT platform company to SAP. And why, for example has SAP got an amazing opportunity? Because they've got all these applications, they've done an amazing job of taking ERP and adding a whole load of applications: financial planning, supply chain, business networks. But those applications model the real world. But they're not connected to the real world. So what happens when you take a model of a financial model about the value of a factory or a mine, and connect it to the real world. Suddenly, it's not theoretical. It actually is calculating in real time, the value of those assets. The supply chain is really about that. So, SAP is an unbelievable opportunity. IBM has an unbelievable opportunity. GE has an unbelievable opportunity. But it's going to be how they execute, and is someone going to come in, and do something unbelievably disruptive we haven't even thought about. So, those guys need to make all the running right now to really protect themselves. >> I wonder if you could comment on this. I see some of the execution risks as what Jeffrey Immelt said, "I went to bed an industrial giant," "and woke up a software company." >> John: (laughs) Yes. >> Wow, it's hard to be a successful software company. So, is that one of the many execution risks? Are there others? >> I think you're absolutely right. I mean, if you take GE for example, my friend, Bill Ruh. He's the chief digital officer, the CDO of GE Digital. >> Dave: We know him, yeah, sure. >> Yeah, he's awesome. Completely new business, but it's really hard. I think that's taken longer than they expected to build up that Predix platform. And are they going to be the people, it depends what business you're in. If you're the business of buying aircraft engines, then rather than buying an aircraft engine, you want to buy engine as a service. So that's the kind of the thing that maybe you'll buy from GE, or maybe it's one of GE's partners and GE provides the infrastructure. But I think they've learned that's really much harder than they thought. And I think everybody's sort of discovering that. It's not so much the thingalytics, I've realized, it's the thingonomics, the economics of the internet things. That's the really important thing to get right. >> We actually worked with GE when they were coming out with the Industrial Internet, and we did a lot of interviews. There's some of these barriers that we're going to hit along the way. As a matter of fact, at Wikibon, our team that works on it, they call it the Internet of Things and People because there's so much that needs to happen to be able to move forward. Some of them are just old industrial things, some of them are regulations, some of them are the mindsets. How do you see some of these, what do you see as some of the major barriers, and how do we knock them down to be able to accelerate this even more? >> Absolutely. Well, first, you're absolutely right. One of the key barriers is a cultural barrier, or a, oh, that's just too hard, getting back to why did I write Thingalytics. And I think it's a question of people have just got to get started, not try and boil the ocean, and try and get some successful projects going. But definitely there's a cultural thing, and you just have to get those people together that think differently. And there's a reason why this new role of the Chief Digital Officer was created, but you can have many Chief Digital Officers throughout your company, just sort of get them together with that thought. One of the other things I can bring up that is really, really hard and why I went from being in the core of the IoT platform world into a company that's a software testing company, when you're going to launch this stuff, how do you, de-risk it, how do you make sure, in this world where there's all these sensors at the edge, all these strange mobile devices on the front end, and the cloud in the middle, how do you make sure you test that? It's a really complicated distributed architecture, that requires completely new technology. You don't even own the code, so how do you test that? So there's a whole load of issues there, but I think you have to put at the heart of it, think differently, think digitally. >> So what's the company you sold to SAP? Tell us about that. >> So the company's called Plat.One, and it was one of the leaders in platforms, software platforms, to enable Internet of Things application. So the idea is that you're going to build an Internet of Things application. You could start and hardwire, start writing some code and hardwire against all these devices and sensors, but then you start shipping your applications. What about if you made the wrong decisions? What about if you spent years just writing all the integrations to your factory floor, or your logistics networks? So, there's a whole load of common protocols out there, in machine to machine, and they call it a new Internet of Things protocols. Plat.One, new and could talk to all these protocols and make machines talk to each other. It could virtualize that, so that you disconnect those protocols from the application you write. So you're modeling things like, in a Smart city, truck and streetlamps, rather than bits and bytes. So then when you change the implementation from one city to another, you're future-proofed. And then graphical tools to model and plug them together, and a platform that manages microservices at the edge and the cloud. So you're managing an adaptive platform that you can place logic, depending on what it is. And that enabled SAP to rapidly roll out ITOs. >> And your company had customers? >> Yeah, a lot of customers, people like, you know, a great customer, Pirelli. Pirelli, obviously a tire manufacturer as you know them, but what they can do, if they plug sensors into their tires and have telematics boxes on tops of trucks or vehicles, suddenly they can go to the fleet management markets and sell them big data analytics because they know where the trucks are, they know how they're being driven, and what's more, rather than selling you a tire, they could lease you a tire as a service because they can track it, they know how much use you've got out of it. Unbelievable new thingonomic models. So, that's an example, flextronics, T-Systems, we had a whole lot of interesting smart cities using it, logistics, manufacturers. So yeah, it was a great, but early stage company, and you have to ask yourself the question, can you, as a small company, win, or would you be better off partnering with an SAP with that unbelievable reach? >> One of the things, I've got a networking background, we hear all these new protocols and the maturity there, there's the security risk there. I hear the fleet of trucks that was like, oh wait, I might turn off these sensors or do something malicious. The surface area has just grown by orders of magnitude. How do we address this as the industry? What is some of the advice you're giving for this? >> You're absolutely right, 'cause when we were talking about the issues earlier, that's a corker, isn't it, you know, the security of it. And as a Tesla owner, it was great when hackers tried to hack into the Tesla and they couldn't. All they could do was make the horn go beep. Which you can do from your app on your phone, anything that was publicly there, but couldn't take control of the car. That was great, that was nice. But with all this highly distributed model, you've got to be able to have end-to-end security. So in Plat.One for example, we had the ability to have role-based, end-to-end security right from the application to the device. And that was part of the platform, so you got that for free. But you've got to make sure that's the case in your applications. >> What's the opportunity for jobs in the growing IoT economy? >> You know, IoT giveth and IoT taketh away. (Dave laughs) We're all thinking let's bring more jobs back to America, which is a political thing at the moment. But are these jobs are going to be replaced by robots? I mean, is there a global issue, which is, are these jobs going to be replaced by robots, and by algorithims? The answer is yes, but on the other hand, are more jobs going to be created? Are people going to become much more productive? So I think humans are going to become more productive, for sure, for things like smart factories, smart cities, and life's going to get better in smart cities, but yeah, we're also going to lose jobs. I draw an analogy to trading, financial markets trading, where we used to have traders in the pits waving pieces of paper, then it went to Bloomburg terminals where people entered their trades automatically, then it went to algorithmic trading and high frequency trading where algorithms run it. Still humans involved, but less and less. But the humans are more productive and more coordinated. >> Hey, what if we put a 30% tax on all IoT-related initiatives, that would help preserve jobs. (John laughs) So tell-- >> Wouldn't slow down innovation or corporate profit or anything like that. >> Hey, here's an idea for you, Since we're in Washington I thought I'd throw out some good ideas. >> (laughs) Yes, exactly, very topical. >> So, tell us about your software testing company, TestPlant. >> So, the reason I was really excited to join TestPlant is there's this new world, you put IoT together with the mobile world and the cloud world, and you have the world of digital. How do you make sure that in this new digital enterprise that everybody's going to compete in, that you're, how do you make sure you're doing well, and how do you make sure your stuff works, and how do you make sure you're beating your competitors? So, TestPlant's all about end-to-end testing of the digital experience. It's taking testing to a new level, 'cause if you think about testing, it used to be about, does your code work? Now, it's about, are you offering up an unbelievable, delightful digital experience to your customers, because testing now has become a profit center. It's the differentiator between you doing an amazing job of launching an app and getting five stars in the app store, or crashing and burning because something's gone down, or there's a usability issue or there's a problem. So that's what we do, we test applications using artificial intelligence through the eye of the user, we actually, our algorithms actually use the applications and connect to the APIs and can take control and automate the testing process and discover these business metrics and show customers what good really is. >> So John, you were the founder of Plat.One, is that right? >> So I was an early joiner of Plat.One, I was the CEO, I wasn't the founder, we have two amazing founders. >> Okay, but you helped do the initial raise? >> Yes, exactly, and I took it from an early interesting technology to the company that got bought by SAP >> Made it viable, and sellable, you're an investor, I heard you say. >> John: Yes. Okay, now you're an author, you're CEO now of an more established company, right? >> John: Yes. >> Jack-of-all-trades here, well, maybe that's not a fair term, but you do a lot of different things. What are your thoughts on which things you enjoy the most, where do you see all of this headed? >> Well-- >> Polymath is the word I was looking for. (John laughs) >> Well, I started off actually as a professor, a university professor, and I took some of my research and started my first company. I loved building a start-up from scratch, and taking that as a first streaming analytics or real-time analytics company, and I then spent over a decade as a C-level executive in public software companies. But I haven't had so much fun as what I'm doing right now. It's beautiful, it's sort of mid-sized, really great private equity, backers, the Carlyle group, so I love what I'm doing right now, it's definitely my favorite gig, so far, I think that's the nice sweet spot for me. >> That's great, well, John, we love having big brains in the Cube, Stu and I, and it rubs off a little bit, at least we think it does, so thanks very much for coming on. >> John: Thank you gentlemen. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Nutanix NEXTconf, this is the Cube.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C. It's theCUBE covering DotNext Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the district everybody, I'm Dave Allante with Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, and we Extract the Signal from the Noise. We're here, this is day two of the Nutanix.NEXTConf, #NEXTConf, Chris Hsu is here, sorry Calvin Hsu is here, VP of Product Marketing at Citrix. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, nice to be here. >> So, you're up on stage earlier today right? A lot of good action here at the show. Talk about Citrix, and what you guys are doing here. >> Yeah, so I think Citrix, Nutanix, we've had a partnership going back for quite awhile. I think what really brought us together were customers that were actually trying to solve this issue, of how do I implement VDI, and how do I do this better right, there has to be a better way. And it's funny, we were just talking about chatting a little bit before about how many different infrastructure pieces and how many different components there are to learn in order to do VDI, and that was one of the things that always kind of stood as a barrier to adoption in some of the early days, going back, I don't know several years now, and they would say, well, you got to have, be an expert in networking, you got to be an expert in storage, you got to know all the server side infrastructure, the virtualization that goes with it, and then you got to also know the desktops, and the app parts of it, and how to manage all that. And in my experience it was all that technical knowledge, but it was also, it was also the people right? So, you also had to bring those people to the table, have one VDI project, go in and talk to a customer, and we're going to do a pilot for 200 people to start, and there'd be 20 people in the room. Because everybody had different areas of responsibility. And so as Nutanix is involved, and the whole idea of hyper-conversion, and HDI that's come around, that's really been some of the basis of where VDI is kind of getting that second booster of, in it's life cycle here, where they're realizing that it could just be a few people that are responsible for that HDI infrastructure, can deploy the VDI, and now they have a more simple reliable way of implementing that solution so (mumbles). >> I mean, that's kind of where, even when I go back to the converged infrastructure world that's, VDI was the one like foothold use case with Vblock's in the early days, and the HPE stuff, or HP then, and you know I have to say, I have to ask both of you guys, because you know this business really well, and you're obviously a VDI expert but, when you talk to customers, they get really excited about VDI, they're like, "Hey, this is a great use case, "we're going to, we're doing VDI, VDI, VDI, "it was a big project effort." When you talk to the analysts they're like, "Uhhh, VDI is so boring." What is it about VDI that there's this bifurcated opinion base right? Analysts uhhhh, okay, but customers eat it up. What's going on, what...? Unpack that for us. >> Well, I mean analysts don't necessarily feel the day-to-day pain of managing a desktop right? That's what it is right, so for them it's a-- >> Well said. >> It's the truth. Well, actually I know, I know some analysts that actually did that job, and so they're the ones that are still excited about it right? But in general, like once you get past the idea of that consulting a client on the complexities, and how do you choose a vendor and, and then it comes down to a few basic things, it's which one's going to deliver the best employee experience with the solution, which one's going to be the best operationally to manage and then sort of their job is done. But then, from a IT Admin perspective it's like they're still, every day they're managing new application update, the new desktop image, and it doesn't end right? And that's dozens and dozens of hours out of every week, every month, that you spend. >> Alright let's hear from the analyst. >> Dave, it was called VDI fatigue. Every year was the year of VDI you know. I think we've gotten beyond that, because I tell you, from my viewpoint, it was wait. It was this mess of a stack, and we're going to fix that. Oh wait, now storage is the mess, now flash is going to solve that, oh wait, mobile adoption is you know, the barrier, yet the opportunity, how do we modernize our applications, the changing workforce, mobile workforce. There were always the next, the next, the next, the next, the next thing and, it reminds me of our conversations with (mumbles) you know, it was like we're never finished, and a lot of it was, it was this big category of you know, you talk about the user experience, is I think, what Citrix is focused on, and how do we make that simpler and you know, so many analysts... The other thing from an analyst is, most analysts focus on a piece of it, and this is very different. I know some analysts focus on like, user experience, and let's look at the application, that's probably closer to where VDI is then, right, if you ask the storage guys they're like ah, VDI. If you ask the desktop people they're like wait, my place is fine so, it's that, it was a really complicated problem, but it's very different today, than it was, and I have to think with Nutanix it is, must've changed in the last five years. >> Absolutely, and well, I think the other thing is that's funny is if you take it back to like 2008 right? Analysts called the VDI game really early, so it's like you're saying every year was the VDI. Before anybody was deploying it in any sort of size, they were already saying it's a, X gazillion billion dollar market and that, and it, I think it's taken awhile for the customers... The customers are still just trying to dealing with some very basic desktop management issues today, and they're probably lagging behind the industry and analysts by three to five years I'd say, right? But what I hear now is, Windows 10 is coming around the horizon, how am I going to manage Windows 10 updates? I've got an Office 365 deployment project on my hands, how am I going to get this all out, how am I going to get the functionality that every one of my end users needs? And it comes around and it's like VDI is a great answer for that, it's a great way to solve that issue. >> Calvin, one of the things that we hear from new (mumbles) customers I mean, they love that kind of one-click simplicity, one-click update, and I hear about you know, Windows 10 is like the roll-out of the next thing, and where things break. How are Citrix and Nutanix working together to solve some of these challenges? >> Yeah, I think that approach of one-click, the automation you know, both the blue-printing types of technology is what we're pulling together. All that sort of automation is really important for, for this type of environment. You know I think the, we're both willing to pull together solutions that really then, drive that simplicity for, for both the infrastructure and the management, ongoing of that solution. It's like for example, we're working together on, work on the district's workspace appliance right? And that's, for us it's not a product name that's really a program, it's a way of defining HCI infrastructure like Nutanix and they're jumping on board with this. To be able to point that thing at the Citrix Cloud, and then download all the resources that it needs in order to run a Citrix workload on it. So it's a very automated way of getting stood up, so that not only is it deployment of the infrastructure, automated and simple, but placing that workload on it, and getting it set to manage, and then even running it and operating it is more like running and operating a Cloud service than it is even operating a local infrastructure for it. >> One of the things that David Floyer from Wikibon, has done a lot of analysis saying, if we can get to basically a single-managed entity is where he calls it, so I can have the entire thing comes out, not just the infrastructure, but all the way through the stack. Not only does that really help your deployment, but the overall kind of time-to-value, customer experience is just tremendously improved, tell us how you're helping to kind of reach that vision. >> Yeah, well I think it's time-to-value, but it's also making VDI accessible to more customers right, and more segments of the market. The types of things that VDI solves, security, manageability, those aren't just enterprise problems right? Even midsize companies, they have security concerns, and for them it's actually probably even more dramatic, like they have a breach there, and it's catastrophic for the company, not just, you know we're delayed by a few hours. And so you know, having that simplicity, and then making that whole thing easier to deploy, and faster, it's not just easier to deploy, but on day two, it's easier to manage ongoing. Those things are getting into tension again. >> So for years I remember in the Citrix, Synergy, a bunch of VMware, VM world's, talked to customers, and it was always a two-horse race between those two companies, and Citrix was like Secretariat, and VMware was like Devil His Due. You've probably never heard of Devil His Due. Pretty good horse but not Secretariat, and you guys, Citrix was the dominant player in that marketplace. What's the competitive situation today? It seems like VMware has made some acquisitions, has maybe caught up, maybe has some advantages, what, how do you see them as a competitor? >> I, so I think where Citrix is, I think that what really happens in the competitors space now is that it becomes less about VDI, versus VDI, and like what features are in each one. Although I could talk for hours, I think there's still a bunch of differentiation in there. You know earlier talking about user experience, I think the way we're looking at this market, and what's happening to it right now, is less about sort of user experience in the sense of a classic protocol versus protocol sense, in a technical sense, and more about, and I'll use the term more and more often about employee experience, alright, so it's not just what is the performance of my virtual desktop when I'm on x-y-z device, over a certain network. It is what happens that first time I give an employee a resource, or a virtual desktop, or a mobile application, or access to a SAS application, or an internally-hosted Web application through a virtual browser, and they go in and they, they want to get work done right? So the experience of that employee is now, not just one of these technologies, it is what we refer to as workspace technology. It's everything I need from the applications, to the files that I want to use, to the workflows that I want to kick off, and I think that will be their new area of differentiation, and again, that's where we want to move very far for. >> Calvin, what should we be expecting to see from Citrix and Nutanix going for a long partnership, and how does it improve even more for customers? >> I think you know, the stuff that Nutanix has announced here, with the whole Hybrid Cloud strategy, I think that very much is in alignment with our philosophy on Hybrid Cloud approaches for customers. So I would expect to see a lot more in that collaboration area. There's lots more that we can do on the NetScaler side of the business for networking, and enabling the reliability of a lot of these network connections as people become, you know I love that concept of the core, the distributing the Edge Cloud right, and all of that's going to need interconnectivity, and security and reliability. And you know, more of the same on making VDI simpler for, for all customers of all sizes. I think we're just at the cusp of you know we've got this automation plan going in, we're creating the workspace appliance in its simplicity there. I think there's a lot more we can do, again, from day two perspective operationally, as I keep going and I'm growing this thing, and I'm managing my images, and I'm managing applications, and growing the infrastructure, increasing performance, taking on different types of workloads, there's lots more we can do in that area. >> What is the all Citrix Stack Workplace Appliance? >> Right, so that is really the Nutanix has announced support for XenServer, and for us, you know XenServer, we've really done a transformation of that technology over the last couple years, where we've taken what was a general platform virtualization solution, and we've really specifically targeted at our workloads. At XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, and making it the best virtualization platform for our, for our solutions. Why do we do that? We do that because there's going to be certain things that we need out of that layer from an innovation standpoint whether it's supporting graphics, which we were the first to do, across all the major ship vendors, virtual GPUs, coming up with new security paradigms like being able to do deep Hypervisor Introspection, and identify day one malware attacks before they, even infect any of the machines. You know, those sorts of innovations become really important that we can drive, and having control over XenServer we're able to do that. So through the partnership with Nutanix, and getting their support on that as well, then all the joint Nutanix and Citrix customers could take advantage of that innovation. So now they also have the obviously at their disposal, everything that Nutanix is putting into HV, everything we're putting into XenServer, and being able to manage it that way. So, in the workspace appliance, sort of reference guide for building this, one of the things we focus on is the XenServer component of it, and being able to have that innovation coming from Citrix as part of that solution. >> Great. Calvin, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE, appreciate your time, and your insights. >> Thank you, yeah it's good to be here. >> Good to see you. Alright, keep it right there buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from DotNext, #NEXTConf, this is theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to NEXTConf everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with Stu Miniman. This is the president's segment. Sudheesh Nair is back. Good to see you again, Sudheesh, the president of Nutanix. And Captain Canada himself, Chad Sakac. >> Dave. >> Cube alum, good friend. >> Dave, it's good to see you. >> Good to see you again. Stu. Hey everybody, most important thing, great, you know, .NEXTConf, but look, Canada Day, July 1st, is right around the corner. So remember, everybody, go have some poutine, drink some beers and celebrate. Then there's this July 4th thing that is apparently right around that. >> Yeah, well, it's important to us, 'cause we've ended an eight-week sprint of the Cube, so. >> Isn't Chad wearing red, white and blue? I think he's, uh ... >> I actually did that on purpose. You noticed! >> Here in DC, nice job. >> I figured when in DC, you know, celebrate Americana. >> Why not? Well, there's a lot of celebration going on here. You guys have been celebrating several years now. What is it? Two and a half years of ... >> With Dell, yes. With Chad it's relatively new, so ... (all laughing) >> It's actually been about three years, and it's been a ridiculously successful partnership. You know, I think ... >> I would say face-meltingly successful, but ... >> Yeah, you know what? I agree. >> Okay, so coming into this role, did you have misconceptions about Nutanix, or was that just marketing, when you were kind of ... >> No. Nutanix basically created the HCI category. They've been at it now for seven and change years. You know, great technology, very happy customers. I'd say out of the 6,200 or so Nutanix customers, roughly around 2,500, 2,700 are XC customers, so I've gotten to know them really well. They tell me pretty clearly what they like about Nutanix and what they like about XC. >> All right, so Chad, I'm looking at my notes here, and there was a guy Chad Sakac who said, "Niche corner case for VDI only," you know, that was Nutanix. >> Love it. >> You know, you're singing a little bit of a different story than we might've heard a couple of years ago. >> You know, I would say that it's important to acknowledge when you're wrong, Stu. You know, and I think that HCI in general has moved absolutely out of any corner case segment whatsoever. I met with a customer this morning that is basically a hospital that is running the bulk of all of their mission-critical customer healthcare records, packs, all on XC. And again, you know, I don't want to get us in trouble here at the .NEXT Conference, but we have an HCI portfolio, we see customers deploying HCI for every workload under the sun at this point. And frankly, I've said it publicly now, firmly and as clearly as I can, SDS and HCI models are ready for the majority of x86 workloads. That's not just my opinion, it's the company, it's Dell Technologies' point of view overall. >> You know, Joe Tucci was the master of sort of building an ecosystem with quasi-competitors, coop-etition, whatever you want to call it, and certainly the Dell/EMC relationship of many years ago was epic, one of the, probably the most successful storage relationship ever. So and, Sudheesh, you get a lot of concerns of Wall Street, when's this going to end? You guys used to get that all the time with Cisco and VC, and yet you continue to ... >> Still do. >> Yup. >> Chad: Still do. >> Valid questions, you know, it's the obvious place for analysts, snarky analysts to go. But in retrospect ... >> Chad: Is there such a thing as a non-snarky analyst? >> There're a couple, there're a couple out there. >> They're sitting here, right here. (Chad laughs) >> It is, getting paid ... >> After the comments that I've already gotten! >> It's getting paid to be snarky. >> That's what's fantastic, by the way. That's what's like watching Charlie Rose and Bill Clinton. Hard but smooth. >> So, if I go back into history, though ... I wish Michael were here, and I'll ask Michael, I know you watch, I'll you next time I see you. I wonder if he had to do it all over again, if he knew then what he knew now, if he would've just said, "You know what? "I'm going to do better just staying with the EMC partnership, "instead of going out and buying Equallogic or Compellent, "and we would've done better for customers, "might've made more money." I wonder if you've learned anything from that experience. I mean, you were biased, 'cause you were on the EMC side of that, obviously you didn't want to see Dell end that relationship, but are there similarities here? >> You know, I think that there's similarities, but there's a notable difference. When the Dell/EMC merger occurred, and the first time I came out to visit headquarters, I mean, lots of discussions with Sudheesh and with Dheeraj. There's a core thing here that's important to understand. The market is not in a zero-sum game. So if, if there's 6,200 Nutanix customers, 2,500 XC customers, roughly 3,000 VX Real customers, roughly 8,000 VSAN customers, you know how many VNX customers there are? 300,000. Do you know how many power-edge servers there are out there? 27 million. We're on the earliest days of the software-defined and HCI journey, and frankly, that's just the first step towards building hybrid clouds on-prem and off-prem that bridge one another, which has been a big part of the announcements from this week. >> Yeah, look, I think the first part of the question you asked, you got to be honest that, you know, when you flip sometimes TV channels, let's say you come across National Geographic, right? And then there's a cheetah chasing a deer. You stop, you want to watch. You know what's going to happen, the cheetah's going to eat the deer, one way or other, that's going to happen. You know it, but you want to watch it. The way we think of our industry, status quo is the cheetah. The deer is all of us, the moment you stop innovating. That is particularly true for companies like ours, young companies. The partnership that we have is not built on anything but the fact that we are adding more value for customers than what we would individually do. That's it. The sum of the parts of this should be higher than the individual parts, right? So what we have learned, for example, last quarter, you're absolutely right, financial analysts, they'll always ask us about the Dell EMC overhang. Last quarter, for example, we for the first time publicly talked about the fact that Dell EMC business was around eight to nine percent of our overall revenue. And it is not because that didn't grow. It is growing, but the overall business we are able to keep growing. Our destiny's in our hands, and it comes down to couple of things6: our ability to really accelerate innovation, because as a younger company, more agile, we are expected to do more, and you saw this morning. Number two, make sure that we are playing fair. There are rules of engagement that we are, because we know that they have tremendous amount of portfolio, and some of them will overlap, and that's okay. But you have to clearly define the rules of engagements, and be very fair in how we treat the partner. And if you do those two things right, we know that this is a relationship that'll last long time. >> And just a quick little add, I mean, the things that we bring is extending the platform's scale and reach. There's no question that you're a younger company, there's no question that we're a larger company. The number of customers that say, "We want the better together thing," and we give them that choice, it's very important for us to do that, but also add value. So whether it's integrating data protection, whether it's what we've done around running Cloud Foundry on top of XC. Home Depot talked about it. >> Classic example, yeah. >> It's a great example, where they want this, that, all together. Now I can't emphasize enough that what we've been trying to emphasize is be transparent, be consistent about those rules of engagement, and telling our customers, you know, driving that choice and giving them that benefit is something that we have to sustain. >> And it's also important to understand that you know, if you spent this morning watching the keynote, you clearly saw that we did not talk about hyperconverged. What we talked about were two things. One is pushing that cloud intelligence to the edge, and then building a hyper-cloud experience that is totally transparent. And the second thing was about building a multi-cloud environment through Calm. We did not talk about hyperconverged. Those things are not built on a platform that is not built for ... Those things are built on a platform that is ready for web-scale architecture. So the foundation that we have built in the last seven years is on which we are building, and as long as we continue to add value like that, and partner, for example, on PCF, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, that's a classic example, a Home Depot example, right? They need that same experience that they're getting from Edibus. And Edibus is not just doing IAAS. They're doing PAAS, they're doing the entire thing. To do that, there is no shame in figuring out what we do well, what we don't do well, understand their strengths and weakness, come together, and deliver something that is better for customers. >> Sudheesh, I'm curious, actually, 'cause Home Depot is a, you know, lighthouse account for Pivotal, on Google Cloud platform. Talking to them about it for the last six months. How does that fit in? We know that the Dell family is a multi-function, so I'm curious to want to hear the Nutanix piece of how that fits in. >> Look, I think the Google thing is a relatively new thing for us. We are expecting two different areas that we are going to partner with them. >> No, no, but Home Depot specifically, is that related? >> No. >> Because they're a big GCP customer, so maybe Chad needs to fill it in. >> This specific project is all on Exceed with PCS. >> The thing that I think is fascinating, and to watchers, I would say, for the intellectually curious that are willing to double-click and go a little bit further, it's a little more of a complex, nuanced story, but everyone's looking for a soundbite, whether it's in politics, as we're here in DC, or whether it's in news, or whatever. Home Depot, like a ton of customers, is using GCP. They're using XC, they're using vSphere, they're using NSX, they're using PCF. It's not like there's some singular thing. Another fascinating example is, I talked to a customer who's a fantastic ScaleIO, VxRack FLEX customer, vSphere, enormous scale and scope, and when I asked them, they want a hybrid cloud to this point. HCI is just a foundation for hybrid cloud use. When I asked them, like, what are their hybrid cloud targets, they're like, "AWS, but we use GCP because we depend on TensorFlow." It is, we live in a world which you need to expand your mind and not naturally create this, like, binary A/B thing. >> Stu: It's a multi-cloud world, Chad. >> It's a multi-stacked, multi-cloud, multi-use case world. >> An inter-genius mess in IT that we've been dealing with. >> So another thing that analysts do a lot is give unsolicited advice. (Chad laughs) So I want to do that and maybe get your reaction. So, Amazon's operating profits are roughly almost double what EMC's were, Amazon Web Services, when EMC was a public company. Massive change and disruptive force in our industry. And frankly, if it weren't for AWS, we wouldn't be where we are today as fast as we were, so I see your joint challenge as fulfilling the vision of what we call true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the cloud experience on-prem. And you're behind, and you know you're behind at that, because Amazon's by definition in the lead. So your challenge as we see it is to create that experience and create that automation and allow people to shift their labor costs to the fun stuff. >> By the way, I agree, and I accept that advice. You can answer for you, but I'll tell you, we've been trying to ... So we started with the first enterprise hybrid cloud efforts almost three and a half years ago, and they're enormous, and at the time we said, "And deploy it on anything you want." And you know what? We had very limited success with that. And the reason we had limited success wasn't because we didn't get the customer going, "Yes, I want to have a hybrid cloud, "where I can bridge and connect to "multiple different public cloud targets." That idea, dead right. The idea of you can build it any way you want? Wrong. Then we said, "Okay, you know what? "CI is a simplification." What we realized is that life cycling CI stacks along with a CMP layer, whether it's inside an integrated thing, or whether it's directly adjacent, still too complex. The latest is basically all of our hybrid cloud, whether it's destined towards enterprise IAAS or PAAS on prem, runs on HCI. When? Always. Because HCI is fundamentally orders of magnitude easier to symph, to deploy, to scale, to version, etc., etc. What I've been seeing over the last 24 hours about basically the Calm acquisition becoming part of Acropolis, is the example where Nutanix is taking it, where they're trying to build it into the Calm and Acropolis stack. I think that's a common vision between the two companies. >> What you will hear from HP or Cisco or EMC or Nutanix, the picture isn't going to change much, because we all know what the blueprint looks like. I think the real question is, how do you get there? How you do that is where the difference is going to be, and the advantage we have is that because we built every stack with that clean architecture in mind, the North Star being, we have to deliver a fully-automatable stack, we have an added advantage of building every step connect naturally to the next step. So for example, our metadata structure, our storage fabric, our virtualization fabric, AHV, our automation fabric on Calm, and how we are introducing Xi, that's a hybrid cloud service, it is all controlled from Prism. And that Prism itself and Prism Central are fully distributed. So that ability to deploy this at scale across multiple continents and manage it, that is very similar to how Amazon ... The reason why Amazon can deliver millisecond billing on Lambda stack is not because they are taking ten different products. They have technology that is built to deliver that level of granularity. >> So again, I agree, but there's an element that I disagree. Calm was an acquisition. Calm was an acquisition of people and talent to basically extend up into the IAAS, chargeback, billing, self-service portal domain. No disrespect of the decision, technology, architecture. You've done, obviously, great progress that you've shown to the market the last two days about how you're integrating that into your stack. We've been at this now for four years, and we've looked at, how do we need to keep evolving our own Dell Technologies stacks? Again, it's not an either/or. So for example, we do multi-site PCF deployments directly on top of a HCI target that has total life cycle, completely distributed stack, and the Pivotal/Google work around Kubernetes coming as part of Pivotal, which echoes a lot of the Kubernetes becoming part of your stack as well. Kubo highlights what we're all trying to do towards that target. Again, I think that the natural tendency because people like to see car races to watch for crashes, cheetahs chasing lions ... >> Or something like that. >> I think we're all striving to do what you said. The customer demand for simple-to-operate, simple-to-deploy, simple-to-scale, turnkey IAAS, PAAS, and even SAAS stacks that're a hybrid deployment model, that is a fact. How customers need to evaluate all the choices in the marketplace is again, who does it best? >> And if you don't, you're the deer, is your point. >> Chad: You're the lion or the deer. >> I wish we had more time, guys. I'll give you both the last word. Chad, you're everywhere this week, and everywhere every week, but final thoughts. >> Final thoughts, I mean, customers can know that we're committed to customer choice, we're committed to this partnership. The number of customers in revenue continues to grow. Our point of view is that we've got a portfolio approach, but no one should be confused about what that means. That means that we're committed to the partnership. Customers, I've talked to a lot of them here, they're happy. Never punch your customer in the face, and never punch yourself in the face. Simple strategy from Chad Sakac. >> Sudheesh, put a capstone on it. >> My point's very simple. I think this is a partnership that is working. The company's run by really smart people. I don't think we are interested in doing anything that is going to make our customers' decision a wrong one for them. And we are committed, we are committed to innovate, and are committed a service to join customers together. Thank you. >> Guys, you know, you guys make this job fun. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. >> It's our pleasure, guys. Remember, Happy Canada Day! >> All right, July 1st. Love it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference. Bought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT everybody inside the district kind of. This is Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're with theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of NEXTConf. Aaditya Sood is here, he's the director of, Senior Director of Engineering and Products at Nutanix and Binny Gill who is the Chief Architect at the company. Gentlemen welcome to theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you. >> Good to see you again. >> Nice to be here. >> So you guys had the great keynote I love how, Dheerraj interacts with you on the stage. Asks you these Columbo questions even though he has deep knowledge of what's goin' on it's really quite good. But Binny let me start with you, first of all what's the show like this year we've been now this is our third year doing. >> Yeah. >> NEXT, we've seen quite an evolution. From your standpoint from the hardcore product side what are you seeing? >> I think it's exciting to be here, this year we are seeing almost every year doubling of the attendance in the conference and also the excitement that we hear from our Nutanix technical champions and our customers is a lot more visceral. In terms of how much we are doing in terms of vision and mission and as we are executing on our vision that has always been are we sure you can do it kind of thing, but as we deliver every year there's more conviction that we are seeing from all these people here so it's really exciting. >> Aaditya I wonder if you could talk about Calm a little bit it is your baby. People say Calm I'm calm, is the joke goin' around today what is Calm? >> Well Calm is many things at once, but most of all it's a control plane at the application layer. How do you build this multi-cloud hybrid cloud technology together? And manage the entire life cycle, compliance, governance, provisioning, costing, visibility all of these things together? >> And Aaditya there's many companies that have tried to attack this challenge why did you when you help co-found Calm think that you could address this and bring us up to speed as to the acquisition last year what is being part of Nutanix what did that do to the product itself to lead us to today? >> I think addressing the first part of your question why we think this is different many people have tried to do this, blueprints and these things over the many decades automation has been around. But I think this is fundamentally 10X to a 100X better because of the logical approach we are taking, the data model we have built which models applications and tries to keep the logical layer separate from the physical layer or the virtual layer. Thinking about the Nutanix integration was homecoming. This was, practically nothing changed from our point of view except that we got, became part of a much bigger family, a lot of warmth there a lot of technical goodness, a lot of I would say systems level and platform goodness that got leveraged in. So it's been all pretty great the last say what nine months or so. >> Alright Binny we want to get your view point of course Nutanix has been growing its ecosystem. We've got a big expo hall with a lot of partners there, what were the goals that you wanted to make sure you hit? By the time we came to this show with Calm to meet your customers and this growing ecosystem. >> Yeah, I think what we're looking at is explaining how we are building an operating system. An operating system is a platform for running applications and now the platform for running applications in fact changing earlier it used to be Linux and Windows now it's Clouds. Cloud is an OS, and when you talk about building OSs it's about ecosystem, it's about the drivers, it's about the partners that build stuff for you. Calm is a way of inviting them to a marketplace. A repository for where you put your stuff. Calm is also your YUM in app kit tool, one click deployment of any application the more simple you make it the more a person will be attracted to your operating system so the message here is look we are developing a marketplace bringing Calm to the picture, giving an operating system that can run on any hardware. Hardware meaning any cloud, any hypervice and so on. >> How much can I ask Stu, how much that one click if you think about the the lifecycle of what has to occur in that one click and then by the way everything else that you don't do how much time do you think you're saving people? I mean take database as a service, yes one click but then you got to do regression testing, you got to do some recovery testing but you're taking away a lot of the planning presumably. >> Yeah absolutely. >> Do you have any sense as to if it takes 100 how much you just shaved off with one click? >> Yeah, I mean I think there's the best person to answer that question his team has been working on this for seven years. >> And this is something that again touching back on what Calm does differently that it understands that provisioning your application is only the beginning of your problems. You have an application now you have to grow it, scale it, it's going to blow up, you need to upgrade it, test it, certify it and all that stuff. And that's where the application lifecycle management part comes in. As a rough estimate I would say at least 70 to 80% of the complexity has gone away. There is still some complexity because there is an essential complexity in every problem cannot reduce it beyond that. But I'd say off the ballpark 70, 80. >> I like that number so I kind of baited you, the practitioner that we had on today said at least, he's being conservative because that's what IT guys do he said at least 50% so we can fairly say let's say 50 to 70% you've just taken off the table so they can now focus on higher quality, testing, recovery and even in the fun stuff as Stu likes to say. (laughs) >> Absolutely, and Aadiyta there was the joke in the keynote that this is not an app store so what do you see the one click is obviously is a critical piece but how's this different from think of the Amazon Marketplace or other we've talked about do we need an enterprise app store, how is this different, how do customers perceive this? What early feedback have you been getting? >> I think one of the problems that we are trying to solve and how we are looking at it is every platform let's say every public cloud, every private cloud they have some amount of tooling and automation already built in. But from a customer point of view these are all just different independent silos. So if you go look at any marketplace it's on EWS only. And what we are trying to do is this is means to an end. I'm running five different kind of infrastructure stacks I want a single app store for my consumers internally. My business user doesn't care where the application is provisioned as long as we can write them the right SLAs and cost ROI for their internal application. >> What's important about this, I wonder if we can riff on it for a bit so we weren't the first to say this I think it was probably Benioff that more non-tech companies will be SaaS companies than tech companies. So that says that they need a stack to build their SaaS. So that marketplace that you showed you had Cassandra, Mongo, MySQL and Redes and TensorFlow and all of these tools. That'll allow a SaaS provider to build their own stack. So I wonder if we could talk about this a little bit in terms of the vision of the next generation company, not just tech company. And how you see yourselves fitting into that as an enabler. Comments. >> I think as an analogy I'd like to take how they the electronics industry evolved. Back in the 70's and 80's the semi-conductor explosion happened. And any kind of functionality that I wanted I looked at the catalog, I looked at the cost, the yield rates, the functionality that chip provided. I just went and bought those chips and I plugged them in, and I built my (mumbles) out of it. And this is how I think this is going to evolve. That we are just going to move the level of abstraction one higher level. Have usable fundamental components, compose them together and have a faster time to market. Do as an application developer do I really need to understand how Bongo scales and how it's provisioned and how it's backed up and everything? I want a single EPI or a one click experience equal in my view to just plug it into my application and then go on from there. And then take this my application and deliver it as a unit to my user which can then go ahead and just like Lego blocks keep building higher and higher layers of functionality. >> Yeah Aaditya brought up a key point there with APIs right. Anytime an OS is developed after some point you talk about what is the standardization of APIs on top of this OS? Like Posix was a standard of APIs in an operating system. This new cloud operating system is actually asking for a standardization of API so that the applications built on top of it can enjoy a guaranteed stable API that'll be portable across various hardwares and clouds. We are seeing the beginning of the that kind of API with the work that Aaditya's team is doing around our blueprints, our lifecycle that's coming to the floor right now. >> Aaditya one of the things I usually hear after a company gets acquired by a bigger company is the amount of feedback they get from the customers. Nutanix is a little bit self-selecting customers that are usually looking to try something different. What's been your experience with the Nutanix customer base? Has that impacted or shifted where you were looking to drive the product? >> It has certainly, informed the product roadmap but I wouldn't say it has fundamentally changed it. Because one of the key things and one of the great things about Nutanix is that we are building open systems. Which is why even in the keynote that you saw when we are going and provisioning an application we are not saying this is Nutanix only, we are treating each of the computer platform an independent equivalent level. And that was our vision right from the start to bring the goodness at the top layer and then leverage some deep platform stuff like we can obviously work best on Nutanix because we get underlying data from the storage systems, the virtualization systems and we'll run on that. But, yeah fundamentally it has not really changed anything. >> Ambitious. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> Binny the question I have for you is if I look at the public cloud they all want to own the applications in one way or another. Google's pretty a little bit more open but Microsoft lots of business apps, Amazon have dealt with next generation apps, how does Nutanix look at that app ownership? Obviously you come from the infrastructure side but how does your view point differ say from some other clouds? >> Our viewpoint is more like how players like Apple look at owning the app. I mean you have an app store or a marketplace but that is sort of democratic I do have my own apps I could have my mail app, my camera app but I am neutral in the sense that I enable others to create a better app if they can because it only helps my platform. So we are in the business of creating the best in class operating system we're calling it Enterprise Cloud Operating System and then enabling that cloud operating system to run on any farm factor any hypervice and or hardware or going all the way to the edge as you might have talked to others in this conference our cloud operating system can run on a single node now down from three nodes, to two nodes to one node to a intel node in a drone. That is where we're going, enable everybody. And on these various farm factors different applications would run. I would say a small fraction of the applications that are key to most customers to get to 80% of the simple use cases might come from us but the majority of the use cases would come from outside. And eventually we look at this as we primarily building the OS and the world building an app, app store or marketplace on top of us. >> Alright gents we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> It was really a pleasure seeing you again. >> As always take care. >> Okay keep it right there Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCUBE we're live from NEXTConf in D.C.. We'll be right back. (exciting music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's the Cube covering .Next Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to D.C., everybody, this is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our special coverage and presentation of Nutanix NextConf 2017. This is the third U.S. conference that the Cube has done of Nutanix .NEXT. Nicolaus Radford is here as a Senior Vice President of Engineering and the CTO at Houston Mechatronics, wait till you hear what these guys do, and Satyam Vaghani, who is the V.P. of technology at Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> How you doing? >> Let's get right into it. >> Yep. >> We're talking IOT, we're talking edge, you guys do some pretty interesting stuff. Tell us about the company. >> Well we're a robotics as a service company primarily, but we do some intelligent automation and intelligent drilling, in the IOT space, so it's pretty exciting and dynamic area, actually, and... Just imagine taking a bunch of different systems that haven't typically talked together before, and we've kind of glued them all together. And one of the big oil field services companies was attracted to our sort of thinking in this area, and have taken some, given us some work, and you know, we're taking and running with it. >> Can you just explain what robotics as a service means? >> Well usually, you know, you can kind of break this down in a couple different ways, you know, there's a lot of people out there that sell robots and it's kind of a thin business, right? You know, you might sell a robot and then the people you sell it to use it and make a bunch of money off of it, and then you're stuck trying to find a new customer to sell a robot to. But if you consume the robots, so to speak, that you build, and then use them as a service, it's a much more lucrative position to have. And so we do technology systems development for partners, and then we also operate that robot in the field for them. So it's a good residual, pull-through revenue stream for us. >> So, Satyam, the industrial technology world and the information technology worlds are coming crashing together. >> Satyam: Absolutely. >> IT and OT, Nutanix has been talking about the edge more and more, I mean, if you're not talking about the edge, you're not in the game, but give us an update on your strategy with regard to the edge, and really, your thinking about companies like Nick's. >> I know, great question. I guess I have so much to tell. >> Host: Yeah. >> Nick: Make it edgy. >> Make it edgy. >> Host: Start wherever you like. >> But yeah, I guess we kind of, sort of, naturally fell into it because we saw that the future of computing might be more edgy, if you will, than we think, as you know, right now we are spending a lot of time and energy worrying about clouds, you know, private cloud, public clouds, how to consolidate them. But then at the same time we are seeing that there are so many of these sensors being deployed in the world, just this year it's going to be roughly eight and a half billion sensors, if you count consumer and industrial RD together. By 2020 it's going to be 20 billion sensors. And so all the data that these sensors are going to generate is going to be processed in real time, closer to where the sensors cleared the data, as opposed to slightly farther away, which is in the cloud. Of course, the cloud remains relevant, as the cloud is going to do much more longer term processing, and the edge is going to do real time processing on the data. >> Host: Alright. >> And so, in that sense, we saw that as a natural step two of the hyperconvergence yearning, is if you think about step one of hyperconvergences, the convergence of computer storage and network resources inside a data center, step two is the convergence of the edge and the cloud into one fabric, one OS, if you will. >> Yeah, I wonder if you could help us unpack that a little, 'cause we saw, kind of, public cloud pulled at the data center for years and now the edge is pulling at the cloud. >> Satyam: Pulling it back out. >> So the edge is different from the data center so most people think of Nutanix, you know, I'm either living in a data center or maybe some service provider, so, you know, different form factor, I know there are some announcements Nutanix made to kind of get to robo-cases. Is that the same for the edge? >> Yeah, different form factors, 'cause, you know, some of this hardware needs to be regulized, you know, it's on oil rigs, or drones, or military vehicles, and so on, but also slightly different and evolving storage stack because now the problem of deploying applications at the edge is about deliverers having to write code, and not having to worry about how the code runs on the edge. Because as soon as they have to worry about that, the deliverers become operators, infrastructure operators, and so this one will also have a slightly higher level of application stack, you know, machine learning services, or analytic services at the edge so that applications can directly consume those high level services, as opposed to the lower level, you know. >> Which actually that's, it's really intriguing because as part of our robotics as a service side of our business we have a pipe inspection system that we're going to be deploying in quantity, and so what you... That's a type of edge device, right? That's, I mean robots are really nothing more than fancy data collection systems, right? And so we put them out into the world to collect the data, but then what do you do with that data? How is it stored? What sort of of post analytics are you doing on that data to then feed forward back to the intelligence at the edge so that they can make decisions better, right? So when you have our robot that we call PEARL, the pipe inspection robot, you'll actually see a demo of it later, fingers crossed. As it's traveling through the pipe it's collecting all this data, right? So but all of the runs prior to that, it's afforded all of that knowledge on the decisions it's making right then and there, right? Because we've done all this back learning, if you will, on what deformities look like, which increases the quality of our inspections, and so then if you start looking at a ubiquitous deployment of these type of assets, where you might have 10, 20, 30 in the field, that's a massive amount of data that you're collecting right there, right where the sensor's being taken. The processing of that data is determining whether the robot stops and maybe observes a little bit more, but then it's all being shipped back at a later date to the cloud for further analytics, then to feed forward in the next operation to perform that better. So it's this feedback process of learning between the application that's actually happening in real time, and the later-on analytics that will occur. >> So let's stay on the data for a moment, because it is all about the data. Is it correct that much of the data in your world is analog data that you're able to now convert into digital, or ...? >> Satyam: Yeah, so I mean. >> Or are you already there? >> At the end of the day you're trying to take an analog measurement of some type, right? We live in an analog world, and if I'm trying to measure the thickness of a pipe I'm using a transducer. >> Host: Yeah. >> That by nature is typically an analog device. I can then digitize that information, and that's how I send it over in, you know, communication streams and whatnot, and of course it's stored digitally, but at the end of the day, you know, we're taking analog information, doing data processing on that, looking at what it means in the activity that we're trying to do: measuring the thickness of a tube. And then we ship the data back at a more convenient time when we have more bandwidth back to the cloud for all of the deep learning, deep type of analytics. >> Nicolaus, could you kind of explain that, kind of your stack or your flows. >> Nick: I was hoping you were going to explain it to me. >> Because, how did you get to Nutanix? What goes into what public cloud? What services are you using there? If, whatever you could share would be kind of good to understand. >> We're involved with Nutanix on our rig automation side. And so we use their storage, you know, we use their storage in the way that they've created an excellent way of doing that. And so that's primarily how we interface with them and one of our big oil and gas partners is a huge client of theirs. And so that's our primary relationship with them. In fact I sent Rich a picture of a Nutanix box that we just recently installed in our server room, and I was like, giving the thumbs up, and I was like, "Hey buddy!"You know. >> Alright, and public cloud, you know, do you have a specific one you're using? Are you using many clouds? >> Nick: No, no, no, no, I mean. >> For the processing and data you say some of it goes to the public cloud, though, it just... >> Yeah, no, I mean, it's more under the local area. >> Nick: I mean this is the stuff we're using intern... I mean this is... The security requirements that we have is... >> Host: So your cloud isn't on PremCloud. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Okay. How much of the data, I mean, I know it can't be precise but if you think about all this real-time decision-making that you're doing, how much of the data is actually going to go back to the cloud? I mean, this even rough percentage terms. I want opinions. >> Well we'd like to send it all back, right? >> Host: Hundred percent. It's just what you don't send then and there, right? There might be a little stream of it coming back off of, let's say, our pipe inspection robot, but at some point, though, you want to take that, download everything, store backup, I mean it's and all the big data analytic techniques and analyze it, I mean, you know. >> So you expect you want to persist the majority of the data, and you ultimately will not do that at the edge. You'll ultimately have to get it back up to the cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely, yeah. That's the way we see it. >> Host: You're going to use the Chevy truck... >> Nick: Unless you have a different opinion. >> Use the Chevy truck access method to get it there or what? Go ahead, please. >> I have a different opinion, kind of sort of similar principal but a different opinion which is, you know, in terms of volume, a very small fraction of the data is going to make it to the cloud. But in terms of intelligence, you know, almost hundred percent of the intelligence is going to make it, but it is how the edge participates in reducing the volume of the data. And just again to give you numbers, you know, in the year 2020 it's projected, and this is I think the Cisco Global Cloud Index, they project that roughly 600 zetabytes of data is going to be created on the edge. And the public and private cloud combined in that year is going to roughly witness 15 zetabytes of data. And so the question is where did the rest of it go? And I think my answer is, if you look at, for example, a smart building, or a robot inspection, that kind of scenario, the robot's taking pictures or video streams, which is ridiculously rich data, and changing it into time series, database of whether some anomaly was detected or not, you know, look at a smart airport example. We're going to take a lot of surveillance data and change it into whether a person of interest was detected or not, or did you see a white van that you're looking for? And so really the information, the volume of information goes down but the refinement goes up. Is, you know, the cloud really is interested to know, because, presumably in the smart airport example, you have somebody sitting at a dashboard monitoring all California airports looking for a person of interest, and all they are worried about is whether somebody showed up or not, and so it's the metadata that shows up, as opposed to the raw data. >> So the needles go back. >> Satyam: Needles go back, exactly. That's a good way to put it. Not the haystack. >> Yeah, Nicolaus, one of the things we look at IOTs, it's really created a much larger, I mean, orders of magnitude more surface area for security attacks. Is that something that concerns you, your clients, you know, how can security fit in? >> It concerns our clients very much so. Absolutely, in fact, one of the first questions out of everybody's mouth is, "How are you going to handle security?" So it's paramount and very important. Absolutely. >> Alright, Satyam, how are you going to solve that? >> Satyam: The running joke is Blockchain, and you know, people stop asking questions as soon as you say Blockchain. But no, it's an unbelievable problem. In fact, something that probably we haven't, you know, kind of solved in generations. We are struggling with cloud security, with cyber security, and now we are talking about a number of devices that's going to be three orders of magnitude more than the number of servers that run in the cloud today. >> What about, one of the things we haven't talked about is connectivity. How do you connect the edge? Is it just all wireless? >> Yeah, I mean, the ubiquity of the wireless networking systems are very high right now, I mean it's all... >> Host: How's the quality? >> Ah, you know, good. >> Host: It's like wireless. >> It's like wireless. >> Host: But is it a headwind? >> No it's actually, it's, you know, one of the issues that we're having with honestly, our pipe inspection demonstration today is just being flooded. There's 4,000 people in the main hall, right? And so there's all this wireless activity and sometimes, you know, our pipe inspection robot doesn't know who it should be quite listening to, and I mean, you know, you go to a concert, and you look like you might head to a Metallica concert here and there. >> I do. >> And, you know, sometimes you can't even send a text because there's just so many people and trying to connect and it's a big deal and so... >> Host: So it's a challenge for you. >> Nick: Absolutely it's a challenge. >> Excellent. >> I've seen some vendors, they are deploying special networks, right? They are deploying low bandwidth networks. Verizon's doing it I think, AT&T is doing it. >> Host: Yeah, okay, no pineapples. >> No pineapples hopefully >> That's like the most recent silicon valley episode, right? >> Alright gentlemen, listen, thanks very much. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube. >> Satyam: Thanks for having us. >> Great story and news cases, it's always a pleasure. >> Nick: Thanks >> [Second Interviewer] Good luck with the demo. >> Alright, keep right there everybody we'll be back with our next guests. This is the Cube, we're live from Nutanix NextConf. Be right back. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: Live, from Washington, DC. It's the Cube covering .NEXT Conference. (upbeat music) Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back at Nutanix .NEXT, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of our wall-to-wall coverage of .NEXT Conf. Kirk Skaugen is here, he's the president of the Lenovo Data Center Infrastructure Group. Sudheesh Nair is the president of Nutanix. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Stu Miniman. We're part of the nerd herd here at the conference. So Kirk, let's start with you. We've been talking to Nutanix all week. You guys got the great booth, we've been looking at your booth all week. Transform, last week you guys had a big conference. Lenovo, obviously undergoing major transformations, as are your customers and your partners. Give us the update, how's it going? >> Well, it was a big event for us. We've been working for about two and a half years since the acquisition, the IBM X-Series team. So we launched basically our biggest data center portfolio in history, about 14 new servers, seven new storage boxes, five new network machines, and, probably more importantly to our relationship, we announced two big new brands. So Think System is kind of for the traditional infrastructure and then Think Agile, and our appliances with Nutanix for hyper-converge infrastructure. >> You guys have been talking to analysts and your community about what I call choice. You know, you've got a lot of different choices of partners, of even now processor types, hyper-visors, etc. So talk about how that's important to your partnership strategy, generally and specifically unpack some of the Lenovo specifics. >> I think it is important to have a point of view, when you're talking to customers nowadays. The problem is: is the point of view about your own company's thought process, Wall Street expectations or the point of view's doing by what is right for the customer. Take it for example, an SSD, a commodity SSD from Samsung or Toshiba. If you take that SSD and put it inside a Solar and try to sell it, you probably will get X dollars for it. That same SSD, if you put it inside a high-end SAN, you can probably take like 10X more that, right? Where do you you are-- >> Those were the days. (laughing) >> The thing is where do you think you will be going first? What will you be trying to sell first? The thing I like about Lenovo is that they're made to be efficient. That it is going to be a software defined world. But hardware does matter, the library matters, support matters and along with Lenovo, we are able to go to customers and completely re-transform, you know sort of change their architecture without being caged by any sort of Wall Street expectation that goes counter to what is right for customers. >> Kirk, I know there are many milestones you talked about at Lenovo Transform. I think if I remember it, one of them was the 20 millionth x86 server is going to be shipping sometime in the next couple weeks. >> That's right. >> To think Agile line to kind of look at software defined, how does Nutanix fit into that? You've been OEM-ing them since before you went into this branding so tell us how that came together to the new line. >> So I think we're celebrating this year 25 years an x86 servers and so you're right, we are looking at a software defined world and what I constantly hear is that Lenovo is getting pulled in because we don't have a legacy infrastructure of a big SAN business or a big router business, so we're kind of unencumbered by that but we're shipping our 20 millionth x86 server in July, next month. But with Nutanix, what we're basically doing is we're tightly integrating our management software with their prism software, we're looking at integrating some of the network topology work now with innovation because rather than kind of a legacy network that people are used to now, well we moved to a hyper-converge infrastructure, some of those pain points move onto networking but we've been innovating together now for almost two years and I think we're crossing almost 300 customer deployments now, almost 200% growth since we've started. At least Lenovo's goal is we're going to be Nutanix's largest growing OEM partner this year. >> So talk more about that innovation strategy because, you know, the general consensus is well, it's x86, they're all the same. How do you guys differentiate from an innovation standpoint? >> Well, what we talked about at Transform is our legacy now is we're number one in customer satisfaction in Lenovo on x86 systems in actually 21-22 categories. And that's a third party survey that's done across like 700 customers in 20 countries. Number one in reliability. So we're building off of this infrastructure, off of a really strong customer base. What we're trying to do on Think Agile is completely redefine the customer experience. From the way you configure the system, we can now do configure to order in three weeks. Which we think is about half of what anyone else in the industry can do relative to our competitors. And then we're innovating down the the manageability layer, the networking stack, all of those pieces to really build the best solutions together. >> Sudheesh, there's an interesting two differing things if I look at Lenovo and your partnership. Number one is Kirk says they don't have any legacy, but one of the reasons you're in OEM with them is because they do have history, they've got brand, they've got channel, how do those come together in the partnership? >> So remember, I think before XEI, servers used to be a stateless machine, being they would move the VM's back and forth because the data lives somewhere else in the storage system. So what you expect out of the server, when it comes to reliability and serviceability are very different. What we did with XEI when we came on for the first time, we took the liable storage piece, sharded into small segments and move them inside the servers. All of a sudden, the library of the server has become exponentially more important. Affordability, serviceability, how you do things like form guard management, all those things become important now because your entire core banking application is running inside a bunch of servers, there is no SAN sitting behind protecting all of this. One of the reasons why Lenovo's ex-clarity project is one of the first apps on our app store is because we want to make sure that customers have a fully integrated souped enough experience of not just managing the product but also experiencing the day one and day two. Upgrades, replacements, failure replacement, all of those things. So between our relationship with Lenovo's hardware and engineering, plus the support, we are able to deliver a one plus one equals three experience for our customers. >> So Sudheesh, I heard almost 300 customers you're at. Could you give us a little bit of kind of either verticals or geography that you're being successful? >> What we've seen with Lenovo that is a little different from the rest of the business that we do is that majority of the business is coming from large customers and second, I would say financial sectors were the biggest initial moment it seem to be. And the repeat business is following the same pattern that the customers who buy are coming back and buying again. In fact, one of the largest financial institutions in the country, New York, bought last quarter a decent size, a seven figure plus deal, and they'll probably come back and buy again this quarter. So that pick-up is happening really fast and customers are happy with the overall experience. And it's also about the courting process, the shipping process that he talked about, these are all simple things but these are extremely important in the customer buying experience. >> I think from our perspective, we operate in over 160 countries, a lot of people don't realize we have over 10,000 support specialists that call with more than a 90% customer sat rating. So when we're bringing in Think Agile, what we're bundling now with Think Agile and the Nutanix appliances is premiere customer support so you don't even go to an automated system, you go directly to a local language speaking person on the phone immediately and you get one vendor to support you across your server, your storage, your networking in the whole configuration. That has gotten customers like for us, Jiffy Lube, Holloway, Beam Suntory who's the third largest premium spirits vendor in the world, one of the largest Japanese auto-manufacturers, I mean, I think it's been across all verticals that we've seen success together. >> I was in Asia last week, two weeks ago, and the business there is tremendously picking up speed. It goes through the story, you know, they have local language support, local marketing, local channel enablement, those things matter significantly. Lenovo's very strong in all those areas. >> We live in a world that's data driven. Data is the new oil. You've got to montage your data. You guys have big volumes, you have a lot of data. In relation to partnerships, in this day and age, what role does the data play? Is there an integration of data, is there a way to get more value, how are you getting more value out of the data that you share with your customers? >> I started maybe working China as well in one of the areas, this is an extremely important question, don't think of this as a hardware and infrastructure software play, this is about what customers want. In one area, for example, SAP. One of the largest SAP's partner is Lenovo and by partnering with Lenovo, we are now able to deliver, in fact, there is a specific product CD's that we've built for Lenovo HANA customers called Bridge to HANA where we deliver certified HANA platform on Lenovo along with the Nutanix software as a prediction and testing and wiring IB's next to that. By lapping the Lenovo SAP expertise, the hardware expertise, and the Nutanix's infrastructure expertise, the customers can have a single one-stop shop for analytics, ERT, and everything. Those kind of experiences are what customers are looking for. >> I think one of the reasons people are coming to Lenovo is we're not trying to compete with them necessarily far up the stack like we would think some of our competitors are doing. But if you look at SAP, we're excited because we've had a relationship in software defined with SAP since probably eight years ago. We were actually blazing the trail, I think, with them on software defined and we got rid of the legacy SAN out of that solution probably in 2010, started eliminating some of the costs associated with that. And now we're proud that SAP runs Lenovo, and Lenovo runs SAP. We're starting to pull some big customers together like V-Grass which is one of the largest, fastest growing clothing manufacturers in China, but we're not trying to like hoard the data and use the data, or compete with our customers on data. >> Alright, guys, we're out of time. But just to sort of last questions relates to the future. Where do you guys want to take this? A couple years down the road, where are we going to see this partnership, what's your shared vision? >> You saw today, we moved from that hyper-converge to a multi-cloud world. A multi-cloud world where we are redefining what hybrid cloud really means. There's a lot of work to be done to bring applications, infrastructure, and uses togethers. And partners like Lenovo is how we are going to get there. >> Yeah, absolutely, I think this is just the beginning. We're looking to a transposable world, hyper-convergence is one path along the way. We've been participating in public cloud and now the world is moving into hybrid cloud. We've got great partnerships I think we'll see strong growth with both companies for the next few years. >> Can't do it alone. Kirk and Sudheesh, thanks very much for coming to the Cube, I really appreciate it. >> Thanks so much. >> You're welcome. Keep right there, buddy, Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break. We're live from Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCUBE, covering .Next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to Nutanix dot Conf, everybody, sorry, .NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with Stu Minamin. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. We have a real treat for you, the day two keynote was done by Sunil Potti, who's the head of product, Chief Product Officer in development at Nutanix, long-time CUBE guest. Sunil, good to see you again. Thank you for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Good to be here. >> Agree with Stu, great energy in the keynote this morning. Have to say, we got in there, Stu, at around ten of, the place was not packed, but by the time you started, the play was packed. We heard the Lenovo party went till like two a.m. >> Stu: The extent of it. There was some excitement. >> People came in and, yeah, lot of cheering, so you must feel pretty good about that. >> Yeah, now I think, I was telling some of you guys, I think right now we are in our growth years where it sort of feels like we've got a lot of fans because folks want to sort of relate to technology companies that foundationally are disruptive and keep disrupting. It helps folks' careers, it helps their personal lives, everything, right? So, the wipe that we get out of these .NEXT conferences are mostly about this, well, not so young people, they feel young using the technology at work and while at the conference, so that's, I guess, part and parcel of some of the, sort of the excitement that you're seeing probably. >> Well, so let's get into it. I mean, a lot of announcements this week. Where do you want to start? >> I think, that's a big question. There's a lot of stuff. >> Maybe we start with the strategy, which you laid out two years ago, we're not just HCI, we're goin' cloud. So that's sort of the set-up, and you've had a number of proof points and product announcements this week that underscore that strategy. >> I think I'll break this down into four parts, just to structure it, which is, obviously we've moved way beyond HCI, we subsumed virtualization, and then, we said cloud, if you remember 2015, and then we improved on it in 2016 and so forth. The big thing was every few years it gives you an opportunity to truly offer a step function change in transformation with the company, and that's 2017 for us is. That's why the announcements are all so packed, it's not just an incremental set of things. Let me break it down into four segments. One, the first thing is the fact that it truly is clear to us and to our customers that this needs to be this single software-centric fabric that gives you optionality of any hardware platform, any hypervisor, any consumption model, whether it be a pay-as-you go, it could be appliance-driven, it could be pure software ELAs and so forth. And then, obviously with our partnerships with Dell, Lenovo, support of Amazon and Azure, and now Google in a big way from the public cloud side, and I'll come to, but then extending that to our software support on Cisco and HP, and now with IBM, power especially, changing the game in terms of an enterprise worker. The first sort of segment of capabilities is to really make it look like our platform story is becoming an OS that cuts across, if I can call it, all of our applications, deployment full factors while being open. So that's the first category. Let me just maybe quickly summarize, and then we'll come back. >> Perfect. >> The second is the fact that, look, while we we're doing that, we were still taking an infrastructure-centric view, whether it's VMs, containers, whatever it is. So now, what we've found is that fundamentally we need to change the operational construct, elevate it to be an application-centric work, and that's where Calm comes in. Independent of hybrid clouds, just from a private cloud side itself, even if I'm just elevating my current infrastructure to a private cloud, an app-first automation is a good thing, and then, what we've done is in that second category is to merge, quote-unquote, on-prem infrastructure with off-prem using this multicloud thing. That's the second thing, that's Calm. The third thing is the fact that, well guess what, while we can bring provisioning and operational convergence with Calm, true lift and shift is still very high because the stacks on both sides are different within public cloud and private cloud, and that's where Xi comes in, which is our new cloud services. Essentially, it replicates your on-prem stack and seamlessly extends your data center so you can do some things like one-click DL and so forth. And the last but not the least was as we were building Xi, and we'll get into it, Google and Nutanix have started getting really close from a technology integration and a delivery perspective where things like Xi could become ubiquitously delivered, but more importantly, I could take Google Cloud past services and fuse them with Nutanix enterprise solutions. So, those are the four. >> Sunil, let me poke at something. We've heard this story before, broad, lots of choice, let's build an ecosystem, but AHV seems to be a strong component, so Xi, you got to use AHV, you got to use Nutanix replication. It's like you've got lots of choice unless you want to use all these cool things we're doing, in which case you want the full Nutanix stack. >> And I think that's a constant thing for us is, look, at the end of the day, to us lock-in should be by choice, not by need. It's up to us to offer a series of value-added services on our full stack, but customers choose to go to that full stack for value. It's just like on-prem, right? I mean, look, 60, 70% of our enterprise workloads are still ESX-based, Hyper-V is still there, under the cover SuperMicro or NX is no longer 100%, it's coming down. Frankly from a customer perspective of deployment, that's where they start, maybe they'll stay there. We can add value to that environment, but if you use AHV, you get micro-segmentation for free, it's one click. It's up to the customer to choose to use AHV based on the choice at that point. And the same thing applies to Xi as well, saying, look, on day one it'll replicate on-premise to off-premise, but on off-premise, at least on the enterprise side, Stu, we will still support ESX and Multi, you know, essentially the open environment is still a source for us. The target, on day one at least, we can build an honest product without being completely integrated. >> And Sunil, definitely there's choice there, even look at the Google announcement. Well, they've got the HV solution tour if you want to go down the containerization, Kubernetes, that's going to be somewhere. We've been positing that the partnership with Google should help you accelerate that move towards containerization. We know it's early for a lot of customers, but any commentary you can give on virtualization? >> Absolutely, and in fact, I would say containerization sort of expanded to the broader cloud-native workloads aspects, which is to us the big thing that customers came to us, and we've seen that now resonate as they just don't want DR. Obviously, one-click DR is a big deal, if you can pull it off by replicating the stacks. But really what they want from the enterprise side is they want to take enterprise apps that they are elastic, consume them as a cloud service, but co-locate them in such a way, not just in the data center level, but at an application-operations level, application-integration level, so that they can co-reside as if they were on the same node with a set of Google past services. So essentially, think about it, I've done all this work to do one-click DR, I have mode warehouse management system running SQL server or something else into the Nutanix cloud, that's a little bit easy now with Xi, but now, I can now run a big query app, I can honestly use those services as if they were in the same VLAN, and that's the real power of isolating containers. >> I love that, and I guess the easy compare on that is later this year we expect VMware on AWS to run. I'm sure you would posit that VMware and Amazon, you know, pricing might be a little bit different than the Nutanix and Google offering and what services and how you have them, a little different. >> I think, I'm sure you get a lot of responses on that one, but I'll tell you my take is, actually, even before comparing the approach. First of all, just philosophically, I think the strategy it makes sense of trying to make hybrid invisible, in general, right? I mean, vCloud frankly was the first cut at that. The way we look at it was vCloud was the right use case, wrong implementation. And to me, I think that is still the most important thing, which is before we build this hybrid cloud, whether it is with AWS or Google or anybody else that we've talked to and over at Nutanix or VMware, you still have to build a proper private cloud, as in the cloud that powers your primary data centers needs to look like a true Google or AWS. And to us, unless someone re-engineers that stack that's going to not be the same as, oh, even if I took, if I can call it, a half-baked fiber cloud, and I extended it as a service, it's still half-baked hybrid cloud. That's going to be the big thing, I think, that's going to turn things up. >> And that led us at Wikibon to coin this term, "true private cloud." We get a lot of grief for that term some time, but we saw a lot of cloud-washing, and the concept is basically to substantially mimic what's in the public cloud on-prem, and then, create a control plane that spans multiple physical locations. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Now, one of the things I've been getting a little grief on in this show, 'cause we think Nutanix is an instantiation of what we call true private cloud. One of the folks in our community who has been hitting on me, and he actually wrote a piece, this guy, Yaron Haviv, he's a very sharp guy, said that guys like you and others have no chance against the public cloud because he said this, "HCI is stateful," I want to read it and get your feedback. "HCI is stateful, its VMs, its vdisks, "they're like IT pets with a lot of labor. "AWS is stateless with micro-services, "its object, its database is a service, AI is a service, "and it's built for devs." I know you understand this, but how do you respond? >> I think, look, you know, frankly, we had a choice as a company a couple of years ago when we were growing, the primary question for this company was, well, if the apps are moving outside, forget about IAS or AWS, it's us, and users are moving outside, again, forget about dev and object store and all that. It's about consumerization because of mobility, everybody's got a phone, they can access an app. Who worries about infrastructure? As an enterprise infrastructure company, that's a secular question to answer, right? For us-- >> It's profound. >> For us, there's a reason why we didn't pack up and sell the company and move on. There's a thesis for the company. The thesis for the company is that we fundamentally think that cloud is not a zero sum game. And we're seeing that not just with the largest assets, like all the big dot-coms that went with cloud, defined cloud, and they're coming back now. One of your popular, whether it's your, you can call it your consumer devices that actually started with their service completely, as they grow, they're actually moving half of their services back to the private cloud. I think but it applies to the mainstream enterprise, which I call the fact that because public cloud is not a zero sum game not because of security or compliance, because those are temporal things, in my opinion. The moment AWS puts a data center right beside my data center, security is a little bit, compliance or data regulation is a little bit avoided. The real reason is purely going to be a financial choice for the kind of workload. If it's a predictable workload, even if I could re-engineer it, if it's predictable, it's kind of like me coming in, staying here in D.C. for three days, I'll rent a hotel. If it's there for a year, I'll lease an apartment. If I'm there for five years, financially, accel makes certain math deal, right? Doesn't matter if my costs are cheap, it's going to just work that way. I can buy hardware, cap excise it, amortize and so forth. I guess the simple answer to it is eventually I think there'll be 100% of the market will move. In some markets, there'll be 70-30, in some markets, it'll be 30-70. We are in 1% of that market, so for Nutanix, the more someone tastes the wine of public cloud, the faster they'll actually make the transition of their private infrastructure to look like Amazon. And in that sense, we are like, look, that's why want to do Xi is because Xi actually takes DR infrastructure away from us. We're probably making more money selling Nutanix in the DR data center when we are accelerating the move because we think that that eventually accelerates every workload to come through the primary infrastructure in Nutanix. At the end of the day, it's going to be not about objects, which is vdisk, I mean, he's right also, in the sense that shame on us if we don't have a level of abstraction that is app-centric, then you don't have really care about whether it's an object storage or vdisk or anybody, so that whether it's a developer or an IT operator, they use the same operation levels. >> Sunil, we like that Nutanix is putting out a vision, my understanding, you know, the cloud service next year? >> Sunil: Yeah, early next year. >> What I'm a little worried about is, we're almost out of time with you, and you went through so many different pieces. There of course, there's the Calm. We're going to talk to Aditya in a little bit, but maybe give us some of the highlights as to the stuff that's shipping now or soon that your customers have been talking about. >> What's happening is basically you take those four segments, the core software fabric evolving across every platform and so forth. There's a bunch of stuff that has started shipping in the 5.1 release which came out a few months ago, and a lot of it was shipped in the 5.5 release that's coming later in the year. Calm is part of that release, as you guys know, it's part of the same, it's baked in. We had a choice, so basically Calm has been engineered a couple of times over six, seven years. It's not a vulnerable product, but we took the time from last year, we didn't release it, create a Frankenstein, a power-sucking alien on the side, like some other tools. We took the time, to be honest, to integrate it into the console. You saw it, I mean, it's apps, it's taken time. Functionally, it's there. But that'll be part of the same release, and then, the Xi project will be early 2018. The Google integrations will come in a staged way, even as early as later this year with Calm and Kubernetes and so forth, and then extending to Xi. So the timeframe that we're talking about is probably minus three month to plus nine months. >> So, the DR solution that you showed, though, that is native Nutanix tech, right? That's not partners in the ecosystem. >> It's Nutanix software delivered as a full stack, and this is another thing that we had to take a hard call. It is raging debate couple of years ago is like who builds a public cloud in these days? Because that'll be the obvious question. And the question was really, it's not about building a public cloud, are you building a cloud service, whether it's on-prem or off-prem, are you being honest in the product design? Do you do billing and metering in one click? We don't do that today. But as building a cloud service through Xi, we are building all those for our private cloud customers. And so, the goal was, kind of like six years ago, the easy answer was to take Nutanix, sell our software and say we are VMware for the new era, not worry about BIOS firmware, upgrades, and all that stuff. And so, until we did Nutanix on SuperMicro, people actually believed that the market existed, and then, Dell and Lenovo and others came to buy. Same thing applies with Xi in an accelerated way. The moment we have the conviction to go build a full stack, make it look like an exact replica, but build these cloud capabilities, that's the big thing that I think some of our competitors didn't do was they took the same stack that was in the cloud and quickly tried to make it a cloud service. That's the reason why we are starting with our own service and data centers, and then, scaling through Google, for example, as a way for not just get global reach, but also to merge cloud-native apps with these enterprises. >> But the other obvious question, and I'm sure you guys had that conversation about this internally is, some of the folks in our ecosystem are in that space, and is this competitive to what they're doing? You guys have always been a customer problem solving company, but what was the conversation like in that regard? >> It hasn't come up, to be honest, I think the cloud service aspect is still relatively new, it's siloed, I mean, we are pretty clear. This is not an end-all, be-all service. We don't want to overreach from our things. It's about, look, you first move to Nutanix on-premise, and it's your choice to say, it should be as simple as, "I provision VMs, and the more VMs I have, "or containers on Nutanix, I should right-click "and say protect." And just like iCloud for the iPhone, they're in the cloud, right? That's the goal, the true product goal. >> That Amazon-like experience that you're describing. >> And it's a service that's integrated into it. And so, when we have partners who have been hosting Nutanix, if you're talking about service providers, you've already had questions on, rather than just create yet another service provider partner program that automatically conflicts at all, eventually what we think is that we will offer turnkey services, not a general purpose infrastructure. There's always use cases where somebody wants to outsource their primary data center, and that's where a lot of our partners will be, especially the mid-tier partners are in the mode of outsourcing the full data center, and for them, offering one-click DR on their primary outsource thing is another advantage. >> He's too good, we're not going to let him go yet. >> Sunil: No, no, keep going. >> Are we done? >> Central, some of the other announcements outside of the cloud, can we just touch on some of the highlights there? >> They're all part of the core fabric, and unfortunately, they get subsumed into the, you know, when you have big announcement, they kind of subsumed. But a couple interesting things that came up is I think, and this particularly I'm pretty fond of couple of features. One is Acropolis File Services. I made this joke about killing an air app a couple of years ago, and people keep reminding me about it. I think it's one of our fastest growing features in the last six to nine months, and it's a natural sale for us. People go in there, it's been a little bit limited because of SMB functionality, but now with NFS, it opens up that. Another one, though, that's probably more secular is this concept of machine learning now coming into mainstream. People talk about AI and all that, and it is a lot of churn for us, but it all comes down to manifesting itself as tangible things that the customer sees. For example, if I can show that certain amount of down time genuinely reduced from four nines, it became five nines, without the operator having to do anything, then it is becoming intelligent. I think our bar for machine learning, which you will see more and more, by the way, as a secular thing, I think, I'll predict that not just from Nutanix. >> Dave: Sure. >> AI, if I have to use the word, is going to become more prominent in the next few years, just like cloud was. >> So, Sunil last question I have for you. From a development standpoint, where won't Nutanix go? >> Where will we not go? Great question, so for example, there's an obvious thing like AWS. It says let me instrument every service that sits on my platform. If I like that service, I might end up doin' it. The classic, if I can call it, the tyranny of being a platform partner. See, for us, I think because of two things. One, our ceiling of our current market is super high right now, Stu, right? I mean, we still, yeah, it's a billion bucks, growing 50, 60%, whatever, but we're still, even if half the business goes to AWS, Google, and Amazon, we can still be a company larger than we were. >> It's nearly a trillion dollar market. >> I mean, it's a big market, so therefore, we don't have to be greedy about near-term. We can be long-term greedy. >> Dave: Alright, we got to go. >> All right. >> Thanks so much for coming on, we really appreciate it, Sunil. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest, right after this short break. (electronic keyboard music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, it's The Cube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back at Nutanix .NEXT. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my longtime co-host Stu Miniman. Don Mims is here as the director of infrastructure and virtualization at Baylor, Scott, & White Health. Don, great to see you. Thanks for comin' on The Cube. >> Thanks for havin' me. I appreciate it bein' here, it's very nice. >> Yeah, so Baylor, Scott, & White Health, we weren't familiar with that before we met you. Tell us a little bit about the organization. >> Sure. So, Baylor, Scott & White Health is based in Dallas, Texas. We've recently had, over the last couple of years, a merger opportunity. We merged with Scott & White that is down in Temple, Texas which is a little farther east, or west and south of Dallas. And we've grown our organization to around 40 hospitals, over 500 clinics and we continue to grow and make strives in the healthcare space. >> Dallas is booming. I mean, obviously-- >> It is. World-class city with world-class healthcare. Talk about some of the things that are happening in healthcare that are sort of driving your strategy, the challenges that you guys are having. I mean, obviously, there's, there's EMR, there's meaningful use, there's, you know, changes in the Affordable Care Act, all that stuff. That and or other things that are really driving strategy and creating challenges for you. >> Yeah, one of the biggest things that we're doin' right now is movin' into the digital space. So, the patient, centered focus being in a traditional brick and mortar facility, is shifting. Patients wants quicker access to data, quicker access to physicians. So, bein' able to create solutions that can deliver a physician and patient experience, possibly from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet, a PC, is where we're movin' the market towards. So, some of the solutions that we're building and delivering are enabling a faster delivery of technology for healthcare. >> You know, sort of, when you think about last decade, docs were, sort of, averse, somewhat to technology. >> You're right. >> And mobile really changed that, hasn't it? >> It has. >> How has that affected your, the backend infrastructures? >> So, it definitely has to be more robust. As you're delivering content now, video, web chats, things like that that have to be reliable because now patient outcomes depend on that type of data delivery, the backend has to be available more than ever at this time. >> So it's kind, you actually kind of have an IOT use case in the hospitals, right? >> We're gettin' there. >> And then when you start pushin' video around it's got to be very challenging. Now you're also doing some projects around DNA sequencing. Is that right? >> We are. It's very exciting space. We recently delivered a solution on Nutanix to create a DNA sequencing platform that hasn't been done before as we know it. The vendor, this was the first time for the vendor, a first time for Baylor, and it has been very successful implantation and it's, it's a very robust system today. >> Don, can you bring us inside a little bit? What were the requirements you were lookin' for? What led you down the path to Nutanix? Had you been usin' them before or was this the first-use case? >> It's actually not the first-use case. The project actually started out as a, it was a migration. The customer was using a hosted solution. It was slow. Their sequencing data was taking a long time. Their results were being held up because of the way their architecture was set up. So, we decided to bring it in-house and put it on a platform that was kind of new to us and try to deliver it with better speed and it definitely has done that. >> And does that trickle down to, you know, what does that mean to the cost of solutions? I mean, I think we all know it, you know, DNA sequencing used to take a long time and a lot of money and it's now, you know, kind of, do a swab type things and it's done a lot less. >> Yeah, so with this platform, the customer, the physician is now not only going to use this platform to get results quicker, we're also going to start potentially offering this as a service to others and help other physicians and other clinics also get their results quicker as well. So, it's going to grow over time to just an in-house solution to maybe something more broad-scale. >> So you saw the keynotes this morning. They're pushin' a lot of information at us. Obviously, we, Stew and I talked about it in our open. Nutanix, a couple years ago, sort of pivoted beyond hyper-coverged infrastructure, tryin' to position as cloud even though they still a lot of hyper-converged infrastructure, let's face it. But, as a consumer, as a practitioner, how does that message relate to you? You have a lot of vendors tryin' to sell to you. You got cloud, different cloud strategies, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud, cloud. Dev-ops, containters. So, do you, what do you want to see from a company like Nutanix? Do you want them to, like, stick to their knitting, hey just give me hyper-converged infrastructure, or do you want them to take you on, on a journey? I wonder if you could add some color to that. >> Sure, and where you're goin' with that question is exactly the reason we chose this solution because it's way bigger than just a hyper-converge, you know, solution. That was, for me, that was kind of the first thing. That's what got us hooked and then the innovation that's come, you know, since then, and things that we've learned about the product and where they're goin' with automation, migration strategies of current workloads, the ease of management, the cloud strategy, the partnerships that they're makin' now with other, with other partners. That's really what I like to see and that continued growth is why we chose this product 'cause they have that vision and it's really appealing. >> And so, do you, are you using public cloud today? >> We are in a very limited manner. As you can imagine, health care and personal health information in the cloud can be kind of scary to some people so we have started that roadmap and we continue to try to expand that as we go. >> Is it fair to say that as an infrastructure professional that you're, you're, can I summarize your infrastructure strategy is you want, like, to, substantially mimic the attributes of a public cloud where it makes sense on prem. Is that fair? >> That's exactly what we're tryin' to do. Speed to delivery, server provisioning, resiliency of the infrastructure, invisible infrastructure, you might have heard that term today or over the past few days. That's what we're tryin' to accomplish. >> Self-service or no? >> Self-service internally right now. So, my own staff are going to use the automation internally to deliver quicker and then eventually as we perfect that, we'll let our customers self-service. >> So be as cloud-like as possible but not too cloud-like too soon? >> Exactly. >> So do you feel as though, as an IT pro, that you are on the path to achieving that vision? >> I do. We are, at Baylor, we're breaking new grounds with what we've done recently and I think the longterm vision to where we want to be is going to be, is going to be big over the next few years. >> So we get, we get into a lot of discussions with folks in our community that are, you know, kind of, cloud bigots, I'll call them and they say, "Hey, the vendors like Nutanix "and even more so vendors like IBM and HPE "and, you know, EMC, and their customers "will never be able to achieve what Amazon achieves." My question to you is, and you probably agree with that, I mean, Amazon's ahead of you, I bet. But, I would hope. But, how do you feel about that? Is that okay? Do you lose sleep over that or do you feel as though, "Hey, we've made so much progress." I wonder if you could comment on that as an IT pro. >> Yeah, sure. So, briefly on that topic, Amazon's business model is a little different than the industry that we're in, right? >> Yeah, sure. >> And, we're not really in the technology delivery business, right? We're in healthcare and patient servicing but what we do behind the scenes to enable the patient satisfaction and patient outcomes using this web-scale technology or this Amazon-like infrastructure is something that we're going to continue to build and grow on. We'll never be in that position, like Amazon is. But behind the scenes with automation and the infrastructure resiliency, using that same technology is what we're going to, how we're going to accomplish that. >> So a big part of that, 'cause you mentioned some of the digital transformation you're doin' up front, a big part of that cloud-like on prem, is makin' your people more productive and not, you know, focused on provisioning LUNs and servers and-- >> That's right. >> You know, pluggin' in cables. It's really automating as much as possible. So, have you seen the affect on non-differentiated IT labor in your shop? >> We have. So, just within our team, the amount of time the engineers have to spend on just this specific infrastructure has been greatly reduced so we get to spend more time doin' things like protectin' our environment. You know, a lot of these, these viruses have been comin' out lately. These, these exploits. So, we've been able to patch more diligently, remediate issues, and then we've seen other reduction in time for other teams. Storage team, they don't have to deal with our stuff anymore. They can focus in other areas. So it's really been a shift in the way we do business. >> So just one more followup, I know that Stu wants to jump in. So, and this is a hard question to be precise on, but, in rough terms, if you think in, you know, rough percentage terms, how much, you know, sort of, of the labor effort you've been able to shift to more interesting, the fun stuff, as Stu calls it. Is it a 5% factor or a 20%, 50%, you know, 100% factor? I wonder if you could just give us some anecdotal-- >> Right now the impact has been pretty small. If you look at the, our Nutanix infrastructure today, it's a very small portion of our overall infrastructure since it's fairly new. >> Right. >> But, I can tell you, the time that we spend on that right now is very minimal. I have one engineer that oversees the entire infrastructure at this point. I'm freein' up multiple other resources to do other things, so it's been an improvement. >> And so, and so pre-, pre-hyper-converged, if you didn't go that direction you'd have more than one engineer or? >> Oh, I'd have, I'd probably have at least three times as many. >> So three x factor, wow. >> Just because there's so many other components that you have to manage that aren't just specific to that one stack. >> David: Mhm, right. >> Don, you've got virtualization in your title, how do you look at virtualization today? Where are you in that journey? We've been hearin' at a lot of these shows that we've been at that, you know, virtualization feels like it's played out for the most part. We know where it is. Cloud has been the big discussion. Where is it in your job? >> So, kind of two paths in my infrastructure. We have server virtualization which is traditional, you know, virtualizing the compute workload. And then also on application virtualization, so app delivery. And I think there's still a lot of room for growth in both of those aspects. Application delivery is going to continue to morph and it can be delivered from multiple different platforms and I can see it doin' that over time. Server virtualization is a way to go and what we're doin' there is tryin' to continue to deliver the capacity, you know, that we're at or continue to grow it but at the same time shrinking that hardware footprint and relieving some of the stress in the data center and that's what we're lookin' for. >> On server virtualization what are you usin' today? >> For server virtualization we use VM ware, ESX. >> And have you looked at the HV stuff at all? >> We have and I'm very excited about that and it's kind of one of those things where you can't jump in with two feet right off the bat just because it is a little new and you feel like you need to really look at it really closely but at the same time, I'm pretty confident that it's going to be a good, longterm replacement as we continue to look at it. >> One of the, Nutanix has really been looking out for their future plans. One, share, you know, what resonates with you, and what about yourself? What kind of future strategy do you have? What are you looking for from the vendor community to help you do even more with your resources? >> So, the vendor community definitely, this is kind of a new area for them. A lot of the application vendors we talked to aren't really familiar with this platform so I think as this product grows and as this space grows, I think more vendor awareness is going to come about and they're going to be more comfortable with this as a solution. >> Okay, yeah, especially healthcare. It's all those ISVs that need to integrate and support and say, "Yes, I'm okay with it." >> Exactly. >> We saw that with virtualization at first and... >> Yup. And health care is always traditionally a little bit behind 'cause it's a little more conservative space. So, I think it'll take a little bit of time for them to feel comfortable there, as well. >> So what are the big problems you're tryin' to solve today from an infrastructure standpoint? >> Well, you know, financial issues are always a topic, right? So, what we're tryin' to do is deliver infrastructure to support our patients in a cost-effective way. So bein' as frugal with the money that we do have and buyin' the right technology and not spendin' a lot of money on a diverse stack and wasting financials. >> I mean, you just basically, you know, reduced your IT labor in that little part of the world by, you know, a factor of, you know, 3x as we talked about. Is there a gain-sharing philosophy where some of that reduction comes back to you for innovation or is it just, sort of, go back to other parts of the hospital? >> It will go back, probably, just to the bigger, to the bigger team. I mean, there are benefits to us, you know, specifically that we're going to achieve, but overall, that time-saving goes back and allows, you know, different teams to do other things which overall will help improve our whole environment. >> So in the keynotes today, and I was talking to you off-camera about one-click migration, there was a database migration and, I think it was one-click DR as well, but I'm interested in the database stuff. You've got some experience with databases. Actually, let me ask you, is that part of the infrastructure definition is database on down? >> It is. >> Yeah, okay. So what was your reaction to the sort of one-click database migration? >> It's very exciting. I think that's going to help in the aspect of migrating workloads from, from Legacy or traditional to this new platform. There's, I think there's still some components that you have to consider. The migration is very nice but, you know, validation, testing, all those kind of components also have to be part of that whole plan. >> So if I looked at the, I mean, database migrations can sometimes be real hard balls. So if I, if I look at the cycle, you know, the anatomy of a migration, let's say it takes, you know, n amount of time, what is that amount of time, you know, on average, and I know it's a hard, it's one of those stupid average questions. >> It can vary based on size. >> Yeah, I know it's a big it depends. But what percent of that, that, that value chain, if you will, that sequence chain is Nutanix attacking with what you saw today in your view? >> So, what you do is reduce the execution part of that migration and you probably reduce a lot of the planning phase of that because in any kind of a database migration, there are so many factors that go into that and a lot of the discussion is around how are we going to move this workload to this new space? And Nutanix has solved that by taking care of the how and then, you know, you just need to figure out how you're going to validate, test it, and confirm that once it's there, everything continues to work as expected. So I think you've reduced the time of planning and execution both with that strategy. >> I mean, the planning piece has actually got to be a huge portion-- >> Huge. >> Is it half of the total? >> It's probably at least half. >> Yeah, I would think so. >> Because the better you plan, the better you're going to execute, right, so. >> Yeah, yeah, right, right. Okay, good. Well, Don, I'll give you a last word on futures. What kinds of things are you workin' on that, you know, you can share with us? >> So for us, the future is going to be to, to continue to converge this stack. We're going to continue to move forward with automation. Try to reduce the delivery time for applications and servers and infrastructure and eventually simplify our management layer and spend more time doin' other things, doin' more fun stuff. And that's what we're lookin' to do. >> Love it. As I always say, love havin' the practitioners on we get to pepper questions and get the real story. So Don, thanks very much for comin' on The Cube. >> Thank you for havin' me, I appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back with our next guest right after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Washington, DC, It's The Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everybody. This is day 2 of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference, #NEXTConf. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. As I said, this is day 2 and today, the keynotes were in the morning. Yesterday, they were in the afternoon. So, when we left you yesterday we went right in the keynotes with CEO Dheeraj Pandey, who gave a very, as he always does, Stu, a very philosophical deep discussion, a lot of commentary from thought leaders and some customers. Somewhat long, although shorter than last year, but that's Nutanix likes to do things. They want you to bake and savor what's going on in their community and their ecosystem. Today, it was all about product. Sunil Potti got up and he basically took us through the products, the new innovations, the strategies, and that's what we're going to unpack this morning in the next couple of minutes and then go deeper throughout the day. So, Stu, it's all about cloud. Two years ago, at the first, the inaugural .NEXT Conference, Nutanix laid out a strategy of moving beyond hyper-converged infrastructure. This is at a time when everybody was pivoting to hyper-converged from the traditional converged, or the legacy infrastructure. And they laid this long term, little bit fuzzy vision about supporting cloud and multi-cloud. At the time, it was really focused on migrating off of VMware onto other platforms, but they sort of teased us with a vision of cloud. Today, we saw that vision come into a little bit more clarity, but there's still a lot of questions. Give me your summary on the keynote today and specifically, this Nutanix strategy of being the cloud operating system. >> And Dave, I think vision is the right term because unlike previous announcements by Nutanix, a lot of what they laid out here are things that in development. The two big announcements that they talked about yesterday and went through a little bit more today, Calm, which was an acquisition that they had made last year really, to be able to help them try to be that management across multi-clouds. That's in process I believe, if I remember right, it's the second half of this year, it will be shipping. I got a note from a friend of mine, and they're like, okay this is the 687th product in the industry that's trying to solve this problem because everybody is trying to solve this problem. Microsoft wants to be the player here. Companies like CA want to be in the lead here. Of course, Amazon would like to manage everything because just put it on Amazon. So, why is Nutanix position to be the control playing layer of a multi-cloud world. Nutanix is a small player. They've got some good pieces. They're starting to touch some of the environment, but I'm not sure. In the second one, the zee or jee cloud services, that's not- >> Zee, Si, jee (laughs) ... >> It's spelled X-I and we've heard multiple pronunciations. We'll get Sunil on this and get him- >> X-I is, as you told me this morning, the last two letters of Nutanix flipped. >> Yeah, so, it's a DR service that they're going to deploy. It's in development right now. I don't think we know anything about pricing yet. It's not going to ship until the first half of next year, is the target for that. But really lays out, as to, I think we really want to get to the Google relationship and beyond. How does Nutanix get to be more than just an on premises infrastructure layer. They've already sold to service providers. I've talked to companies that not only build their infrastructure, but sell services based on using Nutanix as an infrastructure, but they're going to take that full Nutanix stack and make it available in Google data centers around the world, and we expect them to expand those partnerships and what Sunil was hitting on at the end of his keynote is, the terminology they used is your cloud native, your mode one applications, a lot of times those start in the public cloud, and sometimes those come back to an infrastructure like in Nutanix, where I can run it in a similar operational model. And then, do we take our mode two applications, the big legacy, the thousands of applications that we have, do we try to shove those in to the public cloud? And the challenge there is if it's not the same stack on both ends, it's not the same operating model, there's challenges and I know we wanted to use that out a little bit. >> So, Stu, I had a conversation with Paul Moritz in 2009, where he said to me, "The advantage that Amazon and Google and Facebook have is that they have homogeneity in their data centers." And he said, "For us to succeed in cloud, we have to have homogeneity in both on prim and in the cloud." And so he, at that point, indicated that the VMware strategy was going to be putting, essentially, VMware in these clouds and the cloud service providers, as we all know, that manifested itself in vCloud Air. We've heard the story before. How is this different? >> First of all, vCloud Air, most people would agree, a failed strategy. >> Who would not agree with that? (laughs) >> Right. The biggest challenges we saw on vCloud Air when I talked to the community is VMware said, "Wait, we're going to build it ourselves and run it," and customers were like well, I've got lots of partners, and they're like, well, we'll partner with Savvis. And Savvis made no margin on this. Couldn't do anything else. They tried to go to lots of other service providers, and they were, I don't know how I add services, I don't know how I add value. >> So, how is this different? >> You look at this and say okay, well, Nutanix is going to start with building it themselves because they want to understand it. I've talked to service providers here that say, "Hey Nutanix, we have experience and we know how to do this. We could advise you on this." Of course, Nutanix, they didn't come out and say this is the future, everybody run every service on this. They say, hey, we're working on a DR solution, we're a little bit measured. This is where we're going. I think there's time for it to mature, time for Nutanix to work with their partner Ecosystems. The Google announcement gives Nutanix credibility, but a lot of it is pressure leased slideware, if you will. You say, "Okay, great, I'm going to take Z and run it on GCP." Well, this is a product next year that, maybe, will probably run somewhere with Google. Where's the details? >> Okay, talk about lift and shifts, too. >> Thanks Dave. We talked yesterday to one of the doers, one of the practitioners of Nutanix, and they said, "Hey, I'm looking at containers." And we said, "Hey, are you looking at Nutanix for this?" They say, "Well, now that I hear they're working with Google, who's obviously a thought leader in driving that, that will drive them closer to us." So, question is, the Z cloud service is based on AHV. So, if I bought in, there are some customers who say "I want a virtualized environment that I can mirror," but most of us look at it and say virtualization is kind of heavy for taking something to more the public cloud. If I containerized, then I can use kubernetes, and I can move applications a little more. Debate we're having internally, Dave, often is how much of the stack do I have to have to complete hardware all the way through on both ends? Do I have something like kubernetes, which allows me to take containerized applications and move them, because lift and shift, I was at the Cloud Foundry Summit, and it said let me build my new applications on the platform, and then I'll start migrating some over so I have that shared management platform to hold the environment. But, it's challenging. The same thing we've had discussions. Amazon, there's certain applications we build there, Amazon would love you to take all of your applications, but it's not trivial. Porting something over is not easy, is one of the points that Nutanix was making, and we've heard from the community that Amazon really doesn't want you just to trying to lift the whole thing and shift it. You should be doing some refactoring, or start pulling apart your application- >> They want you to pull change the operating model. So, Stu, is this a blind spot for Nutanix? Let me back up. We asked Pat Gelsinger, when Docker and Core OS came on the scene, what does that mean for you? He said, "Hey, we've got the best container in the world. It's VMware." And we all kind of went, mm, I don't know. Is this a similar head wind potentially? Is this a threat that Nutanix is so VM focused versus containerize? Or can they just embrace containers? >> Great question. Something I want to pose to the Nutanix executives, Dave, because there's multiple paths forward. When we asked Amazon a similar question, they said to get from your legacy data centers to public cloud, here are the eight R's, as to refactor, re-platform, redo this, things like that. There's more than one solution. As we know, customers have lots of applications. There's some that you're going to leave them sitting on. That old hardware in the back corner and run it until that thing burns into the ground. >> Running on CMS. >> Absolutely, Dave. Many of those things got moved into VM environments and are going to stay there for awhile. So, unfortunately, everything in IT tends to be additive, and we've got all of the debt of ... >> Don Tapscott. God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. The technical debt. >> Technical debt. >> All right, Stu, we got to wrap. This is day two of Nutanix. We're going all day long. Today, heavy executive, partner and customer day. We have Sunil coming on. We're going to go deep on products. Chad Sakac coming on from Dell-EMC. We got Dheeraj, of course, the CEO. Stay tuned, everybody. Stu Minima, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering .NEXT conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to NEXT Conf, #NEXTConf. This is Nutanix's big customer event. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. This is our wrap, day one wrap, Stu. We had the practitioner day today. Interesting setup for Nutanix, they have the keynotes at the end of day one, which is kind of interesting, most companies have it at the beginning of the day. >> Dave, part of that was just logistically, this convention center, while it was kind of massive, there was another show wrapping up, so they had to shuffle things around and the advice I'd given them was, well, who do we put on? Well, put on some of the partners that we heard in announcements. >> Dave: Customers, baby. >> Give us users. I mean, Dave, more users, more users, more users, they deliver. >> Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk about that. Well, let's get right into it. I mean, every customer we talked to today had similar themes, right? Simplifying, getting rid of the non-differentiated heavy lifting, reducing the IT labor pain. All of them that we talked to were using Acropolis, selectively, they all loved VMware, but they were using Acropolis to make sure that there was a level playing field with regard to not only right workloads, but also, just sending a message to VMware that, hey, we have options. >> Yeah. Dave, the thing I loved about the customers, I think about the Scholastic interview we did. We went 10 minutes into the interview before we talked to the head of infrastructure about his infrastructure. We were talking about digital transformation, how they're helping children read and it's underneath, that invisible infrastructure happens to be from Nutanix, is helping them to do that. Same thing talked about with PXP, said it's not, oh, I could my infrastructure a little better, it's, how do I wow my IT staff to do what he called the fun stuff? That meant, I'm working on the analytics, I'm digging into Splunk and getting more value out of my data. That digital transformation is something that the customers here are embracing. The hybrid multicloud maybe not as much yet, so Nutanix is a little bit of ahead of their customers there, but right, there's some real good, customers that are embracing change and building that platform for the future, and Nutanix is a partner. >> The question I always have, because I always talk about, oh, everybody's doing the digital disruption, they've got to get rid of the banal infrastructure tasks, shift that to our digital transformation and analytics initiatives, data initiatives. Sounds good, but that's not easy, and the gentleman from PXP sort of underscored that. It took some time, we had to do some training. People, process, technology, it's the people and process stuff that is hard. That's something that's very interesting, I think, to me, Stu, is this shift that's going on. We talk about in true private cloud, $150 billion going out of heavy lifting, going into vendor R&D, true private cloud and public cloud. >> Stu: Right. >> True private cloud is the fastest growing sector. If you look at infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and true private cloud, those are the explosive growth areas. Virtually everything else in the enterprise is in flat or declining mode. >> Yeah, absolutely, Dave. Got to talk to a number of partners that are helping Nutanix expand where they're going. We're going to hear, Google's going to be in the keynote. Diane Greene, one we're looking forward to, the announcement today, Wall Street gave Nutanix a little bit of a bump, and gives them some added credibility into, really, why Nutanix should be considered a cloud partner. Actually, it was Scholastic said, that he really saw Google as thought leadership in containers and Kubernetes, and something they're starting to look at and therefore, gives him more reason, that when he deploys it, he's going to turn to Nutanix to help him look at it. Talk to Intel, talk to IBM, so some companies expanding what kind of applications are living on Nutanix. Some good thought leaders talking about, right, how IT can continue to be a sustained differentiation in the marketplace, something that I know is near and dear to your heart. >> Julia from Gartner was very guarded in her comments, I thought, excellent comments, but when we tried to sort of push her into the horses on the track conversation, she kind of stayed neutral. Okay, that's cool. But we like to riff independent thoughts on theCube. Nutanix, for a couple years now has been sort of pivoting away from so-called hyper converged infrastructure as everybody else moves to hyper converged infrastructure, and they're pivoting to cloud. The obvious next wave is that what the Fourier calls interclouding. Extending that control plane across multiple physical entities, whether it's public cloud, private cloud, on prem, off prem, legacy, etc., managing that. There's a lot of companies that are trying to do that. In your opinion, is that something that Nutanix should be doing, could be doing, will be doing? What are your thoughts on that? >> Yes, so Nutanix, if they built up the stack, we've said before, I think we said on the intro, Dave, Nutanix is looking to be like the next VMware. What does VMware need to do? VMware needs to know how they fit into that world that you just laid there. That's why Pat Gelsinger made a bold move, going to partner with Amazon. Nutanix has a little bit of a relationship with both AWS and Azure. Looks like they're goin to have a deeper relationship with Google to really expand what they're doing. They've made a few acquisitions in the market, it was calm.io was one that they acquired right before VMworld last year, and that is some of their really management layer, that control plane as to how they're going to look at managing in that multicloud world now. Does a customer turn to Nutanix? Do they turn to some of the stalwarts in the IT management space? Do they turn to the public clouds? Nutanix needs to prove this out, expand their road map, and get more customers excited. There's, I believe, we've said sometimes, it's a smaller show, it's about 4500 people is what they're expecting here at the show. This is a good size for a company that just went public. Not yet at a billion dollars, impressive, always good enthusiasm when we come to this show. Expecting lots, a high bar for what they should be delivering in the keynotes. >> All right, so good first day. We're coming at you tomorrow. We'll kick off with an assessment of the keynotes. Then tomorrow's a lot of Nutanix content. It's going to be great, we've got their executives on, some of their partners, we're going to have D-Rog, who's always a great guest. Very thoughtful. >> Stu: A couple more customers, too. >> Yeah, and more customers, so keep it right there. If you want us to ask questions of some of these guests, you can tweet us, he's @stu, I'm @dvellante. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news from this and other shows. Check out wikibon.com for all the research. Okay, that's it, we're out, we'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching, everybody. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT in D.C. everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stewart Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the know as we hear it. .NEXT, Nutanix's customer event. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Julia Palmer is here. She's a research director at Gartner. My new best friend. (laughs) Great to see you again. We had a great dinner last night. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, it's a good little event here. Lot of excitement. But what's your take? You are a former practitioner, now an analyist. You were in the heart of technology at GoDaddy. You really know the market, the products. What do you make of what's going on here at .NEXT? >> You know when hyper convergence first emerged it was all about saving money. It was all about going from infrastructure that was maybe too complex and too expensive to something that maybe, based on commodity will bring lower acquisition costs. But this not the story today at all. That's what, I think my IT leaders are telling me. They're not going after acquisition costs. They're not looking at things and just comparing by the capex. They're looking at the bigger picture and how will this technology will help them to enable business. So that's I think a the biggest difference now. Going from something as simple as, is it going to to be more expensive? Less expensive? To how will it move the needle to my enterprise, to my organization? >> Dave: So that's certainly the messaging that you're hearing from, from Nutanix. As a practitioner, do you buy that? Do you believe that they're more than just an infrastructure company? That they are a transformative force in the industry. >> Julia: Yeah, I hear a lot, you know. I moderated a panel today with three customers and one of them said, you know, I'm in the health care business. I'm here to save lives. I'm not here to reinvent my own hyper converge infrastructures. So, he wants to focus on what's important for his end users. And he wants to stop manage (mumbles). That's just not a focus. And I hear it over and over again from different types of customers. >> Dave: Hmm, now you were not a Nutanix customer previously, correct? >> No. But you did see a lot of different infrastructure products? >> Julia: Absolutely. >> As a practitioner what bothered you about what the vendor community did. What were your likes and dislikes? >> Julia: Everything. Everything bothered me. >> Everything bothered you. I was part of pretty large organization and when you have a big footprint you have big problems. And one of them, for example, was that we would have an outage and we reach out to the vendor and they would tell us, you know, you hit a bug and we have a fix and we will give you the fix and you will be good to go tomorrow. Nevermind the outage that you had and impacted end users. So now a lot of vendors are using predictive analytics. Cloud based analytics, >> Right. to see if there's anything in your existing environment that's susceptible to existing bugs and proactively reach out to you to provide a fix. So I was just thinking, looking back, how many outages I could have prevented if this technology was available when I was running it. >> Stewart: Yeah, Julia, I mean we know that companies for so long, you know, infrastructure, they spent so much of their time, you know, running around, patching it, fixing it, worrying about that. Hyper converge now is trying to talk about, you know, where it fits into the whole cloud picture, which is mostly about an operational model. Where do you see along those trends. Do you believe that hyper converge really fits into a cloud strategy or is it cloud washing from a bunch of infrastructure people? You know? >> I think it has a potential. I don't think it's there today. But I think it has a great potential because when I talked to Gartner end users about, like, why hyper converge? And I actually did some total cost of ownership research, what they all told me that looking back they realized how much OpEx it saved them. And they say it was very difficult. You kind of had to take our chance on it because upfront you can't predict the outcome. Is it really going to be more simple? What does simple mean? What's key performance indicator and simple you can put. So, but looking back, the guys that implemented, they all told me that 60 percent of OpEx they saved. Meaning they didn't last with infrastructure (mumbles). How do they do this? They stop manage components. They start managing VM's. So next step is stop manage VM's, start managing applications and that's what cloud management is all about. Getting out of infrastructure management all together and deliver a business what they want. And usually, they want support for their applications. >> Dave: So, my understanding is that Gartner has analysts that service the vendor community, the executive community, and the practitioner community. You are a direct practitioner, >> Yes. Advisor. >> I deal with IT leaders. Okay, your peeps. (laughs) I think you mentioned to me last night that you've had hundreds of conversations and you've only been at Gartner, what, six months? >> Two years. >> Oh, two years, sorry. I apologize for that. Okay, so in the two years, hundreds of conversations. Is that fair? What kinds of conversations are you having with clients around infrastructure? What are the challenges that they're having? And what are you advising them? I know there are many, many, but maybe you can summarize the top ones. >> That's a very good question. I actually want to write research about it. Top five questions about hyper converse people asking so I've been thinking about it for a while. So, different types of customers, new customers are asking questions about, is it ready? Should I go for it? Why would I go for it? Why can't I keep my (mumbles) infrastructure design? What should I look for as a new key performance indicators? It's not the same way, how would you judge it here. Then existing hyper converge customer are looking for what's next step in hyper convergence. Is it ready for prime time? Is it ready for mission critical applications? Because they're looking at the boxes and they look at the commodity hardware and they still feel uncertain. Can it really run something that they're a proprietary hardware used to run. So we explore the advantages of software defined, software defined storage. Value is in the software. You know, being backed up by software defined storage, my favorite subject, is a, is a, you know abstracting and distributing data that you don't worry about us anymore. So scale out storage replacing proprietary architecture can provide you same level of uptime and performance especially with new, you know, flash options. So that's a popular question. Number three is just the, you know, we leave it to in the age of a compressed differentiation I believe my colleague Dave Russell calls it, and there's a small differences between the vendors and end users are not aware of this. And they can be critical for particular use case. So they always ask strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats on each and every one them. Because we have a lot of solutions on hyper converge now. A lot of vendors, prominent vendors now join the market. So end users are a little bit confused. How do I navigate through this ocean of different hyper converge solutions. >> Stewart: Yeah, so Julia, Nutanix helped really drive a lot of this awareness for the hyper converge market. Now, every company, you know, all the big players have at least one, if not multiple solutions out there. How do you see Nutanix? Are they differentiating themselves? Are they, I know they're trying move beyond kind of the hyper converge label, ya know. What are the doing good? What would you like to see them do more? >> Julia: Yeah, Nutanix is a, you know, was one of the leaders from the very beginning. And, you know, remains the leader. They obviously succeed in at least in a lot a features. And a very fast release cycle of new features. It's easy when you have one focus, you know. Other companies have so many different areas they need to focus or protect and Nutanix doesn't have this problem. And also being able to mix different hardware, I think it's an advantage, you know. Being able, the customer needs to make a choice, you know. I think the structure of the future is going to be all about choice. It's less about, ya know, this is a lock in. I want to pick my hyper visor. I want to pick my hardware and move on. >> Stewart: So one of the things I think Nutanix does best when they're not positioning themselves as a storage solution, however, cause the storage market is tremendously competitive and there's always the, you know, there's the next technology, the next wave. There's so many competitors out there. I mean, do you think things like NVMe over Fabric are going to just, you know, have the potential to disrupt everything that Nutanix is doing? You know, what are some of the big threats to, ya know, their current position? >> Actually, I just wrote a research about how NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics is going to disrupt and improve integrated and hyper converge systems. I think those technologies and it's like NVMe without NVMe over Fabric. It's like, I call it, it's like barbecue without barbecue sauce, right? So the NVMe and NVMe over Fabric has potential to boost performance of hyper converge systems on par with what a solid state, erase today do. So I think a, and it's commodity hardware, right? We're not talking about anything proprietary. So when a we going to move towards this territory when NVMe and NVME over Fabrics become mainstream maybe two years from now, three maybe years from now. I think everybody can enjoy shared distributed storage performance. And, but honestly, your question about storage, like do you need to position yourself as a storage company or not, the major difference about different hyper converge products, in my opinion, is how they do storage. Other than this, it's the same flavors of hyper visor, it's the same commodity hardware. So what do we have different? The ways you did data services. The ways you position your storage. You, you deliver the storage services. >> Stewart: So, you know what, I'm curious. When I read Wall Street stuff about Nutanix they seem to overreact to every bit of news so, you know, the Dell relationship, ya know, is challenging there for that to head win. Oh wait, the Google announcement seems to be a great tailwind, ya know, the big bump in the stock today. Do you see those partnerships as critically important or is it the vision and execution of Nutanix and what they're doing with their customers? >> I think so. I think we live in the age when a ecosystem support is everything, ya know. People not necessarily today go to the public cloud to save money. They go for ecosystem support. To expand their services and their capabilities. That's why, ya know, embracing the cloud and not trying to position yourself against is the right way to go. I think we all need to embrace cloud and find the way that will benefit the end users. >> Dave: Um hmm, so you were sharing with, you spend a fair amount of time, all Gartner analysts who do these things do on magic quadrants. They, we put a lot of effort into them. A lot of people criticize magic quadrants. I think they're unfairly criticized. I know how much work goes into them. >> Thank you. And they are fact based opinions if I could categorize them like that, right? Is that fair? So, do you do one on hyper converged infrastructure or converged? Do you separate converged from hyper converged? How do you look at the market? >> Julia: So last year magic quadrant was integrated systems, which is converged and hyper converged. But what Gartner does is actually, every year we look at the market and we adjust our inclusion criteria. We adjust market definition. So, I don't think it's a big secret that hyper conversion is leading this market right now. And, honestly, in conversion infrastructure, if you look at conversion infrastructure, it's very similar. The only difference in conversion infrastructure is how you do storage. Which storage area you are using. So it becomes less strategic to even analyze conversion infrastructure. So you will see this year, I cannot break all of the news here, but much more emphasis on software driven, hyper converged infrastructure. Not services. Not the appliances, but more software. >> Stewart: I love to hear that cause at Wikimon when we called the category "server sand" so like VM ware, major player both as a partner in Nutanix. A competitor in Nutanix. Ya know, I know there like, they don't show up on the Gartner magic quadrant because they don't fit into that environment. Also the lines between converge, hyper converge, and software defined storage seem to be blurring a lot. I mean, in some ways they're just different ways of packaging. Some of the others, they, hyper converged is a, ya know, delivery option for what they're doing, so. >> Julia: Exactly. >> Where do you see it going, ya know, it's, ya know, obviously beyond the appliance but, ya know. Say there's the Google announcement today. Where do you see, ya know, a company like Nutanix fitting into this hybrid or multi-cloud world? >> Differentiating on software, this is the name of the game, right? So, if you can have a portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well. And this is an idea. You said it absolutely right. Like software defines storage. It's not a technology. It's a delivery option. So customer needs to be in charge of their options. Do I want to deploy on premises? Do I want to go on cloud? Do I want to have an appliance? Do I want to buy a software, bring your own hardware? All of those choices need to be given to the end user. They need to decide which way they want to go. >> Dave: So, we're going to have Chad Saccage on tomorrow and it's obviously interesting, we see Nutanix selling through Dell. We were there two years ago when that announcement was made. Great, ya know, business. Terrific. But as you were saying, converged and hyper converged and software defined, they're all coming together now. What do you expect is going to happen with EMC and Nutanix? Do you have any... I don't want to use the prediction, but any scenarios that you can see developing there? >> I think, you know I hate to speculate, but I think both of those companies are extremely user oriented. So, if there will be demand for Nutanix that will continue to support Nutanix because they will do it right by the customers. And same with Nutanix, ya know, they never want to turn someone down saying it's not their problem. Both support them in parallel as long as demand is there. >> Dave: So let me ask the question differently, cause I agree with you. EMC, customer centric. Michael Dell, there's nobody more customer centric on the planet. Clearly Nutanix is customer focused. Having said that, if the three of us were advising Dell, EMC on what to do, we would say keep doing what the customers want. Great, check. But from a product roadmap standpoint, I don't know about you Stew, but I know I would push them to look at doing more of a hyper converge, software defined, like roadmap, as opposed to kind of bolted on V-blocks. Which got it all started. Would you agree with that? Or, do you think that's a waste of R&D? Just outsource it or OEM it? >> Software defined storage is hard to do. It's hard to do it from the ground up, ya know. Products need to mature, ya know, VMware, VSEN. It's a mature product. It's a good foundation for software defined storage and for hyper converged. Building something from the ground up, just to separated from VMware, it will be very difficult. >> Dave: Okay, well okay, right. Well then double down on VMware maybe is the advice there. Or maybe they're not really inquisitive right now because they have the debt service but over time maybe bring in startups to innovate there. Or maybe not because when you look at the Dell EMC deal from previous generations, there's a very successful deal. One of the most, probably the most successful storage deal in the history >> Stewart: Talking about the partnership? >> of storage. The partnership. >> Sure. Before Dell bought Compellent, then remember, Dell buys Compellent. I would look back on that and say Dell probably would have been better off just staying with EMC. Reselling EMC. I mean you were there during those days. I don't know. Was Compellent and EqualLogic, >> EqualLogic were those successful acquisitions in your view? In retrospect. >> Stewart: In retrospect they did pretty well but you're right Dave, the EMC partnership was way more money. I think by the time Dell bought EMC the internal Dell storage, ya know, revenue had grown to almost, or a, ya know, order of magnitude, the same size of EMC and they had to put a lot more emphasis into it. So, you know, better margins, ya know, just if they continue to partner. >> Dave: So maybe it's better for Dell to continue to partner is kind of your point. >> Stewart: Yeah. >> Julia: Absolutely. >> Uh huh, okay. Very diplomatic. (laughs) >> Julia: Would you expect anything else? (laughs) >> Julia, thanks so much for coming on the Cube >> Oh, thank you guys it was a pleasure having you. >> it was my pleasure >> Julia: Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap right after this short break. This is the Cube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (electronic music) >> Narrator: Robert Hershev.

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington, DC, it's the cube. Covering dot next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody, this is the Nutanix dot next conference #NEXTConf, and this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Dr. Arthur Langer is here, he's a professor at Columbia University, and a cube alum. Good to see you, thanks very much for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Dave: Appreciate your time. So, interesting conversations going on at dot next. People talking about cloud and you hear a lot about virtualization and infrastructure. We're going to up level it a bit. You're giving a talk-- you're hosting a panel today, and you're also giving a talk on strategic IT. Using IT as a competitive weapon. It wasn't that long ago where people were saying does IT matter. We obviously know it matters. What's your research showing, what is your activity demonstrating about IT and how is it a strategic initiative? >> Well, if you were to first look at what goes on on board meetings today, I would say, and I think I mentioned this last time, the three prominent discussions at a board is how can I use technology for strategic advantage, how can I use predictive analytics, and how are you securing and protecting us? And when you look at that, all three of those ultimately fall in the lap of the information technology people. Now you might say digital or other parts of it, but the reality is all of this sits at the heart of information technology. And if you look at many of us in that world, we've learned very efficiently and very good how to support things. But now to move into this other area of driving business, of taking risks, of becoming better marketers. Wow, what an opportunity that is for information technology leadership. >> Dave: So, obviously you believe that IT is a strategic advantage. Is it sustainable though? You know, I was sort of tongue-in-cheek joking about the Nick Car book, but the real premise of his book was it's not a sustainable competitive advantage. Is that true in your view? >> I don't believe that at all. I live and die by that old economics curve called the S curve. In which you evaluate where your product life is going to be. I think if you go back and you look at the industrial revolution, we are very early. I think that the changes, the acceleration of changes brought on by technological innovations, will continue to haunt businesses and provide these opportunities well past our life. How's that? So, if anybody thinks that this is a passing fad, my feeling is they're delusional. We're just warming up. >> So it can be a sustainable competitive advantage, but you have to jump S curves and be willing to jump S curves at the right time. Is that a fair difference? >> Yeah, the way I would say it to you, the S curve is shrinking, so you have less time to enjoy your victories. You know, the prediction is that-- how long will people last on a dow 500 these days? Maybe two, three years, as opposed to 20, 30, 40 years. Can we change fast enough, and is there anything wrong with the S curve ending and starting a new one? Businesses reinventing themselves constantly. Change a norm. >> Professor Langer, one of the challenges we hear from customers is keeping up with that change is really tough. How do you know what technologies, do you have the right skill set? What advice are you giving? How do people try to keep up with the change, understand what they should be doing internally versus turning to partners to be able to handle. >> I think it's energy and culture and excitement. That's the first thing that I think a lot of people are missing. You need to sell this to your organizations. You need to establish why this is such a wonderful time. Alright, and then you need to get the people in, between the millenials and the baby boomers and the gen x's, and you got to get them to work together. Because we know, from research right now, that without question, the millenials will need to move into management positions faster than any of their predecessors. Because of retirements and all of the other things that are going on. But the most important thing, which is where I see IT needing to move in, is you can't just launch one thing. You have to launch lots of things. And this is the old marketing concept, right. You don't bat a thousand. And IT needs to come out of its shell in that area and say I have to launch five, six, eight, 10 initiatives. Some of them will make it. Some of them won't. Can you imagine private equity or venture people trying to launch every company and be successful? We all know that in a market of opportunity, there are risks. And to establish that as an exciting thing So, you know what, it comes back to leadership in many ways. >> Great point, because if you're not having those failures, your returns are going to be minuscule. If you're only investing in things that are sure things, then it's pretty much guaranteed to have low single-digit returns, if that. >> Look what happened at Ford. They did everything pretty well. They never took any of the money, right, but they changed CEO's because they didn't get involved in driverless cars enough. I mean these are the things that we're-- If you're trying to catch up, it's already over. So how do you predict what's coming. And who has that? It's the data. It's the way we handle the data. It's the way we secure the data. Who's going to do that? >> So, that brings me to the dark side of all this enthusiasm, which is security. You see things like IOT, you know the bad guys have AI as well. Thoughts on security, discussions that are going on in the board room. How CIOs should be thinking about communicating to the board regarding security. >> I've done a lot of work in this area. And whether that falls into the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, and where they report. But the bottom line is how are they briefing their boards. And once again, anybody that knows anything about security knows that you're not going to keep 'em out. It's going to be an ongoing process. It's going to be things like okay what do we do when we have these type >> response >> How do we respond to that? How do we predict things? How do we stay ahead of that? And that is the more of the norm. And what we see, and I can give you sort of an analogy, You know when the President comes to speak in a city, what do they, you know, they close down streets, don't they? They create the unpredictability. And I think one of the marvelous challenges for IT is to create architectures, and I've been writing about this, which change so that those that are trying to attack us and they're looking for the street to take inside of the network. We got to kind of have a more dynamic architecture. To create unpredictability. So these are all of the things that come into strategy, language, how to educate our boards. How to prepare the next generation of those board members. And where will the technology people sit in those processes. >> Yeah, we've had the chance to interview some older companies. Companies 75, 150 years old, that are trying to become software companies. And they're worried about the AirBnB's of the world disrupting what they're doing. How do you see the older companies keeping pace and trying to keep up with some of young software companies? >> Sure, how do you move 280 thousand people at a major bank, for example. How do you do that? And I think there's several things that people are trying. One is investing in startups with options to obtain them and purchase them. The other is to create, for lack of a better word, labs. Parts of the company that are not as controlled, or part of the predominant culture. Which as we know historically will hold back the company. Because they will just typically try to protect the domain that has worked for them so well. So those are the two main things. Creating entities within the companies that have an ability to try new things. Or investing entrepreneurially, or even intrapreneurally with new things with options to bring them in. And then the third one, and this last one is very difficult, sort of what Apple did. One of the things that has always haunted many large companies is their install base. The fact that they're trying to support the older technologies because they don't want to lose their install base. Well remember what Steve Jobs did. He came in with a new architecture and he says either you're with me or you're not. And to some extent, which is a very hard decision, you have to start looking at that. And challenge your install base to say this is the new way, we'll help you get there, but at some point we can't support those older systems. >> One of my favorite lines in the cube, Don Tapps, God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. Right, because that handcuffs companies and innovation, in a lot of cases. I mean, you saw that, you've worked at big companies. So I want to ask you, Dr. Langer, we had this, for the last 10 years, this consumerization of IT. The Amazon effect. You know, the whole mobile thing. Is technology, is IT specifically, getting less complex or more complex? >> I think it's getting far more complex. I think what has happened is business people sometimes see the ease of use. The fact that we have an interface with them, which makes life a lot easier. We see more software that can be pushed together. But be careful. We have found out with cybersecurity problems how extraordinarily complicated this world is. With that power comes complexities. Block chain, other things that are coming. It's a powerful world, but it's a complicated one. And it's not one where you want amateurs running the back end of your businesses. >> Okay, so let's talk about the role of those guys running. We've talked a lot about data. You've seen the emergence of the chief data officer, particularly in regulated industries, but increasingly in non-regulated businesses. Who should be running the technology show? Is it a business person? Is it a technologist? Is it some kind of unicorn blend of those? >> I just don't think, from what we've seen by trying marketing people, by trying business people, that they can really ultimately grasp the significance of the technical aspects of this. It's almost like asking someone who's not a doctor to run a hospital. I know theoretically you could possibly do that, but think about that. So you need that technology. I'm not caught up on the titles, but I am concerned, and I've written an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago, that there are just too many c-level people floating around owning this thing. And I think, whether you call it the chief technologist, or the executive technical person, or the chief automation individual, that all those people have to be talking to each other, and have to lead up to someone who's not only understanding the strategy, but really understands the back end of keeping the lights on, and the security and everything else. The way I've always said it, the IT people have the hardest job in the world. They're fighting a two-front war. Because both of those don't necessarily mesh nicely together. Tell me another area of an organization that is a driver and a supporter at the same time. You look at HR, they're a supporter. You look at marketing, they're a driver. So the complexities of this are not just who you are, but what you're doing at any moment in time. So you could have a support person that's doing something, but at one moment, in that person's function, could be doing a driving, risk-taking responsibility. >> So what are some of the projects you're working on now? What's exciting you? >> Well, the whole idea of how to drive that strategy, how to take risks, the digital disruption era, is a tremendous opportunity. This is our day for the-- because most companies are not really clear what to do. Socially, I'm looking very closely at smart cities. This is another secret wave of things that are happening. How a city's going to function. Within five, seven years, they're predicting that 75% of the world's population will live in major cities. And you won't have to work in the city and live there. You could live somewhere else. So cities will compete. And it's all about the data, and automation. And how do organizations get closer with their governments? Because our governments can't afford to implement these things. Very interesting stuff. Not to mention the issues of the socially excluded. And underserved populations in those cities. And then finally, how does this mess with cyber risk? And how does that come together to the promotion of that role in organizations. Just a few things, and then way a little bit behind, there's of course block chain. How is that going to affect the world that we live in? >> Just curious, your thoughts on the future of jobs. You know, look about what automation's happening, kind of the hollowing out of the middle class. The opportunities and risks there. >> I think it has to do with the world of what I call supply chain. And it's amazing that we still see companies coming to me saying I can't fill positions. Particularly in the five-year range. And an inability to invest in younger talent to bring them in there. Our educational institutions obviously will be challenged. We're in a skills-based market. How do they adopt? How do we change that? We see programs like IBM launching new collar. Where they're actually considering non-degree'd people. How do universities start working together to get closer, in my opinion, to corporations. Where they have to work together. And then there is, let's be careful. There are new horizons. Space, new things to challenge that technology will bring us. 20 years ago I was at a bank which I won't mention, about the closing of branch banks. Because we thought that technology would take over online banking. Well, 20 years later, online banking's done everything we predicted, and we're opening more branches than ever before. Be careful. So, I'm a believer that, with new things come new opportunities. The question is how do governments and corporations and educational institutions get closer together. This is going to be critical as we move forward. Or else the have nots are going to grow, and that's a problem. >> Alright, we have to leave it there. Dr. Arthur Langer, sir, thanks very much for coming in. To the cube >> It's always a pleasure to be here >> It's a pleasure to have you. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. Dave Vollante, Stu Miniman, be right back.