>> Narrator: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube, covering .NEXT conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. Or where the doer of deeds, could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Whose face is marked by dust, and sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errors, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error in shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end of the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Those words by Theodore Roosevelt were in this morning's keynote by Dr. Brene Brown. Welcome to theCube's coverage of Nutanix.NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with Keith Townsend here to break down, give our critiques as well as understand that Nutanix, while they are a public company, been striving and succeeding greatly. 5500 people here at this conference, very enthusiastic, great party last night, so Keith, we talked about it, our show opened yesterday, been your first show, got to talk to a bunch of customers, talked to a bunch of partners. Give us impressions and overall experience. >> So you know, you can't go to a show like this and not get hero numbers. 70,000 people in the Nutanix community program. 61,000 certified individuals. Customers making statements such as, Nutanix, humble company, Nutanix, not feeling entitled to the sale. Needing to work for the dollar. Customers extremely excited about the announcements, the direction of the company for key core areas I saw from a technology perspective, in which they made some really aggressive announcements and bets. So you know what, this has been a very high energy conference. >> Yeah, absolutely, talk about, from a financial standpoint, they're doin' well. Wall Street's been rewarding them greatly for the move to move to software only. Company's over nine billion dollars in market cap. Amazing. Had to go for a thousand customers a quarter. Very good for the space that they're playing in. Things like their file system, AFS, their fastest growing products. Building on that base infrastructure, but then yes, as you said, bold direction, they've got the kind of three axises that they're trying to build on. Build out HyperVage's support, build out cloud support. They're going to talk about how we think, where Nutanix fits in this cloud world. Building out their software portfolio. Where do they have IP, where are they growing? They've done four acquisitions so far in the software space. Some of those are starting to show through. We did interviews with the former CEO of Minjar and it NetSill, and- >> Bot Metric. >> Yeah, yeah that's the Netsill Bot Metric piece there. So products that are now, some of them are shipping. And as well as getting some vision. They had their first SAS product in Beam. Really interesting, something that really was targeted at AWS and Azure. Not the data center, but they're trying to make that hybrid-hybrid message as well as giving some of the vision. Nutanix Era is a big directional piece. Project Sherlock. Of course the big brains here working on that. Really interested in Edge and IOT. So a lot of pieces there, what's your take? >> You know what? I think I'm a bit overwhelmed actually. Which is a great thing, you look at COM was over the past couple of months, their Com platform was evened out by adding micro-segmentation. Which, against their biggest competitor VMware was a essential piece. They've been unabashful with going after it. You know what, AHV can now compete head-to-head with VMware just as long as you don't need memory over commit, and metro clustering that AHV, the term that they use in "game on." So Nutanix is, you know we talked to Duraj, a couple of years on theCube, asked him, you know what, is Nutanix a platform company? He say, you know what, no, (mumbles) too humble to accept that mantle of being a platform company, there's a lot of work to do. You look out onto the show floor, 80 partners and sponsors, who are all offering solutions tied to AHV. Which we talked about a little bit. A lot of adoption, but it doesn't seem like there's much VMware. Market penetration and stealing customers from VMware as much as HyperV. There're a lot of customers we talked to we said, you know we tried HyperV on Nutanix, not so much so we went to AHV. >> Quick point, and I felt a few years ago, the conversation wasn't about HyperV when you talked about Microsoft. It wasn't the, for years it was, when will it catch up to what VMware's doing? VMware's still dominant in the space, customers here, and lots of 'em are usin' Vmware. Yes, there's that tension between Vmware and Nutanix, but Nutanix, do they poke and prod a little bit at some things? Yes, but at the show, very much focusing on what they're doing, and focusing on their customers, not sending pot shots or anything like that. But when it comes to Microsoft, you're right Keith, there were a number of customers I talked to that were like, well in a Microsoft shop, and we know what applications used to live on VMware. Number one thing was always Microsoft. Many of them, I tried HyperV, didn't really like the experience. And therefore it was a smooth path to go over to AHV. Lot's of customers that are doing both VMware and AHV and sorting that out. And it's like oh, well over time, if Nutanix becomes 80, 90, even some of them gettin' towards 100% of heir deployment, AHV becomes a bigger piece of the portfolio. >> And you know, we thought that this whole multi-HyperVisor argument was over. Like, you know what, just go to one HyperVisor. A lot of Nutanix customers are showing that multi-HyperVisor is a legit way to go that we haven't ran with anyone who said, No, we're having management pains, running AHV side-by-side with VM or Vspare. >> I would like to see from Nutanix, more partnerships with Microsoft though. You talk Azure, absolutely huge growth, number two out there. Yes, they support it, but you know, of course they have much more showing at the Amazon show. They've got a strong partnership with Google. Got to highlight that with the Brian Stevens interview. And know that later this year, as Zai really starts to roll out, that we will see much more of that. But Azure, not only in the public cloud piece, but Azure's stack is starting to grow. I've been talking to Lenovo, HP, Adele, Cisco, all of them have pent-up demands, service writers that are starting to roll at Azure's stack. And while Azure's stack really is kind of a closed ecosystem there, I think there is opportunity for Nutanix to play in there, I expect them to hear from the customers who'd love them to do more with Microsoft. We heard from customers that they'd actually love to hear Nutanix do more with Redhat, and in general be a deletega system, yes, show floor, it's growing, it's vibrant but absolutely, it's always, what more? >> OF course, we always, and I think we get our friends at Nutanix always pokes us about staying positive. But it is a positive, they're a software company now. And as a software company, you have to integrate with other software company services. The Azure stack thing, while it's mainly a hardware play for companies like Dale, Lenovo, Fujitsu, there has to be software integration. The folks with the Google and Nutanix partnership, did a really great job of doing push-button, at least showin' us on stage, push-button deployments of VM's, from Zai to Nutanix instances in the cloud. This is Nutanix in the cloud. That won't probably play with Azure and Azure Stack. So Nutanix really needs to figure out a way to get into that relationship with Microsoft. >> Yeah, true simplicity takes genius, is a quote that I had out of this show in the early years. And Nutanix will make a bold claim. Oh, database migration, we're going to make that really easy. Well, show me (laughs) Anybody that's worked with databases- >> That's like sayin' DR is easy. Yeah, gettin' the stores from one point to another one is easy. Processes, not so much. >> Some of that Project Sherlock, oh yeah all that tensor flow, cumbrineties, functions of the service, we're going to make it push-button easy so that we'll make that invisible. How much is a distraction, what's in the weeds? You know, the networking, there's so many pieces in there that love the vision. Of course customers want it simplified, but we want to talk to the customers, and understand what works, what still needs to be tweaked, where do they have to build out some services, partnerships, even more than they've done today to go further, what have you been seeing and hearing? >> So, Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company. I've poked at the whole cloud marketing term. Matter of fact, on Twitter, one of the, I'll read this. Cloud really, no AI, no databases or severs. No server-less, does that even, doesn't even have a presence at Cubrineties events. Fake cloud story for IT, ah! So you know what, let's pick that apart a little bit. DV as a service, they announced basically yesterday, that's there. AI, Satium Gatupum said a really nice story with Sherlock there, absolutely looking at it. Cubrineties integration, ACS, 2.0 will come out the gate as a Cubrineties manage distribution. They announced Zai integration with Cubrineties and push-button. Now you may pick on the cloud part. Nutanix still very much talks to the infrastructure group. Their customers are the infrastructure group, and you can't talk cloud without having a relationship with application developers. So I think the next step as Nutanix matures, these offerings on, their cloud offerings, is that they have to start to have a deeper relationship. They have to go side-by-side with their IT sponsors and organizations to start to have conversations with application developers. >> Yeah, and I love the online, the cloud-eraderie if you will, out there. Well, we understand, this is the architecture of the future. Where it should go, I love hangin' out with the cloud native crew. But for me, it goes back to talking to their customers. And when the customers, if they're like here's what we've done, here's the proof as to how I get faster time to market, how I'm accelerating my development teams insight. I'm creating, one of the interviews we did, IT as business, is how we run things. These are real digital transformation stories. Impressive stuff, and it's cloud. And it's not virtualization with a little layer on top. It's real change inside customers, and Nutanix, I'll say, as a platform to help us get from where I've been, to where I'm going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Nutanix customers are not listening to the cloud-eraderie. They absolutely love the platform. You know Stu, I don't think I've run into a negative customer at the show. I haven't run into a customer that says, you know what, Nutanix isn't meeting my need in X or Y area. Home Depot won the innovation award at the show. Then Home Depot is a forward thinking customer, truly embracing parts of the platform. I'm sure there's some cloud native pieces. >> They're a big Google cloud platform customer. One of Pivotal's big one on GCP. So absolutely, and we have, I've talked to a number of customers big on Amazon, developer shops, absolutely public cloud to piece of it. Yeah, if the criticism I should have, I always look and say, if I said public cloud and private cloud, where's your center of gravity? Of course Nutanix is going to go, leaning a little bit more towards the data centers, hosted service providers. That's where they live today. But they're not blind to it, they're embracing it. They have a full SAS product, they're going to be expanding that. They are software at their core, distributed architectures where they're going. >> You know Stu, one of our favorite comments is that, company X likes to move, moves at the pace of the CIO. I think it's safe to say, Nutanix is a little bit faster than the CIO. And they're enabling the old stuff. You know what, let's make that push-button easy, and as we're looking, have a eye to the future, looking at the new stuff, let's see how we can get there, push-button easy. There's a lot of work to do. But I think they're making some really interesting and probably the right moves for their customer base. >> Aright well, Keith, first of all, I want to thank you for all of your help here this week. The CTO advisor, always great to dig in with customers. Really get in, it's been exciting to watch you kind of get to know a little bit more about this. I've had the pleasure of tracking Nutanix in the really early days, been at every one of these shows. It is a great community, kudos to Nutanix. Thank you for sponsoring us, and if not familiar, if you look at the bottom of the videos we're playin' right now, we mention who sponsors, we're tryin' to be transparent. Keith and I though, we're out here in the field. If you have questions for us, or you know, want us to ask something, or question what we're doing, hit us up, we're really easy to reach on Twitter. Always happy for feedback from the community. And as always, check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows, everywhere we're going. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watchin' theCube's presentation from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in New Orleans, and see you at lots more shows. (futuristic music)