>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017, Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. >> The sun is shining here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE. Happy to welcome back to the program two guests that we have had on before, Bob Wallace with Nutanix and Wilfredo Sotolongo who's with Lenovo. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, we're gettin' towards the end of another Nutanix .NEXT show. I've had the pleasure of being in all five of the shows, so a lot to kind of go through. Bob, we've had you on the program a couple of times. You've been involved with all the OEM relationships there. Bring us up to speed as to kind of you know, where does OEM fit in the overall Nutanix story? >> It's a big part of how we're going to market now. It really ties in with our interest in providing customers with choice like we do from a hypervisor perspective. We also do from a platform perspective to give customers the ability to, they love the goodness, let's say, of Nutanix and all the things that the Nutanix solution brings and then they get the opportunity to then connect with, connect that with the relationship they may have with Lenovo as a partner to tie in with that to truly work through the Lenovo goodness from a support perspective and everything like that. So, we see it as a broader theme in how Nutanix kind of goes to market which is providing a maximum amount of choice to our customers. >> So, Wilfredo, we've had the pleasure of kind of documenting some of the changes going on. You came in to Lenovo through the IBM X86 acquisition. We've watched Lenovo build out the data center group. I've interviewed Kirk Skaugen three times this year already and you know, have seen partner events at Lenovo events so talk to us just a little bit about how's your role changed and how do we think of Lenovo today, before we even get into the Nutanix piece of it. >> Well, Lenovo has a very different approach to the segment, right. We see a tremendous opportunity in tripling of our addressable market, primarily driven by the shift to software define architectures with Nutanix being one of the primary software define architectures and we see ourselves as having a technology disrupter responsibility, i.e., rather than being the legacy provider with protecting the status quo, we see ourselves as the challengers trying to shift the discussion to the future. And, it actually feeds right in to why we partner with Nutanix almost two years ago now, right. We saw Nutanix as an emerging, aggressive, forward looking provider of technology and new options and with that common vision and common role in the industry we decided to partner with them to accelerate the process. So, different role, new relationship, actually not as new anymore, almost two years, but the same common desire. >> What I think and I'd just build on that, it ties in perfectly with Nutanix disruptive technology and approach and I personally as a sales leader and sales rep myself overtime you should have a perspective and Lenovo has made choices to have a perspective in how they're approaching the market with the technology rather than some of the vendors that have kind of a menu approach and I think it's the right thing that serves the customers needs to be able to be a trusted advisor to the customer and not say, I can offer you anything, but to say, here's what I believe is the right solution for you, and Lenovo does a great job at that. >> Wilfredo, we've heard from Nutanix a lot this week. Their goal is to be an iconic software company. So, that means they're going to need hardware, they're going to need someone to help complete some of the pieces there. Why is Nutanix best in partnership with Lenovo? >> Okay, that's a perfect question, but you said something that triggered a comment that I made to you earlier today. I like the shift I'm seeing in the messaging and the strategy and the product direction that Nutanix has embarked upon the last six to 12 months because aspiring to be much more than a hyperconversion of such a provider is key, right, for the success. This multi-cloud hybrid environments, right, you need to play, to be much more than just the virtual storage player, right. Now, with that said, we got together with Nutanix and we started building our portfolio, right. The first few months of the relationship we were just trying to catch up to what was already there. The good news is we've been investing consistently in this two years and now instead of trying to catch up we're actually leading the transformation. So, to answer your very specific question, point number one, we're the first ones to market with Skylake, Intel Skylake versions of their solution. Even your own is not going to, is coming in a few months. Ours is already in market since last month. Point number two, we recognize the need to virtualize not only the server and the storage capability but also the network. And we invested in software in our switches, in the Lenovo switches that allow us to virtualize all three of them in Nutanix implementations. So, as a Nutanix system administrator you have the choice now with Lenovo, and only with Lenovo, to manage even the network and when there are unfortunate circumstances that create a failure all of that, the migration, all the workloads are completely automated including the networking changes required, right. Number three, this one I didn't even know til one of my Nutanix colleagues pointed it out today, is our latest version of hardware where we run the Nutanix workloads has unique resiliency and availability features that none of my competitors have, like unstoppable fans. Fans are actually the number one item that breaks in infrastructure. So, unstoppable fans makes a big difference for them, right. And then last but not least, there is the one that has characterized us the most over the almost two year long relationship is support, right. We come from a heritage of enterprise great support, right. Things don't go down. The quality of the hardware, the quality of the software, the quality of the support structure, that make sure that the client has peace of mind in terms of if anything goes wrong. Four points. >> Bob, one of the reasons of course Nutanix partners with companies like Lenovo is to help with reach. Can you speak to kind of the global go to market that they help with? >> Oh, absolutely, yeah. So, I've recently also taken on our channel organization from the sales perspective and from my perspective we really have, we have regional partners, we have national partners and we have global partners, and those global partners are OEMs like Lenovo. They had the ability to allow us to engage with global customers that have operations all over the world to not only get the right product in the right place, but also from a support perspective support those customers in place because just like Lenovo, Nutanix and we talk a lot about our NPS score and our support organization, but it really is that ties together in such a good way. Our 90 plus NPS score our customers depend and count on us for that and when they're looking at the underlying hardware platform they need something that keeps that level of commitment to the customer there and that's what Lenovo brings. And, from a global perspective, it gives us a reach frankly a company the size that we've been over the last two years, just couldn't serve some areas of the world. >> In a specific area where I think we can make a big difference together is in global Fortune 500. This is also part of my responsibility inside Lenovo and which I picked up recently, in the last few months, and as the Nutanix technology is maturing and proven into the largest, most complex environments, we're helping support their reach into those biggest accounts where we already tend to be a large provider of either PC or server technology, right. So, and it happens to be by the way, one of the strongest capabilities that Lenovo has as compared to what I expected when I first came in here, right. We're pretty good in terms of the global accounts program. >> Wilfredo, I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit 'cause absolutely goin' up market. You know every company wants to go up market. Is the enterprise, have they just not felt the maturity was there? Are they a little nervous about young companies or why is it now ready for those type of engagements? >> I'm not seeing that much resistance anymore. To be very candid I'm not sure why there was any resistance in the first place, maybe because of a young company. Right now it's more about the discipline to come in, pick a use case, demonstrate into approval concept and execute it flawlessly, right. Where we do that, which by the way, we most of the time do through systems integrators, like IBM, like Capgemini, like APMG, it works very well and we're beginning to see some I'm going to say, fairly large deployments that we hope to build on for the future. >> We had some meetings here this week with some of those, a lot of those customers here, those large organizations that we're partnering up on. >> Any specific verticals or geographies that you're especially excited for kind of catchin' fire lately? >> Well, AMIA, I think we've AMIA for Lenovo is the, if I had to rank the fastest growing market for Lenovo and I think we've had a lot of, Wilfredo and our team, have been working closely together over the last two years to really build that out. So, I'd say AMIA is very strong. I think we're seeing a lot of growth. But, with Lenovo clearly Asia, the Asian region, PRC is a huge market for them. It's, they obviously have a deep legacy there. So, we're doing a lot in Apak as well. >> From an industry perspective I actually don't pick up a pattern. I see your, our, technology quite applicable in almost all industries. I mean, earlier in the conference we had one of our customers speak, right, one of our young customers speak, right, one of the hospital in a server, right. Healthcare, state of the art hospital, state of the art IT infrastructure, running everything, running everything, right, from the hospital information system to the medical imaging OEM software, everything, right and we see more and more institutions, right, making the migration, making the jump to state of the art architectures technologies and running the totality of the workloads. >> And, that's a core government project and very important project for the government of Azerbaijan and having a trusted partner in Lenovo in that scenario not only gives us the reach to reach into Azerbaijan but to have the trust level with an institution that ultimately has to be successful. A hospital, you just, there's no room for error. >> Want to give you both really the final word here. Wilfredo, if somebody didn't come to the event, what might they not know about HX and the offering of that that you'd want to make sure that they dig in and learn a little more about? >> Lenovo is all about disrupting the status quo and helping you get to the future faster. Nutanix is about the same thing. Together we've actually created an offering now that is differentiated against all the OEMs. Come talk to both of us about it. >> I'd say if you weren't here at the show the thing you might have missed is Nutanix bringing our one click simplicity that we're known for to the cloud era and really helping customers manage what we call an enterprise cloud that includes multiple cloud offerings on prem and public cloud with our one click simplicity and removing a lot of the barriers and complexity that customers are dealing with today as they look at how to manage their infrastructure between the different clouds that are out there. >> Bob Wallace, Wilfredo Sotolongo, thank you gentlemen both for joining us again. We're getting towards the end of two days of live coverage but be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all of our coverage for this and all upcoming shows. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

For a global digital audience than they could in person. Whether you're watching from home, in Europe, in Asia, it doesn't matter where you are. You can access and watch live and access on demand content 24 by seven. We come to you wherever you are. We bring to you real, live conversations that are aimed at educating you so you understand how you can make a difference at your company. >> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe brought to by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the Nutanix .Next Conference in lovely Nice, France. We're inside the Acropolis Conference Center and happy to have me wrap up the show coverage is Adrian Bridgwater who is a freelance contributor with publications such as Forbes and Computer Weekly. Adrian, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me on the show. All right, so Nutanix keeps calm inside the cloud tornado. I mean, a little bit cheeky, but Nutanix calm, of course, is their product, there, but a lot going on, a lot of churn in the industry, which is the headline that you put on on Forbes from the show here. >> Adrian: Yes, thanks for reading. How's the show been for you? It's been good. I mean, the company's gone from strength to strength. We all know that. It's been a really sort of slick operation. We come to a lot of these events, and you expect, you know, some tangible news and some opportunity to actually meet with the C-suites guys, and we've had that. It's no complaints overall. It's been a good event. Yeah, absolutely, definitely approachable. The Nutanix team does well with the press and the analysts to kind of pull us in, let us understand, 'cause, a lot of this area, I tell you, like hyper converged infrastructure was not something that was readily accessible that most people knew, so they know they have to do some work and even kind of enterprise cloud that they push out there. A lot of it, their messaging's a little ahead of where most of the market is. What's your experience been with them? Well, I think, I was also kind of trying to say beforehand, Dheeraj and team have taken a really, very hands-on approach with the press. He came with, you know, two or three of them came over to London a good four or five years ago. Would it be five years ago? Four years ago and kind of went around the table saying, "Does anybody know? Who knows Nutanix," and there was about 10 press who did come out for that lunch, and there were a lot of kind of like fumbling, shuffled looks, and you really didn't get a clear idea. I think people know Nutanix now. They have an idea of hyper convergence. People are almost trying to understand what an abstraction layer is and what the company's taking to market. Yeah, I think he's kind of democratizing the team or democratizing their actual technology proposition. I think people are really starting to understand where they sit in the cloud market. Yeah, and I'm curious, and you've talked to customers when you look at your readership there. It feels like, by the time now people understand Nutanix, and they might've gotten their arms around hyper converged, they're off to the next thing, and they're talking about multi-cloud, and they talked about edge computing some today and some of the future technologies. Do they get ahead of themselves in the marketing too much, or are they doing a good job of giving a full vision thought leadership? I think, always, their difficulty within internally in Nutanix is that they really understand the cloud model, and, whether they've got ahead of themselves, I'm not sure. The customers are only really getting to the verge of going cloud native with a lot of their applications, and that's one of the things I've been looking at a lot recently, and it's kind of like, if that's the point that companies are at on the hype cycle, then it's kind of, well, what do they need to do to get that happening in their organizations, and it's probably now at the point where they're starting to ask, "Well, at what point would we use Nutanix "in a total implementation". I don't think they're ahead of themselves. I think they're obviously of the time and of the place, 'cause we're all focusing on them, and people are starting to understand what cloud computing means. Yeah, absolutely, and something we've seen at Wikibon from a research standpoint is there's still a large legacy base out there, and how much of that is going to convert into what we've been trying to call for years private cloud? We put out some definitions about two years ago that said true private cloud, because just virtualizing isn't enough. A little bit of orchestration isn't enough, but there is, in that multi-cloud world, Nutanix is going to say, "We're not just for the data center "in that piece". "We're going to play and reach out "to some of the public cloud. "We're going to live in this world," so yeah. I think there's almost a confusion between what is private cloud and what is public cloud, because we're almost getting vendors selling public cloud as private cloud, which I really don't think anyone's got their head around what this is trying to be. What we say is the public cloud really should be the benchmark that you go against. I want the operational experience of the public cloud. That being said, nobody's keeping up with Amazon, three features a day. They're massive scale. You got Microsoft and Google. I'm not discounting them. Even Alibaba's there. Some others like Oracle and IBM have public cloud services, but you're never going to have the amount of services and access to that in the private cloud, but that's not necessarily what I need, but I need to be able to respond to the business. Agility is the thing that they have. I need to be able to, what Nutanix delivered really well is, I can start small, and I can expand in incremental pieces as opposed to kind of the monolithic infrastructure that we used to spend 18 months building. That's kind of where we sit. Don't you think it's the service's elements that are falling into the toolkits that we're seeing the Nutanix develop. Mostly, announcements at the show have been related to incremental service elements. It's kind of, well, you know, what do I? I've got my cloud computing infrastructure. I'm starting to build cloud native applications within the business. What's my devops offering like, what's my infrastructure management tool, the Prism user management interface, all of the sort of elements in that. Everything's starting to just get more finessed and more sophisticated. Spot on, Adrian, absolutely is. Com is really going to be that platform that's going to allow them to deliver those services to where the customers need it, and even the naming of this, it's like, "Oh, they're object service. "Oh, look at it. It's OSS. "Oh, the compute thing: it's AC2". Sounds very AWS-like in how they name things as opposed to, you think, AHV reminded me a little bit more of following the Vmware type of model, so absolutely. Amazon, a bar that many companies and industries are following; if Nutanix wants to become an iconic software company, I'd love your commentary on that. Looking after Amazon and what they're doing is not a bad model to follow. No, no. I think it's interesting to look at where they've come from in terms of what they used to describe themselves as, which was the hyper convergence company, and they're not that now. They're the enterprise cloud company, and I think we all, I think it was the Vienna conference, so it was the European leg, which this is, this time last year that they changed the tagline. You walk into the convention center, and suddenly why aren't you the hyper convergence company now? It was kind of the proposition that they were going to be a broader platform play, which is the whole one OS, one click, one cloud. That's how they're taking a bigger proposition to market now, don't you think? Yeah, absolutely, and the term I heard that I kind of latched onto was that iconic software company, and all indications are they'll be 100% of software company relatively soon. That means that it's not, "Oh, well, I'll buy "the super micro appliance from Nutanix". Well, how will that change to go to market. Sudheesh, on the interview, said, "We're re-changing "how we think our, you know, our sales structure "and everything like that," because they've got their OEMs, of course, offer that full fully-integrated solutions. They're still going to do all the testing, and make sure that everything goes out, but it will change a little bit the revenue. I actually had the chief revenue officer on, and he talked about. He's like, "Hey, you know, "software's got pretty good margins, right". It's like, yeah, well, okay, margins will go up as a percentage standpoint, but, overall revenue, as a public company, we'll see how they thread that needle. I think they've got a nice window here, 'cause they just restated all of their software revenue that they had had from their OEMs. They used to take it kind of over, I believe, a three year chunk, and now they're putting it there. They've got this opportunity, hitting right around a billion dollars. Change themselves and truly be a software company' and considered a software company and measured as a software company by Wall Street. Is that something that you think, outside of the Wall Street people and the impacts on the channel and sales, or-- I think it was surprising to have to hear the guys try and justify themselves as a software company. I mean, 'cause I think that's what we perceived them to be anyway, and, of course, every business, every company's a software company, even a bakery. Literally every industry vertical, every company, every firm, every customer is having to redefine itself as a software company. Even for Dheeraj to say that a cloud is digital, I think we assume so much of that, and I don't know why. They're kind of going back to basics with some of this stuff, but that's fine. I think there's a lot of clarification needs to be done to explain what these technologies are supposed to mean to customers. Adrian, meetings, you've talked to executives, probably got some sessions, maybe talked to some customers: key takeaways that you had from the show, any new things you learned that you didn't know coming in? Really, my key takeaway is, as the toolkit has expanded, and the question I think I posed to Sudheesh was, "What are you going to add next," and there was no sort of defined component. It seems to be quite a complete go to market proposition. I think that their total house, their shop, is looking fairly complete. It's validated, I think. That's their market proposition. It's not a term they use, but I think that they've got the credibility and the validation for what they're trying to go to market with. Yeah, it seems Nutanix known a little bit more in Europe now. How they doing overall, in your opinion? In terms of their recognition amongst the customer base? I think they're on the up and up, aren't they? They're getting the recognition amongst the press. Certainly, the customers here seem very happy. They got the blue-chip clients that they want to use as use cases. Yeah, across Europe, it's good that they're moving locations for this conference. We were in Vienna. We're now in France. I'm not sure where next year is. They're making the spread and their footprint substantial, it seems. Yeah, any favorite spot for a sub-5,000 person event? For next year? >> Stu: Yeah. Italy, I think. Yeah. >> Stu: Something like Milano? Yeah, somewhere warmer, South, I think. All right, well, yeah. I've heard they're actually not announcing the location this week, that they have narrowed it down. They're definitely committed to doing the European show but definitely look forward to seeing where they go from here. Adrian, want to give you last words, any final things. What are you working on outside of Nutanix, things that your audience and readership are mostly interested in? I think what I'm generally working on is day-to-day reporting on, my beat as a journalist has always been, well, three words really: software application development, but, a lot of the time, I'm writing for people that aren't actually developers. It's kind of just explaining what the mechanics of software operations what they are, what these things do, because, 10 years ago, people didn't know what an app was, but the iPad arrived, and we've started to understand so much more of what goes on inside the machines we're using. I'm just trying to explain what the developers are using and how that's actually impacting the way the software that the consumers use every day. That's what I do. All right, well, Adrian Bridgwater, appreciate you taking some of your words and bringing 'em out to the video for our audience here and appreciate you helping me wrap up two days of coverage, wall to wall. Heck, they're tearing this place down, and we were still going strong here. Thank you so much. I'm Stu Miniman for the whole team here at SiliconANGLE and beyond. Appreciate you joining us. Be sure to check out all of our coverage, siliconangle.com for the written word, thecube.net for the videos, wikibon.com for the research. Wrapping up, final words, Stu Miniman. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> Offscreen Male: The acquisition of Nutanix has been.

that are aimed at educating you, When they come to theCUBE, it's a more conversational interview. We have big technology executives, from Michael Dell, for example, who come to theCUBE, share different messages, and reach a much bigger global digital audience than they could in person. Whether you're watching from home, in Europe, in Asia, it doesn't matter where you are, you can access and watch live, and access on-demand content 24 by seven. We come to you wherever you are. We bring to you real, live conversations so you understand how you can make a difference >> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, at your company. >> Technology industry for over 12 years now, so I've had the opportunity of a marketer to really understand and interact with customers across the entire buyer's journey. Hi, I'm Lisa Martin, and I am a host of theCUBE. Being a host on theCUBE has been a dream of mine for the last few years. I had the opportunity to meet Jeff and Dave and John at EMC World a few years ago, and got the courage up to say, "Hey, I'm really interested in this, "I love talking with customers, "give me a shot, "let me come into the studio and do an interview, "and see if we can work together." I think where I really impact theCUBE is being a female in technology. We interview a lot of females in tech. We do a lot of women in technology events, and one of the things I personally love is understanding what their career path was. They're very inspiring, and it's a great vehicle, theCUBE, to showcase and raise the profile of females in the technology and software space. The benefits for vendors to have theCUBE at events are manyfold. I think the first one is de-mystifying the messaging. You're going to hear great guys and gals as keynotes, prepared speeches. it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at the Nutanix European Conference .NEXT, and, being in Europe, one of the hot topics of conversation leading up to May, 2018, is, of course, GDPR. So happy to welcome to the program two guests that are here talking about this, Famke Krumbmuller and Nina Vassilief. Thank you so much for joining us today. So, Famke, we'll start with you. You're a partner with OpenCitiz. Tell us a little bit about your background and what your organization does. >> Sure. So OpenCitiz is a consultancy. We work together with companies and businesses helping them to understand the impact of policy and politics on their business, especially European politics and national politics of countries in Europe. We're based in Paris. I'm here to talk about GDPR. >> Alright. And Nina, you're a security and GDPR consultant. Tell us a little bit about your background, also. >> Well, I used to work with Volkswagen Group France as CTO and I'm a CISO, and then I was asked to work basically on GDPR and security as a consultant, because many companies want to be compliant by the due date of May 25th next year. And many companies are having a hard time, so I'm doing business analysis, audits, and creating roadmaps for GDPR. >> Yeah. That's great. Famke, there's been many times when policy and technology come together, but GDPR feels like this growing buzz that's been around the industry. Like, I've heard people, "It's the new Y2K," it's this impending thing, there's a lot of uncertainty, it seems, for something that has a big legal document on it. Give us where people are, how are they feeling, how are you helping people go with it when there is so much uncertainty there. >> First of all, it's very interesting to know that a lot of companies, even in Europe but also outside of Europe, who will be concerned by GDPR, not even aware of the fact that this regulation exists and that they are concerned and they need to comply. And then the other half, roughly, it's unclear whether they will be able to comply by the deadline in May of next year, because it's a huge burden on the majority of the companies. They really have to review all of their processes, maybe do something new, get outside expertise on how to do so, and if they don't, they actually face huge fines from the European Union, which is obviously a way to try and incentivize these companies to do all that hard work to be able to comply. >> Yeah Nina, as if IT organizations didn't already have enough challenges to work with, it's like security is kind of keeping people pretty busy these days. So where does GDPR fit into the discussion? How do they bring it up? Where in the organization does it usually bubble up? And in which teams need to address this? >> Well GDPR actually concerns everyone, so it really concerns the business, but IT has a big role to play in the sense that, for example, many companies don't know what applications they're running. I've seen three companies, and they might be running, let's say they say, "Okay, we're running on the cloud 40 applications," but when they start looking at it with shadow IT, they might be running the triple. So it's actually good, because it's forcing best practice, it's forcing inventories, audits, and it's cutting costs at the same time. >> Yeah, I moderated a customer panel towards the beginning of the week here, and there was one research organization, they're like, "Look, we've anonymized all of our data, "I think we're pretty good," and one that was like, "Well, I'm doing a lot of cloud stuff, you know, "Amazon will take care of this for me," something like this. But if you ask all of them, "Are you ready?" most of them kind of said, "Yeah, we think we're ready." What do you find, Nina? Are most companies really ready? >> I'd say most are not. I find that in the UK, they've understood most companies that they need to be thinking about the big companies. Some of the small companies are just waking up. In the US, they're really thinking about it too, how it's going to touch them, because all services and goods concerning European citizens are concerned. So companies are really, and executives, are waking up. And for France, for example, I'd say about a third of the companies realize it's really going to hit them, and there's many others that are not ready at all. >> Yeah, you mentioned, Famke, that half of all companies barely heard about this, and absolutely, most companies, they are global. Even if you're some local place, you have customers and everything, so what's the step beyond becoming aware? Where do people need to go? >> Right. I mean, there's several things they should be doing when they start to realize that they are actually concerned by this regulation. One of the most important thing is just to educate yourself about it. What do I need to do? Do relevant people within the company know that we need to respond to this, and are they aware that something needs to be done quickly? And then conduct internal information audit, like what data do we hold, why do we hold it, do we really need it? What are our processes? And then maybe appoint a data protection officer, somebody who is on the inside of the company and will have the legal responsibility to inform them about how to be able to comply with GDPR. Things like these, I think, are the most important things to do in the very beginning. >> Nina, I've heard the most from companies that handle data protection, you know, IBM, Veritas, Veeam, all ones that I've heard kind of a strong push from them. A company like Nutanix, do they fit into the picture? Is it something that they're just part of the landscape and they're trying to help and be good citizens to make sure their customers are aware? What from a technology standpoint? >> From my perspective, it concerns every technological company that's running a service concerning European citizens. So of course it concerns Nutanix. And yesterday we had a really great session for executives to explain, and quite a few of them were actually saying, "Hey, I didn't know GDPR really concerns me," and so it's good that Nutanix realized they also need to wake up. >> It does even concern companies who are not based in the EU, but simply by the fact of holding data that concerns EU residents, they need to comply, and that's something which is obviously extremely important, because it affects companies globally, even though they might think, "We're not based in the EU, "we don't have any headquarters in the EU, "we're totally not concerned," well, yes they are, as soon as they hold EU residents' data. >> Yeah, well, the clock's been ticking. It was only towards the beginning of this year that I first heard about GDPR, I've done a number of interviews and talked to many companies. Any chance it's going to get delayed? Or are the lawsuits just going to start as soon as we get to May? >> Well I guess the authorities who will be responsible for overseeing where their companies are compliant, if there is a data breech or something like this happens, I think they will really look at the processes that companies have put into place, and if there is a good amount of goodwill and work has been done, and it's a minor breech to a certain extend, they will probably be lenient in the very beginning, because they know what a burden it is on companies to comply. On the other hand, obviously they also need to set a precedent and show that they're actually serious about enforcing this regulation. So depending on what company they have, if the Amazons and the Facebooks don't comply, that will be a huge problem. If a small business doesn't comply, that's maybe a little bit different. >> Just following up on that, companies have so many different challenges they need to work through. Any, kind of, first steps that they need to make sure that they're doing to kind of meet with what is expected? >> Well I'd say just for them to be compliant to start with is to find out what they're really running on systems and on the cloud, applications to do inventories, to do business assessments to see what risk is involved around it, and I find that most companies that are starting to wake up, the first thing they do is they realize they don't know what they're running. So operations has a lot of work to do, and the security staff. >> Nina the other question I have is, we've spend the last few years, a lot of companies are getting excited about what they can do with information. Is this going to be now a headwind that's going to stop companies and say, "Wait, hold on, "maybe I shouldn't be holding onto everything," or is it just having the right governance in place to make sure I have protections for personal information as opposed to more anonymized information? >> I would think that it's the governance. It will make a big difference in many companies for the governance in IT. It might change the roles of CIOs and operations staff. I don't know, what do you think? >> I think companies will have to re-evaluate what kind of data do they hold and for what purpose, and ultimately, GDPR actually really introduces this principle of you need to have, first of all, consent to hold the data, and then second it needs to be data that you really need for your operations and to deliver the service, or whatever you're delivering. So if there's no good reason for you to hold certain data, then you're actually, strictly speaking, not even allowed to do so. That should probably change a little bit, how companies view the type of data that they hold and for how long. >> And I've even heard, we've talked about some of the global impact, because, even if this is the EU, if it affects people that work there, but other governments are looking and might copy that, if this becomes the template to go forward. >> Right, and we've seen already. I think South Africa, Singapore, have published papers that are relatively similar. And it does make sense. This regulation was negotiated for four years in the EU, so it took some time to agree. And if it's globally applicable, and if it's extremely strict and high standards, it makes sense that it's being copied. >> I want to give you both the final word as to takeaways for this topic. >> Well, I'd say that if anybody's thinking about GDPR, I know there are 99 articles, but in most companies, 30 to 40 really concern the company, not to be scared. You need to start from something, and just to see what really concerns you. >> And I think the most important thing to know is that there are many legal and IT experts out there who really know this topic, which is very technical, extremely well, so it's probably a good idea to get outside consultants look at your processes and how you should go about things. >> Nina and Famke, I think that's part of the reason why Nutanix brought you in as to socialize some of their customers, and even some of their executives with the expertise that you bring. So thank you so much for sharing with our audience. We'll be back with more coverage here, getting towards the end of two days of live coverage from Nutanix .NEXT Conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, It's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's production of The Cube here inside the Acropolis Conference Center in Nice, France. Beautiful location, happy to welcome back to the program off the keynote stage this morning, Sudheesh Nair, President with Nutanix, and a first-time guest, someone I've gotten to know through the industry, Dan McConnell, Vice-President of the CPSD group inside DELL EMC. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. Sudheesh needs no introduction, but Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your role inside of DELL EMC. Sure, I guess, I've been at DELL for about, I don't know, 18 years, in various forms, engineering, CTO, product management. Nowadays I've got a collection of the CPSD businesses. Chad will refer to it as the horizontal businesses but basically all the things that are multi-hypervisor in nature. XC series, clearly one of those products, one of the long relationships we've had with Nutanix, very successful. Matter of fact, coming off Q2 was our strongest quarter ever. We're still closing Q3 so I can't talk about that, but safe to say these last six months will be six months of the strongest we've had with Nutanix and the XC series. I've got a collection of products from Block to FlexTech C Series. Yeah, so you come from what was the DELL side of DELL EMC, in through, of course, the DELL VMware relationship, been a strong one, driven a lot of joint revenue for the companies, yeah. Yep, absolutely, it's been great. Been good getting to know Sudheesh over the years. It's been multiple years at this point. >> Sudheesh: Almost four years now. But it's been a great relationship. Sudheesh, please. Yeah, first of all, thank you for having us. It's always nice to see you. And I still am amazed by all this equipment and how professional you are when it comes to doing these sort of things. It's very nice to be here with Dan. He's one of the nicest guys in the company and I'm not just saying because he's sitting here. A very good human being, it's always been a pleasure. It's almost four years we've been working together. Sudheesh, our audience loves when, they're looking forward to this session because, come on, DELL EMC, Nutanix, wait, they're friends, no they're competitors. No, yeah, they're, you know, it's a mix together. They say it's like the macaroons. It's, a couple of pieces go together, some of the flavors you like, some maybe you don't as much. Probably a bad analogy. Bring us up to speed as to kind of the Dell relationship. You know, how important is it to Nutanix? I know it's something that I talk to customers that are running Dell EMC and say, "Does it concern you at all?" And it is something that at least is on the radar for most customers. I'll try to give a shorter answer. It's a long answer question. The first thing is, this is a relationship that is built to last. I know that it is not an easy relationship, but let me also be honest about, look inside the industry and tell me a single relationship that is absolutely black and white. I mean, it's not that long ago when in one of the VMworlds, I don't remember who exactly, but someone from VMware actually said, "We're not going to lose to a bookseller," right? And then in the last-- >> Stu: Yeah, he's a VC now, so doing quite well for himself. Yeah, he's a great guy, it was his call, yeah. Again, it's a point in time of opinion, and I would do the same thing because we all compete with our heart and mind. It's not about that point. The fact that the company evolved, and in the last VMworld I think the CEOs of both AWS and VMware were hugging it out. Does that mean they've built a relationship that will not have conflicts? Absolutely not. I fundamentally don't think that the relationships in IT industry specifically will no longer be black and white, and it will always be shades of gray. The question is, should we be focused on customers who wants us to stop bickering and deliver what's right for them, and continue to focus on the overlaps of interest as opposed to focus on the conflicts that will arise. Absolutely well said. It's clear, and Dell's always been focused on a strategy of customer choice and flexibility. One of our key strengths at DELL EMC now is the portfolio, the fact that we've got multiple offers, the fact that it's a focus on the customer, what the customer wants, giving them flexibility as opposed to always trying to pigeonhole a specific product. It's interesting because I've been watching since the first days of the relationship. Dell's goal is to be leader in infrastructure. Nutanix's goal, be an iconic software company. Well, you're not going to be a server manufacturer, there's room there. So, Dan, why is Nutanix best on Dell? That's a great question. So one, the long relationship, right? So, we actually have teams of people who focus on integrating the platform and the software. There's a software stack in there, we call Power Tools internally that, long story short, manages all of the firmware stacks as well as, essentially lifecycle management of the hardware up underneath Nutanix. So, one piece is the hardware integration. The second piece, which we talked about a year ago at .Next, that we would be focused on integrating the broader Dell EMC portfolio, namely data protection. So, you'll see in upcoming weeks, we've already announced it formally, it gets turned on here in a few weeks, tight integration of Data Domain and Avamar with the XC series. Not just to reference architecture, but actual integration into the management. So, full lifecycle integration of data protection leveraging Data Domain, Avamar, tightly integrated into XC series, keeping that focus of ease of use, lifecycle management not only around the infrastructure, but also from data protection. So, hardware integration as well as tight integration of other pieces of the ecosystem. One other piece there, not to take too long, but not only data protection but we're also leveraging our relationship with Microsoft, and you'll see us integrate XC series into Azure with things like OMS, with our Log Analytics solution, so building out that ecosystem around the infrastructure. Yeah, Sudheesh, the Microsoft relationship's an interesting one, of course. You know, Dell, very long, strong relationship. I remember Satya Nadella up onstage with Michael Dell at Dell World years ago. It seems like a good opportunity for even deeper partnership. I think it's not just Microsoft. I think Dell EMC is the single largest vendor in this space and ecosystem, for example Pivotal. The innovative things that Pivotal is doing, Nutanix has an opportunity to partner with that because of the ecosystem. The global support, the global reach that Dell has, we have access to that. Customers get choice. Pretty much every customer who's buying anything in this industry probably have a contract with Dell. We have access to that. So, it requires a level of maturity for the business to sort of turn off the noise and listen to the music. We have been able to do that, and I know that people would love to see a fight, and yes, sometimes we have friction, and I think that is healthy. But by and large both companies have figured out the most important thing is to focus on customers, do right by them. So, Sudheesh, I think it would be fair to say that both companies have a sales culture that many outside call a bit aggressive. And especially where it's been interesting and sometimes challenging to watch is when it hits the channel. So, I know a number of channel providers, love Dell, love Nutanix, and have felt pressure sometimes from the Dell side to move to some of the other products, many have stuck. How do you balance that to kind of keep the channel happy, keep them working on that? You're absolutely right. I think both companies have a sales-driven culture, no question about it. And Nutanix, even though we are a younger company, much smaller in size, I don't think our aspirations and the fighting spirit is any less. In fact, in some cases it might even be out there. However, what we have done is we always focused on partners as part of the customer in the same ecosystem. That is, do right by the customer, do right by the partner. And I think that applies to both companies. What we have done early on is actually put together some guard rails between companies, how do we approach when those sort of conflicts arises, number one. Number two, we put together processes in the field when it comes to dual registration which is somewhat convoluted on the back end, but extremely delightful on the front end. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be friction. What we've done is we made sure that number one, the frictions are exceptions, not an example always, and second, when it comes up, we talk. So, he's on my WhatsApp. When something really blows up he will say, "Sudheesh, what's going on?" It's less and less now because our people have actually done a pretty good job of managing it. But ultimately, the one thing that'll continue to sustain and grow this relationship would be trust and communication. In the last four years, we know the people. We have built the communication, we speak the language, and because of that we are able to overcome all those problems. Yeah, the key is when those arise, getting the right people involved and ultimately doing right by the customer. There's always going to be conflict, this, that in the field. It's getting the right people involved early managing it and making sure we're putting customers first, not getting them in the middle of it. >> Sudheesh: Absolutely. Alright, so Dan, one of the things we heard from Nutanix today and I've been hearing all week, Intel Skylake. You've got 14 Gs available. Since it's not announced yet as the date, what kind of guidance can you give, and how's that rollout going to look for customers? Especially, I love your viewpoint as you know the server world forever, and you've got a broad portfolio. How does customer adoption across the various buying modes happen? I'll dance around this a bit and say stay tuned, very soon you'll hear some announcement around the 14th Generation PowerEdge. >> Stu: If you're watching the replay, call your rep now, it might be ready. Exactly right, so yes, stay tuned, very, very soon. We've already talked about it back at Dell EMC World. You can expect us to fully embrace the 14th Generation PowerEdge. We've already having some conversations with folks in the field. Obviously, we've got the PowerEdge line out there already. It's actually, the adoption of 14 G has been very, very strong, so we expect that to pick up here on the XC series very shortly. So, like I said, stay tuned. I have to dance around a little bit, but it'll be very, very soon. But one point, it's not available any later on the XC than it is on the other hyperconverged offerings that you have, correct? Correct. Yeah, so that's, I think, kind of the main thing. But that also tells you that we don't just take the same server and ship it out. We actually go through a different process to make sure that this can actually run mission critical applications. That's part of the problem as well, we have to do this right. Take a lot of time hardening that, what we would call standard server, so that's what's in process now, and almost done. I'd like to give you both a last word. Talk about customers, talk about anything we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Dan, we'll start with you. Sure, you'll see continued, what I'll say tight integration, focus on the ecosystem. I think big steps with data protection integration, focus on Microsoft. You'll see more integration in that vein filling out that overall ecosystem. Partnership continues to be strong. I think it's a very good combination of software, hardware, and ecosystem. So, on the Dell EMC side you'll see us bring that ecosystem focus, and continue working with these guys. Obvious integrations on the hardware side with some exciting technologies like NVNE and RDMA. So, we'll continue to leverage the hardware technology to promote HCI and to drive HCI, make it stronger, and continue to focus on the overall ecosystem. So, we're excited for the relationship, and I'll hand it over to Sudheesh. Yeah, I think, see Nutanix, we always were a software company. But taking a product like this without the help of an appliance form factor would not be feasible, because any problem happened, it would be our problems. But now that we have the last five years behind us, we know how to make it work. What sort of products do we need to build to support the installation process, the upgrade process, lifecycle management, all of those things are done. Now starting next year, you'll see Nutanix making a conscious decision to become a truly software company, without the reliance of being, pushing through hardware. Our sales organization will be retooled and restructured to become, and incentivized to focus more and more on software, and less and less on appliances, which will bring companies like Dell EMC and Nutanix closer, because they have the footprint. Some of the conflicts used to arise basically because we had our own appliances as well. And once the sales organization is differently incentivized, you will see the trust building faster between the resellers and the companies. So, I am very optimistic because of not just the technology vision. Nutanix with hyperconverged, and the Calm and Xi, and everything else that we laid out. We know that for us, hyperconverged is just the foundation, and the support for everything that we're building. That fully aligns with Dell EMC's aspirations on how Nutanix should proceed. So, we're pretty excited, but always cautious about what could go wrong, focused on those things. As long as we talk and communicate, and we focus on customers and partners, I am pretty confident on the future. Sudheesh Nair, Dan McConnell, thank you so much for catching up. Welcome to The Cube alumni. Much appreciated. He's a pro already. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in Nice, France, with Nutanix.Next. Happy to welcome back to the program two return guests, Binny Gill and Aaditya Sood, both with Nutanix. As I said, Binny is the Chief Architect. Aaditya is Senior Director of Engineering. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. My pleasure. All right, so, for about the last year, we've been looking at Nutanix, you talk about enterprise cloud. What does that really mean? How do you, as Dheera said, the goal was to become an iconic software company. Audacious goal. Started with a couple of acquisitions. Really, this week it feels like we're kind of expanding a little bit on what kind of the Nutanix Cloud portfolio if you will, is going to look like. So first, Aaditya, pretty busy, since you came into the Nutanix fold. Bring us up to speed on what you've been up to since the last time we talked. Sure, thank you Stu. The last year or so we have spent integrating Calm into the Nutanix platform. And also just enhancing it so that the true multi-cloud capability of the current platforms come together. And I think this is one of the fundamental building blocks for the modern next generation enterprise clouds. On services, as well as on a service-centric life cycle approach and that is what we have been up to. Yeah, so to dig in for one second here. Because Calm, absolutely seems central, kind of cloud and (mumble), the two things we have been talking about. I've talked to a couple of customers that have had kind of that early, limited access really happy. A lot of customers I've talked to they're like, ah, I've seen the slides. I'm hoping to see some demos. But, you know, they can't wait to get their hands on it 'cause as Nutanix has done in the past, you know, some bold claims, but will the product deliver? So were are we? When does everyone get their hands on it and, you know, get beating on it? Sure, we have been running some early access betas with customers for the last two or three months and the response for us has been phenomenal. Our partners are very excited, our customers are excited. And well as all of Nutanix is very excited. And I think that sometime later this month is when we will push this thing out there to see how it works out, but so far, looking pretty good. All right, excellent. All right, Binny, lot of new announcements. I mean we had Sunil on. We went through, there's all the five-five stuff. But you know, we bring you on stage to talk about some of the future things as I said, expanding out kind of the cloud's stack. Give us a little bit, kind of the architect's view as to how you're deciding, you know, what to build and then you give us the thumbnails as to what's coming. Yeah, so, essentially what we're trying to build is, as you talked about earlier, an enterprise cloud OS, let me put some more meat to that statement. Essentially, an operating system is something where we run applications, right? Back in the old days, operating systems were run on my desktop, like it could be a Linux operating system or Windows operating system and my app would just run on one host. Today, apps run on clouds, right? So the cloud is the new operating system. Now there are multiple operating systems out there. There's AWS, there's Azure, there's GCP. What does the enterprise have, right? Enterprise doesn't have a good operating system and that's our goal. So what were are saying is we need to build all the aspects of an operating system that means starting from a marketplace, you know, from where you download an application to Calm which can deploy an application to a run time like AHV where the application runs to the networking, the storage and security, all these aspects is what we are building and if you can see how we are progressing over the last two, three, years on this, we have made tremendous progress on a lot of these fronts. And if you look at the announcements that we are making, these are very strategic in that direction, how can we make the right components fit into the picture at the right time. All right and speak a little bit to some of the announcements made-- Yeah, so, if you look at so far what we have done, we have had a (mumble) block services and file services and services that allow you to run your mobile apps better, right? Now you're looking at the next generation cloud native applications. One of the first, key things to have is an objects store. If you look at how the public cloud evolved. It started with an object store for multiple applications. We announced that the objects store service. And again, in true Nutanix fashion, it's going to be highly scalable, elastic. We are looking at global scale and how can you build an object store, not only to reside in one cloud and sort of be lock a lock-in, but rather, have it inter-distributed dispersed cloud fashion with the odd capabilities, back-up snap shot. The old constructs of mobility are still needed in this next generation disperse cloud. So that is one of the things. The other announcement we made was on the compute cloud, right. So you've seen Nutanix bring in hyperconvergence first, then we said you can add storage-only Nords. Now we are saying you compute only, storage-less Nords. And the whole idea is that now you can run AHV on a lot more servers. Even the servers you had earlier invested in, you can bring them into the Nutanix fabric and manage from Prism, the one place to manage all your compute farm, all your hyerconvergence farm, and all your storage farm. So that's pretty exciting right now. Yeah, and it's interesting, those people are like, oh well, Nutanix is a hyperconvergence structure player. Well, that service you describe AC2? There's no storage. It's not not hyperconverged, right? So, is HCI just a piece of the portfolio? How would you look at that from an engineering standpoint? HCI was sort of the hammer we needed to use to get rid of the legacy, if you think about it. But, that essentially got rid of the complexity of three-tier architecture, three-tier mindset. Once that's gone and we now say that okay, this is one compute fabric, and the storage fabric could be married to it, or in some cases, it could be separate, that's completely fine, as long as there's one stack that you're dealing with, you know a single place where you can go and upgrade your files from there, this from there, that from there, hypervisor, you know the storage controller, that makes it an operating system in some sense. OS is the one place where, you know it's still wholistic, it doesn't have, I don't buy parts of an OS from different companies. It's one OS. And that's what we are building, so, HCI was an means to an end, I think. Now building an OS for the cloud is the next goal. All right, so, Aaditya, We hear the message of a one OS. But if I look at any IT environment, they have and, because they have something new and they have their old stuff. And the they accept something new and it's always heterogeneous, well I've got vSphere and AHV. I've got AWS and, you know, GCP. Management has to kind of deal with that. And it's been something we have been struggling with in this industry for longer than I've been in the industry. (laughter) So, how are you looking at this? Where do you feel that Nutanix and Calm is going to help, you know to try to, not silver bullet, hopefully single pane of glass get discussed too much. But, what realistically, what do you solve and what advice do you give customers to try to help them get through this? Sure. So the way we look at it, that's the reality to it, the fractured reality of infrastructure, of the enterprise and the different kinds of Window stacks running together. And to riff off Binny's example, an operating system, forever, had different devices, different hardware devices from different Windows. But, by using things like device drivers or file abstractions, build a consistent, layered platform on top of them, so each application did not need to be return off or I'm running this network card or that network card and so on. So that's how we're looking at this layered approach in Calms as well from Nutanix. And yes, there is going to be AWS, there is going to be GCP. But on top of this a single layer can be built which can go ahead and allow the applications to abstract those parts out. That being said, there is no silver bullet for any of this. There are trade-offs involved, but we like to think of based-off on the feedback we have seen over the last year or so of running betas and getting customer interactions and partnerships that remains is, it takes I'd would say 80, 90% of the complexity over. Now I will specifically not use a single pane of glass. Why, because you said so. Yes. Very rightly so, but I think that as close as coming and not just as a single scream but as a single abstraction across multiple pieces of infrastructure is what we are going and building now. And, I've talked to a number of the Nutanix partners and RESTful APIs come up all the time. It's easy for them to integrate with the services. It's kind of the core fundamental of what we look at today, yes? Yeah, Binny. When I think about the channel and I think about your customers, sell an appliance, it's relatively easy. Selling software and services and these pieces, it's a little bit different mindset for them. How do you help with the customers, the go-to-market for what you're building today, how do you get them ready for that? How do you listen to them? How is the feedback you're getting from people impact the kind of what and how you're building it? Yes, we see all sorts of requirements actually coming in. There are some large customers who still love our appliance model. They can just buy Nutanix appliances and forget about managing them or who do they need to call, it's one number to call, one throat to choke, quote unquote, and then there are some others who want to picky in terms of hey, this is the hardware I need to get, because I have great contacts with Taiwan or China and I'll the hardware from there. I also have been using that in my other server farms. They are using just software from us, so we sell them software only. So, there are many different ways in which we are solving for what customers want. And there's no one-size-fits-all. And that's the beauty of this, I mean, just like, I can take Linux and package it as an appliance and say, hey, this is a router or something else, or maybe a custom, super computer or I could just have it independent, right. So, the beauty of an OS is that it's very flexible in how you package it, right. And that packaging will be very diverse and the partner ecosystem will build around that operating system, as Aaditya was saying. As you see in this expo, there are a lot of partners excited working with our OS and adding their value-add on top of it. All right so, Binny, we heard of there's a lot of features you're rolling out through community edition, CE, first. When I saw the announcements of the object and the compute, there's this disclaimer, it's like well, this is future stuff that we're working on but we're not giving you a date. For a software company, how do you give guidance on this, it gets announced, when should we expect to see it in beta, community edition and kind of generally available? You're a public company, you can't give too much, but general guidance, philosophy, engineering standpoint, how do we look? 'Cause we've gone away from the 18 month major release cycles, so how do you look at release cycles and the way to get them out? So yeah, a couple of things, One is that we are going towards an agile modeling in terms of how releases will be done. Like how Aaditya's team will be releasing Calm at a different cadence compared to, for example, a storage fabric. This is still one OS. But you can upgrade pieces in it, separately. And they can come faster. Basically, the new services that come in, they need more quicker reiteration and that's how they will be iterated on and the older services where you care about, hey, I don't want to cut up my data and all that. You'd be more concerned by nature. And that's essentially, you'll see that's the transition that's going to happen and how we do stuff. One of the core principles, like philosophies, that we have is in mind is that we want to make sure that the experience that our customers have today with Nutanix on trim is maintained. Say, if they want the five nine, six nine is a liability. If they want the NPS of 90 plus, that's what you need. The reason we started with our own appliance was precisely that. We want to control the experience. Then when we went with Onyems and Partners, we were very strict in what we allow, what we don't allow so that experience is maintained. You will see the same thing going forward. So, we're not about, hey, just throwing in a bunch of features because so many people are waiting for it but the quality goes with that. We want to make sure that when we, even when we talk about hybrid cloud and (mumble), and we're talking about DR as a service, what would you DR, your business critical, mission critical apps. So you expect the same quality, right? So, that's what you should expect from Nutanix that if it is GA, it holds up to the bar and net promote a score. It will be maintained very high. All right, Aaditya, one last question I have for you is in an event like this, you get to talk to a lot of customers. I'm sure there's huge requests, talk to a lot of customers, they're excited about what you're doing and they want to know not only GA but kind of roadmap. What can you share with us as some of the big pieces, what should we be looking for beyond the availability itself when it comes to your activities. Sure, I think, I of course, can't go into too much amount of details because I'll unveil it at the right time. Some of the things what we are, what core things we are specifically looking at is how to bridge the chasm between the old school of more than one application and move to container-based modern entirely cloud-based native applications like all the majority of a lot of the enterprise today is stuck on this side of the divide. And it's very simplistic and naive to say just rewrite all your applications to fit into containers, or the modern cloud and everything. So we are building a bunch of technologies which you are here and creatively and incrementally get you over to the other side without doing rewrites, maintaining uptime and hopefully minimizing your spending. Yeah, that's great, Binny, in the keynote today, we heard more about the edge computing, Satyam talked about it. There's certain parts of the market I talk to, it's like containers are pretty much a given at this point. Server list is something that we're talking about a lot. Now, how is engineering and architecture keep up with this change? how do you look at some of these dynamics, how to make sure you don't kind of over-rotate too fast? You want to be with your customers, not too far ahead of them. Well, yeah, so, even in the keynote today, you might have noticed that the way we look at the problem of how our customers will move to the next level. And every customer is at a different phase in this journey towards building their true enterprise hybrid cloud, right. Some are still virtualizing, to be frank. And some are them are moving from three tier to hyperconvergence, some of them from hyperconvergence to hey, I need a better hypervisor with the HV, and then I need Calm and then I need Zi and so on. So they're on a journey. The way we look at this entire transition, even when you talk about IODs, like have it as another phase in the evolution, don't force it on everybody. So IODs being built as a layer after you're standardized on Calm, for example, then you can use Calm as a way of saying now I need to enable some services that I need to create the foundation for building my IOD apps, so functions as a service and all that would be managed by the cloud admin using Calm. So we're building things in layers and IODs is yet another layer that will come out in some time. Binny Gill, Aaditya Sood, thank you so much for giving us all the updates. We look forward to the releases and the future announcements. We'll be back with more coverage here. Nutanix next, I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's live coverage from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. Always love when we get to dig in of some of the practitioners, the users at this conference 'cause a lot of 'em have shown up for this show. Happen to welcome to the program first time guest Mohammed Ibrahim, who's the head of IT with Securities and Investment Company or SICO headquartered out of Bahrain. Great to see you Hello, how are you? Good to see you, too. It's really my pleasure to participate and to be here and joining the .NEXT Conference. I'm very lucky to be here. Thank you so much. And you've been at both of the European shows? Exactly, I have attended last year in Vienna, and that was really good as well. And this year I really see a very big development and enhancement and the difference between this year and last year which is a very good progress. So, Mohammed, first tell us about SICO. How long's the company been around? Kind of the breadth of coverage and locations and the like. Yeah, SICO, it's actually, it's a wholesale bank headquartered in Bahrain, and we are a premiere wholesale bank in the region, Middle East and North Africa. We do business in two different lines like asset management because we manage more than one billion US dollar as asset management and portfolio managers, and we are also a custodian house. And the brokerage business, this is one of our main business lines as well because we are brokers and we started as brokers, and now we are a wholesale bank. Our coverage as I said is MENA, Middle East and North Africa, and we have our also subsidiary brokerage arm in United Arab Emirates. It's SICO UAE. It's our brokerage arm there, and they are also working under SICO. You were telling me SICO's been around since 1995. Give us a little bit of your background. How long have you been on there? Actually, yeah, SICO established in 1995, and I joined SICO in 2007, and since that time I'm at SICO, I started as the head of infrastructure, and now I am the head of IT looking after the whole IT and services in SICO. Maybe explain to us those roles, infrastructure and IT, and kind of how many people, how many data centers, that kind of stuff. We have actually one data center which is on the main side, and we have another data center in our DR side, that's the recovery side. And yeah, it's very, very sophisticated because we are operating as a bank and we have a core banking system. We have a trading platform. We are serving more than 1,900 customers, and our customers are government, pension fund, high-worth net individuals, corporates, so we have fund managers. This all our customers, and this is actually very critical customers for us. We are in IT of course. We have couple of units. We have the infrastructure and application. I was actually entitled for the infrastructure, looking after the platform and security network, and recently from couple of years back, I have been promoted to be the head of IT and looking after the applications as well as the infrastructure. Great, and you've got security under your preview which I have to imagine is taking a lot of time and budget these days. Exactly, it was a very, again, critical task and a critical position because handling the security, it was really important for the business and for our data and our confidentiality. So, it was really a good practice and a good experience. And now we are actually enhancing more in our information security policy because as you know, cyber security is one of the important topics, especially when you go to the digitalization. And this is our main purpose and our main target, is to do digitalization automation and enhancing this domain, plus ensuring the security is very standard, very high level, matching the whole expectations, the fund regulator, as well as the worldwide standards. Brought up a great point, Mohammed, there. I want you to explain to our audience what is digitization mean to SICO? For us, digitalization is actually, it's more than giving online services. Automation for our services as well. Make it easy because the wholesale bank actually have different line of services, and getting into access to your data, to your portfolio managing your orders, placing your orders, getting your positions, guaranteeing your cash statements, this is all actually, transferring your cash, this is all something that it's very important for the customer. And in many places, even in the Gulf, even in the area, it happens manually, so we are trying to be more automated, more smart, and this is for us, is the digitalization in the time being. Okay, so let's dig into the part of your job but your whole job too, the infrastructure itself. What's the role of infrastructure when you're doing the digitalization? You've probably gone through some transformations there. If you can tell us a little bit about kind of what it was like, and kind of what led to where you are and where you're going? Mainly, this is a very important question actually, and I love to answer it because when I joined SICO, it was a traditional infrastructure. As many people did, it's a physical implementation. You have servers, you have network switches, so it was a very traditional. And this was actually the challenge is to move SICO from the traditional way of the infrastructure into very simple way and very standard way, allowing you to grow, allowing you to add more applications, allowing you to really develop and focus more on the functionalities other than infrastructure. Since you also have limited resources in terms of IT resources, so you need really to think about simple infrastructure giving you the functionalities you expect, giving you the stability, that resiliency, and as well as giving you the opportunity to add more sort of critical applications on top of that. So I have to imagine in your time virtualization played a role in this, and when did Nutanix come into the picture? Actually, Nutanix came into the picture when we decided to go with our online and trading platform, SICO Life. SICO Life, it's actually a very important and critical product for us because it allows our customers to get the direct market access, and we are currently online with seven markets, and we are going for the globe as well because we are planning to go for Europe and US markets. So to build this kind of critical system you have to have a cloud. You have to think about virtualization because again, following the traditional implementation of infrastructure, it will not help you. And it will take a long, long time, and it will be very complex in terms of administration and support. For this reason, we have to had actually our private cloud, because again, you will stuck with the regulator if you go with the public cloud. If you tell him I'm going for a public cloud, he will tell you it's against confidentiality. You cannot take the customer information and put it somewhere. So we said, okay, we will go for our private cloud, and this was a challenge. We need a hyper-converged infrastructure. We need infrastructure that is smart enough to be hosting all our VMs with a central monitoring, central sort of administration, and easy as well. So we have converted more than couple of solutions around the world, and Nutanix was one of the proposed solutions coming to us. And we have done a very sophisticated vendor selection, and I think we have taken the right decision when we have selected Nutanix to be our infrastructure for a trading platform. Before I get into the Nutanix a little bit more, some people when they hear I built a private cloud, they say, well, you virtualized some environment, you did some things. What were your internal requirement? What makes it a cloud versus just okay, I've automated some things, or I've done some things? Did you have certain criteria that you went through or what did you do? Did you benchmark yourselves against the public cloud from kind of the usage and the agility? How do you sort that out? Again, it's very important, the question, because this was the strategy when I joined SICO from the beginning. As I said, we have or we had actually, a traditional infrastructure and the market, and the standards was ahead actually. So you have to bring SICO infrastructure into the standards. Traditional infrastructure, it doesn't give you that facility to grow and to add more sort of systems. It's very difficult, so this was actually the criteria and the requirements from our side. We need to have a simple infrastructure where we can add additional servers seamlessly. We can grow, we can expand, we can add more resources without rebuilding the whole infrastructure because the physical implementation, if you're stuck with the capacity, you have to shut down the server, bring a new server, do another implementation, bring everybody involved to do the new implementation. But with the virtualization, it's easy. It's a virtual server. It's a data, you take it somewhere. Just only you need to provide the infrastructure that can host it. And with the Nutanix or with the hyper-converged infrastructure, you can whenever you need additional resources, you can add resources, and you can keep your application running as is. You can keep your data as is, and without interrupting the business, without interrupting the operation, and without interrupting customers as well. And this was actually the criteria when we selected and when we decided to go with our hybrid-converged infrastructure. Okay, that's great. Do you have any metrics as to kind of operations or how many headcount you have working on things? What's been the impact of the planned Nutanix? This what we have done actually. I told you we did like a vendor selection, and we compared two different vendors. And actually, to be more honest, four vendors actually. Monitoring and developing and comparing different technologies. So if you go with the traditional infrastructure and implementation, how it will go in terms of support, in terms of implementation, timelines, the cost, post-implementation, support, even with the converged infrastructure because I remember in that time we had a converged infrastructure where some people like well-known companies were talking about converged infrastructure. And we had the hyper-converged infrastructure solution, which was a very a new into the market. For this reason, we had taken, I think, a decision where everybody said, Mohammed and SICO, I think you are taking a very what you can say? It's a very new decision. It's something that is-- Say it's risky? Exactly, some people consider it a little bit risky because you are doing something, it's still not yet many people did it, especially in the financial services and the banking sector. But as I told you, it was a challenge that you had to take and you had to go through because you have to have your own private cloud. Why, because you have to host whatever VMs you need. Whenever you need to add a VM, it will be very easy for you. Whenever you want to expand, it will be also easy for you. And with your resources, current IT resources, you can still handle this sophisticated systems and the critical systems. And this was a challenge because again every time you implement a new system, you add to payroll additional resources and you hire more resources. The business will be killed. You said something I've heard lots from financial markets these days is, the business is changing, so you need to have the agility to be able to respond and deliver what you need. And to be honest, again, I will tell you frankly speaking, now the management and the business decision makers, they look to the IT that they have a buttons. When I tell you something, you should press the button and bring it to me. They don't actually think about how much sophisticated that your system have already in the background. So they don't care about the technicality. They care more about the functionality and the deliverables. IT, it's very now challenging and the decision makers and the IT management and the technical resources we have a very challenge, a very high challenge, that whenever they get the requirements and a lot of priorities are coming from the business, they have to be always ready. So if you don't have a simple and a proper infrastructure that can really flexible, help you achieve all of these kind of deliverables, then you will stuck. And people will look at you like you are in 19th century. So we are now in 91, we are growing. We have to grow. We have to be very fast like others. It sounds like your saying Nutanix provides the easy button for the infrastructure. From my experience and from the implementation we have done, I think Nutanix, with our systems, it could really achieve our target. And we could really implement the trading platform in a very good time as we expected, even less. And we could really do this kind of performance. We could really achieve the deliverables as we expected. We have more than expected performance. We have the right choice in terms of expansion. We have also good support from Nutanix, which is really helping a lot in terms of critical systems because it's a 24 by 7. I cannot actually afford a couple minutes even downtime. It's the markets. I'm accessing the markets, so I'm placing orders, and these orders are money. And if the customer while placing the order his order did not reach the market because of the system, he will kill us. (laughs) Exactly, this is how much, and actually it's seconds because the price in the markets is changing, and the customer is placing the order. So if I did not give him the very stable platform that he can really place the order into the market with this moment and then it got delayed, then he will lose money. And I will lose the customer, and I will lose the business. For this reason, it's very critical and it's very important to have such a simple, flexible, reliable solution for your system. Mohammed Ibrahim, really appreciate the updates on what SICO has been doing. Thank you so much and best of luck. We'll be back with lots more programming here from theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT, I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE.

Live from Nice, France, it's the Cube, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to the French Riviera, Riviera, sorry. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube, and we're live, so every once in a while, things take a little bit longer, or we slip on a thing or two but we're really excited to have two guests from Veeam with me. Of course the Cube was at VeeamON earlier this year, and so I've got Nicolas Savides, who is the Senior Director of Alliances in EMEA, and Michael Cade, who I've known from the virtualization community for a number of years, but first time also on the program, global technologist, also with Veeam. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. All right. Nicolas, let's start with you, tell us a little bit about your background, how long you've been at Veeam, what's your role there. So I'm in charge of follow alliances for the EMEA region, so I've been at Veeam for six years now. My mission is really to build full stack solutions with our set of alliance partners to deliver the best possible solution on level of availability for our customers. All right. Michael, same question for you. So, I started at Veeam about two and a half, three years ago, I started off as a systems engineer with a data center background, so doing Veeam as an SE, and then moved up into this global technology role. And basically, I work very closely with product management, within the product strategy team, so one of my key responsibilities is gaining feedback from our customer base, and hopefully getting new features into the product that are going to help Veeam grow from a technology point of view. Awesome, good. So we get to talk about the ecosystem, we get to talk about the partners between dues. Nicolas, at your conference, per your whole executive team, talked about, Veeam had ridden that wave of virtualization, like many of us, I've spent a lot of time in that ecosystem myself. Today, virtualization of course hasn't gone away and is still majorly important, but it's a really about a lot more than that. There's a lot of cloud going on now, a much broader ecosystem, I think for many years when I thought of Veeam, there was one partner that was critically important and there were a few others. Now, there's a lot more. Tell us, how's your role been changing in the last couple of years? I think, our customers asked us to think broader than we used to. So yes, we started on virtualization, inside the data center, and the needs expanded. So, inside the data center it became diverse, not only VMware, but Hyper-V, and then it went beyond the border of the data center. Public clouds, Azure, Amazon, and more and more coming, and our customer loved the level of simplicity, and quality that Veeam delivered in silence, they wanted to keep that quality when they were expanding to a multi-class strategy. And that our job is changing today, our product is evolving, to take in charge that diverse wall. Our mission today is to protect any app, any data, in any cloud. And we've released a set of products to take that in account, and that's something we share, in the vision we share, with Nutanix here. Michael, I want you to take us into, the mind of your customers today. Of course, it integrates spectrum out there, if you talk about, virtualization, I've still run across customers that are still very early in that journey. When you talk about cloud, this week at the show, I've talked to some that, well, I've got regulations, especially in certain countries here in Europe, where I'm not doing it and others that are heavily, heavily, heavily, weighted toward the cloud. So, give us the flavor for what are the big problems, the real reasons when you're engaging with customers. So, I would say, exactly that. Let's see we've got people that are, just beginning to go down that virtualization route, but then we've also got some big customers that are looking at how do we leverage AWS, and other public cloud-type offerings. I think that's, so 18 months ago, we announced that the availability platform, which as Nicolas said, any app, any data, any cloud, the ability to still, obviously we've got a strong heritage in that virtualization space, with vSphere and Hyper-V, I think with the extension of AHV on top of that, but also with our agents, for those physical workloads, but not just physical workloads, think cloud instances, any virtual machine that we don't have access to the hypervisor, up in AWS, or Azure, we've got the ability to leverage our same toolsets, to be able to manage and back those up, and make them available, as well as software as a service, so we see a lot net-new customers coming in, and actually where they don't necessarily use us for the virtualization environment, but they're looking to us to use us for Office 365 mail backup, bringing that back on premises rather than leaving it all down to Microsoft to look after that protection window, so you can see there's quite a lot, and then on top of that we've got, we're enabling our service provider, our reseller community to offer backup as a service, DR as a service, we've got a cloud connect model, so you can see, where pre-18 months ago, we were back up in replication, for virtualization, and now we've got this whole portfolio, this whole availability platform, where we can hit a lot of the different aspects of up and coming infrastructures that are out there. Yeah, when I listen to Nutanix talk, they talk about enterprise cloud, and it was not just data center, but it was data center and cloud, and they're even talking a little bit about Edge, and they don't talk about much, but you just brought up Sass is a huge piece, from our numbers, it's got two-thirds of the public cloud numbers. Where does, give us from the customers' standpoint the overlap between where you see Nutanix today, in that whole cloud discussion. So, we're seeing quite a large number of Nutanix customers teaming up with Veeam, to protect those virtualized workloads, especially in the vSphere and Hyper-V area. Obviously we don't have the AHV support just yet, but definitely seeing a lot of uptake, and even in the session yesterday that I did, we forget that half the room said that they were using vSphere or Nutanix with Veeam, and then probably a 1/4 using Hyper-V, and a 1/4 using AHV. But then when I asked a question about, to the audience of around 250, 300 people, we probably saw half the room say they were considering moving to AHV, because of what Veeam is doing in that space as well. Yeah. We know that AHV of course is something Nutanix has been beating the drum. I need to get the partner perspective on this. How much of this have customers been asking, how much of it is from the Nutanix end, give us the update as to how long is this going to take, and how hard of a lift is this. So, when we decided, to go onto launch support for AHV, this was really a demand from our customer. This was, we started from a statement that said, okay, we know as customers, we will have to go multi-cloud, whether it's for resiliency, cloud, quality of service, whatever the reason, we'll have to go multi-cloud. And then the question that comes next is, what's the best player to make it happen? And how do I guarantee the right level of SLS, availability, when I go that way? We think Nutanix has a pretty good answer on how do I make multi-cloud strategy happen, and we already partnered on the Hyper-V and Vmware part, and our customer was saying, I will go to the multi-cloud, I will use AHV eventually. Growing slowly, not overnight, but that will grow, and I make a choice of data protection, availability, for the long run. Veeam, please help us get into that direction, and that was making perfect sense of us, getting with them into that multi-cloud direction, and support acropolis. We've announced it a few months ago in .Next in the US, I've made a first live demo yesterday during the session, so Michael was doing it, and we expect the product to be released in 2018. But we're already feeling a lot of demand and very positive feedback around it here at the show and at our booth. Great. 2018, coming pretty quick. One of the things you hear from customers is they understand, it's going to be multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor kind of ends up there, managing across those different environments is tough, the biggest sin in IT is always you end up with a heterogeneous mess, and then the poor admins have to deal with it. Veeam has a nice story, more than a story, but that's something that, really, you're trying to position and help customers across those environments, maybe you can speak to that some. Yes, so I think one of the really important things for us is making sure that that interface, or that experience when just deploying Veeam, is very easy to use, very usable, it's very important to keep that, as we move forward and develop all these new products. All of the new products use a very similar, easy-to-use, wizard-driven type approach, but with some extra functionality to allow things like restful API out the back so that people can customize that. But when I showed the AHV demo yesterday, it's really aimed towards the Nutanix acropolis administrator, so it uses very much a prism-looking view, an interface, a web interface, but then it still links in and authenticates against VBR, so Veeam Backup Replication, to leverage the repositories, still uses that native file format that we have, the VBKs, the VIBs, so then we can start to use the same functionality that we have within VBR, to use backup copy jobs, send things to tape, use our Veeam explorers for application, item-level recovery, all of that good stuff that we have today that exists in vSphere, admins will know if they're using Veeam and vSphere, but we wanted to import that into, or make it, remember that this is a version one product, and everything, to your last question as well, is around everything Veeam do and develop, is generally based on feedback from our customers. We listen to those and implement those changes where we see that it's going to help people to achieve what they need to achieve, whilst still trying to keep that easy-to-use mentality. Okay, so relative confidence you can talk to customers and say hey, you've got vSphere and you want to do vSphere and AHV, your management of that environment isn't going to be horrific. Yeah, absolutely. (laughs) Yeah, yeah. Nicolas, so we've talked about the AHV, what else would the partnership, where do the key engagements and anything down the line beyond we've talked about already that we should highlight? Really, where we go is we're both companies that work a lot with a channel, so resellers, integrators, so that's obviously the next step, getting Oracle system ready, jointly, to deliver what we promised to our customers, make sure they're aware of how that works and what are the benefits, and of course, last step is really a collaboration, around going together to the customers, making sure it's not only an alliance that is from the technology perspective of a product, but it's really something our customers can feel on the ground and can trust. One of our customers who is there today, a manufacturer in the aeronautics industry, he's been using Nutanix and Veeam for a year now, he's very excited about the announcement, because he loves the flexibility we already offer, an order comes in, comes out in that sector, on the scale of it that was offering, but we know he will move progressively to acropolis and he was very happy about us, and we are together, with him, to go into his journey into digital information multi-cloud strategy. Yeah. In talking to Nutanix leading up to the show, they actually said from a pre-registration standpoint, your sessions were at the top of the list from a partner standpoint. Of course Nutanix loves all their partners. (laughs) But Michael, what is it that customers, usually it's I want to learn something, or something that's really going to help them in their job, what's so exciting that's pulling the customers in, what are the types of questions they're coming, what are they taking away from a show like this, from a joint, Veeam-Nutanix? So from our point of view, it was, one thing that we didn't put in the abstract, was around we want to show the AHV thing, because we announced something in June, we felt like we needed to have that, at least something to show. So actually, we're close to having a landing page that will allow the interested parties to come in and look for that beta and we'll give them that information but we split the session into two parts, one was the vSphere and the Hyper-V that we have on the truck today, and secondly was the bit to keep everyone in their seats, right, to show them the AHV stuff and how it looks from an interface point of view, and actually the methodology that we're using to take those backups and as well as the guest file restores, through a question point of view, so the architecture looks pretty simple and easy to use, and that's exactly what we wanted to hear from the v1 feedback is okay, that makes sense, why you're doing that, so from that architecture point of view it's going to look very simple, it's an AHV proxy appliance that's going to sit inside the AHV cluster, and it's then going to authenticate to an existing or a new VBR server. So, in terms of people were interested about the beta, obviously that's generally what comes up, but that was really the feedback that we got, they were asking about what's next, when can we have this, that, and that's important for us, but it's also very positive for us, because if people are already thinking about v2, v3, then that's a great roadmap or vision for what this needs to look like in the short term. Excellent. Always love to hear the customer excitement and engagement on that, I'm sure everybody will be looking for the beta code, look to catch up with you at a future event, when we can talk about the full G8. Nicolas, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today, I'm Stu Miniman and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in the French Riviera, you're watching the Cube. (intro music)

(upbeat pop music) >> [Narrator] France! It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat pop music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCube. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, gonna help me with some analysis of what's been happening here at the show, Keith Humphreys, who is the managing consultant at euroLAN Research. Thanks so much for joining us. >> My pleasure, Stu. >> Alright, so, Keith, you and I were the only analysts at the Vienna show last year, they've grown he analyst program a little bit as, you know, most of us in the community been watching Nutanix for many years. Tell us a little bit about kind of your background, and what specifically you focus on. >> Okay, so, euroLAN is an industry analyst company focused on helping vendors optimize routes to market in Europe. So, we're a channel analyst company founded in '93, in Paris, France, I was employee number five, and we're still about five consultants, and as I say, we're very vendor focused on channels. >> Yeah, well, it goes without saying, in our industry things are changing a lot, but boy, has the channel been changing massively, you know, everything from the impact of service providers to the public cloud. So, let's start kind of at the macro level a little bit. What are some of the big issues? The channels always, you know, we say they're coin operated. Where do they make money, where are they concerned about, what's exciting them these days? >> I think at a macro level what's really exciting, if you look at the book B four B, it describes the risk having gone from corporate back to the vendor. So, before the enterprise used to buy kit, buy stuff, buy products and have to integrate them themselves, take 18 months before they actually got a working product, but in the mean time the vendors had produced the invoice, maybe not even shipped the kit before they could recognize the revenue, now with as-a-service that's totally changed. The risk is gone from the customer, right they way back to the vendor, it's a fascinating point, and the channel's stuck in between here, trying to be the good guys, still trying to integrate that stuff, still trying to produce those solutions, but only getting paid at an annuity revenue model. It's very different. >> Yeah, you know, I was involved in some of the early convergent infrastructure solutions, and you go to some companies and they're like, "We make tons of money racking and stacking and cabling." We're like, "Come on, that's not huge value add, let's help you add more value, get more involved, be more consultative solution-selling and the like." We've only seen that accelerate with the like of hyper converge infrastructure and solutions-as-a-service as you said where sometimes it's just frictionless, just acquire what I need when I need it. How's the channel doing? >> I think the channel's doing okay, but they're in denial, because of this issue. I think if you look at the way Nutanix started as a box provider and now moving to software, some of the channel is really railing against that, and saying, "We still want to do it this way." They're not learning the lesson that they must move to an annuity model basis, because it's a huge business transformation. We jointly run a workshop with IDC to help system integrators make that transition across, and we've only booked through a half a dozen companies for it. They should be knocking our door down to go through this, but they're finding it really hard. >> Alright, so, how's Nutanix doing in the channel? >> So, I think, interestingly, I think it was Chad Sakac of VMware said that they're having to bring out a proof of concept box for vSphere. So they can put that box into customers, so they can try it out. Interesting for a software vendor you're having to package something, so they've gone in that direction. Where as Nutanix are moving in the other direction, going to software only from the box. That's fascinating, but they're trying to drag that channel with them. Are CDW really happy that they're moving to a software-only model? Maybe not. >> Well, look, we've been discussing this week the software-only model, of course, there's still gotta be an appliance somewhere. So, from a channel standpoint, if tomorrow Nutanix says, "Hey, we're only gonna do software and you're gonna do..." does that have a significant impact on the channel, if they now get it if it's a distributor, or some other piece, how much will that impact the channel? >> I think it's going back to the old model of digital days where the channel partner's going back to integrating stuff. Which I think is great news for them, because they can add value, but have they still got the skills? A lot of them have lost those skills, they've been de-franchised or they've de-franchised themselves. >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out, as to whether it comes in a similar form factor. I don't expect that they're gonna be getting Lego pieces and putting together, it's still mostly gonna be pieces. How 'bout Nutanix's been going a lot of new directions, trying to expand, software-only isn't just about saying, kinda the base stack and AHV, but Zai and calm. Some of these other pieces. Is the channel ready for these kind of things? Does Nutanix have to then do way more of it and the channel's just for filling it? How does that dynamic work? >> I think Nutanix has to go out and create the market. They've got to make end customers aware of this and then the enterprise customers will be asking their channel partners for it so they'll have to get up to speed. You know it's a push and pull model to channel. You can't just push through the channel. I heard someone from Nutanix describe the channel as an extension of their sales force. It's just not. You know computer center's go out and sell computer centers. They don't sell Nutanix. They sell their customer benefit and Nutanix is a small part of that solution. Every project is software based. It's around SAP. It's around Oracle and there's some infrastructure to run it on. It's a small part. >> It's interesting, I got to interview a service provider that has then become a reseller of Nutanix solutions. We sometimes say that service providers are the new channel. How is that dynamic playing out? >> Well, if I was to want infrastructure in our office I wouldn't phone British Telecom for it. (laughs) >> Fair enough. What about, we're talking about the multi cloud world. I've found that there's some systems integrators out there that are offering Azure services, some are engaging AWS has been really good at building out their channel. How's that in Europe these days? How much is the channel engaged in the public cloud? >> We're seeing Amazon with AWS starting to reach out to the channel at long last, with channel programs, channel recruitment. They're not gonna get rich reselling that but they'll get rich by putting the professional services on there. You know, what should I run on here? Is it good for computers? Is it good for scaling? Is it good for additional workloads? They've gotta add professional services but even as we run our workshops we see exactly the same thing. As they move to as-a-service, it might be profitable to a degree but it takes you four or five years to get there. So you've gotta be adding professional services on top of that revenue to maintain it. >> Well, I have to think there's good opportunity there because while there was this promise the future's gonna be simple. Right? Public cloud, it's nice and easy swipe a credit card and good. There's so many features out there. SaaS, anybody's that's used SaaS providers when they really wanna use it there's requirements there. So is the channel stepping up to fill some of that gap or will the Accentures, those kind of consulting come in and take that revenue? >> I think it depends on the company's size. We profiled in our newsletter a small UK company who get digital transformation. This quarter we profiled Accenture. They're both doing the same things, just addressing different parts of the market. I think the other interesting thing is, you mentioned the difficulty, obviously AWS uses its own terminology and it looks very complicated but what I do like is the Nutanix one click based around machine learning. That's really exciting. Sudheesh Nair was just talking about DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero and how it's learned the Chinese Go Program. It self learned that. No one taught that. It actually self learned that. There was an article on the FT which was trying to say this is frightening. It's not frightening if we're gonna move into an IoT age, if we're gonna move into an autonomous car age. We're gonna need software that's written to Sigma Nine not Sigma Six and I think only machines can do that. We're not very good at writing software. >> Keith, what more should Nutanix be doing? What advice do you give them on what they can do to engage even more with the channel? >> They've gotta ramp up the marketing. They've gotta provide the air cover for the channel. They've gotta go out and create the demand, create the awareness. The channel will follow through on that. >> One last question I have for you, what advice do you give to the channel today? For them to stay profitable, stay relevant, in this ever changing future? >> It's professional services and annuity revenue. Days of selling boxes are gone. They'll always be boxes you say but you know, it's pure commodity now. Maybe they should invest in super micro? >> Alright. Well Keith Humphries, pleasure to talk with you again and thank you much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu >> We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. You're watching theCube. (upbeat pop music)

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is SiliconANGLE Media's coverage of theCUBE at Nutanix .NEXT in East Frant. Really excited to have on the program Rob Lloyd who is the CEO of Hyperloop One. Off of the keynote this morning Rob, thank you so much for finding time to join us. It's great to join you. So, it's interesting. I've been watching Hyperloop since the day one when it got announced. I'm study mechanical engineering. So transportation's something I looked at. But I've been in the tech world. I knew you back from your Cisco days. When I talked to some friends of mine that didn't know about Hyperloop, you kind of explain it was like, "Oh! Remember the bank pneumatic tubes? "It's like we're going to do that with people." And they're like, "That sounds crazy!" And then you say, "Well, Elon Musk is behind it." And they're like, "Well, OK, another Elon Musk thing "that's probably going to be near impossible, "but they will find a way to make it work." >> Rob: Mm-hmm. You talked a little about your journey in the keynote this morning, but let's start, Hyperloop One. Pre-revenue, give kind of a thumbnail of the company and where you are today. So it's a three year old company. Literally in a garage, in the very late part of 2014, our founder, co-founder, started on November 2nd. So, just an idea. A white paper that Elon wrote, which was the concepts of something very different. A new mode of transportation. Slightly outraged by the expense and archaic nature of the High-Speed Rail in California proposal. So, that's the starting point. A company that was founded, co-founded by Shervin Pishevar, a venture capitalist, and some brilliant engineer, Josh Giegel. Now, from that point, 300 people, 245 million dollars raised and just this summer, having only started on the designs, tested some concepts: a magnetic levitation, a custom-design linear electric motor, evacuating a tube to the equivalent of 200,000 feet above the Earth's surface. We built a full-scale prototype. 500 meters prove the tech is working, and the cool part is that the speed with which this engineering and development is occurring is like nothing else. So, it's kind of DevOps for hardware. And we saw what happened when people kind of went to Agile Development Methodologies. We saw it in tech. But it really hasn't hit the traditional methods of transportation, where people build in silos. They're not closely associated with a fabricator or a welder. And we have mechanical engineers working with fabricators working with welders, and you make amazing progress when you see that happen. You stated, it's been over 100 years since we had a kind of major new transportation model. The tooling that allows you to prototype this... I know, it's kind of, friend of mine, it's watching the space stuff and watching the videos that you put out. Everything from testing the engine, to the pod. If I remember, wasn't there a contest around the pods, too? Well, actually, yeah. The tools we have today, the analytics tools, the way we can model things, didn't exist when we did our first moonshots, when the United States said we're going to put a man on the moon and NASA was mobilized and the country was excited. We didn't have the tools we have today. So we have much, much better tools. We have methodologies and approaches that are not accepted everywhere but are embraced in our company. And you make things happen that were taking five years from an engineering perspective. And you can build a full-scale prototype in 10 months. That really changes the speed with which this can occur. Most people say this would take a decade. This is going to take three years. As I said, like other Elon Musk companies, you've got strong conviction at Hyperloop One. Some of the things that kind of skeptics come up with reminds me a lot of autonomous vehicles. "Ah, well, regulators are never going to let it happen, "and, gosh, safety." It's like "I'm putting software? "It's going to do this? We're going to be going at what speeds?" And you know, "How fast?" And all these things. How long's this going to take before its reality? Can you give us a little bit of that road map, as to how we make sure that once somebody actually goes in this, that they're not going to end up just completely flattened? So, the way that we're approaching this is actually different than the way in which most new technologies are regulated in transportation. We're going to partner with one or two countries. We're going to partner with the regulator while we're designing the commercial version of our technology. So while we commercialize, which is the next two to three years of our road map, we know the tech works. Now you build a commercial offer. You build the car. You build the pod. We will commercialize this. We're going to work with them now, so we don't come to them in three to five years and say, "Would you please certify this?" And in doing so, we actually bring a huge opportunity to the countries that go first. We ran a global competition, to kind of AKA Peter Diamandis, who's on our board, like the X Prize. We actually asked countries, "Who'd like to build the world's first Hyperloop?" 2,600 people registered. 100 serious submissions. Dozens of them are now real projects moving forward with government support. So, the short answer is, we have to do it differently. We're going to partner with a regulator while we're commercializing the tech. And then when we get there, of course you want it to be safe. Of course you'll need certification. But you do that now rather than later. And you'll end up bringing benefits to a country that chooses to go first. Did I hear right that the first solution is probably going to be in the Middle East? There is a good probability that's the case. The land is fairly flat. We can build along existing right-of-ways. There's massive investments in airports and ports there. Wherever there's a very dense transportation hub today, airports, downtown centers, connections to metro or train stations, that's where we want to put kind of a Hyperloop portals. So think of it as the backbone between two data centers. All the activity going on in the data center, we want to connect those high-density locations. But it's not just one-to-one. We can branch on and branch off. So it's sort of like point-to-point packet switching. One of the things that really excited me in your presentation that I didn't know as well is you talked about kind of the sustainability, the energy of this compared to other options, as well as the affordability. Something that really could help a lot of environments. Could you speak to those? Yeah, so... There is absolute science about the substitution rates that will go to a faster mode of transportation if the price is right. So, our model as we analyze opportunities around the world, in the United States, in Europe, Northern Europe, Canada, India, and the Middle East, where we see a lot of our projects today... If we price at the same price level of the current mode of transport, you'll get almost 100% conversion, because why not? Why wouldn't I go, in nine minutes, to Abu Dhabi from Dubai, instead of what could be a two-hour car drive? But why not price it for the ticket of a metro ride? Then you'll get really high ridership, high utilization. The economics of building infrastructure, a PPP structure that would bring private equity, debt, pension funds, sovereign funds together, to invest in that new infrastructure, that's how it's going to work. So that's the passenger case. And then on the freight side, you know, seriously, we forgot that this on-demand economy is based on a transportation network that effectively is 100 to 200 years old. Steel cans, right? This idea of a container was invented, a standard-sized container that goes on ships. The ships unload them in ports. They sit a couple of days. Then a truck puts it on the back, and they drive through our cities. Or it goes on the back of a train and takes seven to ten days to get to its consumer. That doesn't work anymore, in this world of Amazon, on-demand, Alibaba commerce. The only option they have is to pay for air freight, which is five to six times more than it would cost to carry those same packages and goods in a Hyperloop cargo system. Huge opportunity. Rob, speak about sustainability, kind of the energy required for this compared to other modes of transportation. We take some energy to remove the pressure inside the tube which obviously reduces resistance. It's an all-electric motor. Because we have little resistance and no friction, because we're floating on magnets, effectively floating on a magnetic cushion, once you're up to speed, you're pretty much gliding, like gliding in space. >> Stu: What speed do we think that'll be? Well, by the way, this really is, I'm being very candid, it depends on the route. It depends on how straight we can get a right-of-way. It depends on the levels, so flat and straight means you can go fast. If you're going to go 300 kilometers, we can go six, seven, eight hundred miles an hour which is faster than an aircraft. And obviously city center to city center, then we don't have the drive of an hour and a half, the vagaries of weather, and all that other stuff, which has made air travel for most of us just a somewhat demoralizing experience. So, solar power, wind power, and in some environments where we do have a lot of sun, we can just have the tube covered with solar panels and make the entire thing energy neutral, which is really, really amazing. A new mode of transportation that doesn't consume any energy. Yeah, maybe Elon can help with some of the solar stuff. Elon's got that stuff. How much is Elon involved? So he's not involved in our company. His idea, right? His brainchild. Our company was formed to commercialize that, and there are others that are now in this market. I think we're the leader. No, I know we're the leader. We've demonstrated the technology no one else has. And we're there. I mean, this is a go-for-it business. So we're going for it. Well you just had a new partnership with Virgin announced recently. So Richard Branson, you know... Yeah, so Virgin Hyperloop One, a brand that actually has been known for customer experience, thinking of the customer, delivering an experience, taking on the giants as he did with Virgin Atlantic, putting people into space now from a commercial perspective, as well as satellites. So think of his companies and transportation and how that brings comfort to governments and investors, that we're here to actually really make something big happen, and Richard's done that. He's a serial entrepreneur. And that brand typically stands for an excellent experience. Yeah. He has pretty good track record as a risk taker out there, too. Some of the extreme things that he had done, but absolutely, the comfort and the brand there... Pre-revenue, you said a couple of years until we're there, but you mentioned even that you've got kind of a pipeline of orders already, so sounds like-- Well the projects are big, so this is infrastructure. We won't be financing that. That will be done by people that find governments and pension funds and sovereign funds and insurance companies that invest in infrastructure. But if you take a look at the projects because they're big, they start with billions and they go up from there. So it's kind of fun to think that you're first order could be three billion. It's kind of neat to go from this pre-revenue stage to the size of projects that we'll have. That three billion will be spent on, some will be on contractors, some will be on infrastructure, but for us, the revenues that will come will be high margin. We're building a software platform that will connect with other modes of transport and manage the massive amounts of data we'll be collecting off the pod and the track, the headway between these vehicles, which could be as close as ten seconds traveling at that speed, and then obviously you've got to have a whole lot of control software and a whole IoT Platform built in. Last question I have for you. We're here at a technology show. Just throw out there: software, massive amounts of data, I've got to have the analytics going into it, and there, is the tech all ready? How's the industry doing to support some of these kind of moonshot-type of activities? High-speed networking is going to be a big deal for us. So we probably need kind of an evolution of 5G because we're moving so fast inside that enclosed area that we're going to need some radio technology to keep all of those devices connected. That's a little bit of a push. Listen, we're starting from scratch. So we have a clean sheet. So we have legacy to integrate. That's typically an advantage. We're not trying to do mechanical switching. We'll do a digital switch, which means you'll actually just bump a vehicle off onto an on-ramp and weave it back in with software, kind of like packets on the network. But clean sheet. I think we have tools required to do everything that we're looking for today, an industry that's evolved, has developed around IoT, and a plethora of options that our architects and engineers are working on today. Gosh, all my background thinking about packet loss and things like that, it gets me a little bit nervous, but I know you've got lots of engineers working to solve that problem. Rob Lloyd, Hyperloop One. Really appreciate you joining us. I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France It's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe Brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and here with SiliconANGLE Media's exclusive coverage of theCUBE live from Nutanix's .NEXT conference here in Nice, France. It's the fifth Nutanix conference. theCUBE has had the pleasure of broadcasting from all five of them. It's the second annual European show. Over 2,200 in attendance here. We're in the Acropolis, which is a little ironic because, of course, Acropolis is one of the product names of Nutanix. To help me with the introduction today, happy to have Martin Veitch... Is the Contributing Editor of IDG Connect. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, so, Nutanix. It's a year after they IPO'd. I've been tracking them since they were a very small company. I think a friend of mine was somewhere between the number 20 and 30 employee in there. They now have 2,800 employees worldwide. Talked about, they have, you know, thousands of Nutanix certified, you know, people just in Europe alone between the employees, the partners, and the customers. You know, what's the vibe been for you so much? Tell us, you know, bring us in for the Nutanix show. >> Yeah, like you, I followed them from pretty much the early days. I always thought they were a hot-to-trot, you know. They were an exciting company back in the day. The narrative made a lot of sense. It looked like they were a company very capable of executing. They seemed to have great management. What really surprises me is, if anything, you know, in this business we have a habit of, you know, overdoing it and praising these people to the skies and saying "this is the next big thing." I think these guys really undersell themselves sometimes. To me, you know, the Goldman Sachs line that Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO, used earlier on when he was talking about the Goldman Sachs comment that it was a once-in-a-decade opportunity, to me, the company they remind me of a lot these days is VMware. I think, you know, that's a company they're going to work with, go up against, and they remind me a lot of that infrastructure revolution kind of play, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think Nutanix would like that analogy, because number one, >> I hope so. >> I love the line, they did a little song at the intro with the clapping and everything. >> Yeah that was pretty wacky, wasn't it? >> They have a little fun, they've got a fun culture. Dheeraj always says they try to be humble. From a marketing, from a sales, sometimes a little aggressive, but you need that to kind of break in to the enterprise space. But they said, in the song, they said "We used to sell boxes, now it's all about the software you know" You know, so what they've been pounding on is, it's one OS, one click, any cloud. So the question I've been asking at all of these events I go to this year is, you talk to customers, it's a choose your pick, hybrid or multi-cloud world, but how do you live in that environment? You're absolutely, you know, customers, they doing lots of SASS, they're doing Amazon, they're doing things with Microsoft or Google, and if you just live in the data center you're limiting where you're going to play. If you're just, you know, the public cloud is obviously lots of growth. Nutanix is trying to fit in all these other environments, as they said many people when they first saw them, was like, "Oh, well they sell you an appliance that goes into your data center? That's not all that interesting." They positioned themselves as enterprise cloud. What do you take, the message in, you know, they said, you know, hyper-converge was kind of the baseline, but I don't think I even heard that word in the keynote this morning. >> I was going to say the same thing >> It's now clouds, so... >> Yeah, enterprise cloud, which isn't a tag I'm particularly fond of, I must admit, but you can see what the appeal is, right? I mean, people are going to build these, they're going to have these data canters on premise. They're going to have private clouds, going to have public clouds. They're going to go for data center co-location, and what you really need is a layer of management, a layer that sits over there. So I think what they're building is something analogous to the systems management frameworks that we saw back in the day for the multi-cloud era, and really, that adds such another arrow to the quiver, and that's why I say, you know, you look at the stock price on this one and you kind of wonder whether they're under-priced in a way, you know, or whether people realize quite what the power they potentially yield is, you know. Obviously they're going to go up against some of the world's largest organizations, but I think it's going to be an extraordinarily ambitious and bullish play. Yeah, absolutely, I think it's a really fascinating story. >> Yeah, well, top line revenue Nutanix now sitting right around a billion dollars on an annual basis and from a market cap, talk about the stocks undervalued, they're still over four billion dollars in revenue. Kind of, you know, if you look at the similar compare company that, you know, Pure Storage, Nutanix now has about the same revenue but, you know, higher marker cap, so, you know, they're doing okay. But as they are trying to emphasize, and I think your point, I would agree with you, it is early still. This is not the final Nutanix. CloudPlay at the DC show made a big announcement with Google, and starting to see some of that come to fruition here at the show, and a big push of theirs is their Calm. Calm really is that layer that's going to live in the multi-cloud. It's still, most customers haven't touched it or really seen more than kind of some slides and demo. I did talk to a couple of customers already that have used it, and at least the early customers, of course heavily involved, it's a little bit self-selecting when you come to an event like this, but excited about how that is, you know, can be that layer that spans between my various environments, whether that be my core, the public cloud, or potentially even the edge. They did an example in the keynote of an oil and gas going out to the rigs. So, you know, you think the Nutanix, you know, if we look to a year from now, when I think multi-cloud is Nutanix a company that comes to mind? >> Absolutely, I've just thought of this, so tell me if you like it or not, but they've kind of gone from stack to PAC, okay. So, hyper-convergence was the play where you would conflate compute networking storage et cetera, and really this combination of Prism, Acropolis and Calm is a whole other level. And you know, again, they didn't really hammer it with the audience today, but they're moving to also a very much a software-centric view of the world. You know, and that was always the question that people like me would ask of them, "Hey, why do you bother having the appliances? Why do you have the hardware cell when, you know, software is the high-margin kind of business in technology?" And "software is eating the world" as Marc Andreessen said. And now I think they're really pivoting towards being very much a software-centric company and flying the flag for that, you know, and I think that whole combination of management layers, of virtualization, of orchestration that they have is exactly what the sweet spot is in the future of enterprise software management. >> Yeah, I've heard some companies talk about the "new stack" and you took their products and P, A, C >> See what I did? >> I do, I think maybe the marketing organization, you know, give you a call, see if they can leverage that. >> 500 bucks. >> So, you know, we've got two days of the show coming up here. Absolutely the kind of cloud story is one that I'm looking to tease apart and talk to the customers. Since I've already had a chance to talk to some customers and it's very much a spectrum. You talk to some customers, especially here in Europe, you go to Germany and it's like well, you know governage, regulation, yeah a public cloud might not be something that they can do because we have to dig into it. >> Yeah >> As opposed to, there's a customer giving a presentation today that, very much, they said everything was going to be public cloud, but they found even when they tried to put everything either in SASS or, like, infrastructures of service with Amazon, there were certain things that, well, in certain countries I just don't have the networking or it was going to be too expensive. >> Yeah. >> So I need to put something in my own data center, and that's where Nutanix has been a fit for them, so it's that good story, as they said, "Where is the center?" and Nutanix being a softer play, it's not about, "Oh I have to sell, you know, thousands and millions of boxes", and even, I've read financial reports that there have been hints from Nutanix that you've said, "Why do they offer the appliances?" Well maybe in the future they won't. It will be through a partner and they'll do that. You need to qualify it, but, you know, absolutely position themselves. They are the, you know, enterprise, you know, software company is what they want to play. Infrastructure is a piece of it. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, you've, we've both been around the block a few times. When I started writing about this business, people used to say, "Well, mainframes, they're the dinosaurs who are about to fall off the edge of a cliff." People are still buying a lot of mainframes now. Look at IBM's revenue sheet, a lot of that's mainframe-centric. So I think you're absolutely right. People are going to persist putting stuff close their vest in internal data centers, and they're going to selectively source in various different types of cloud. And you're right, governance is a big one over here in Europe, you know GDPR is a thing that scares all the CIO's and CEO's, for that matter, witless, you know. So they're all terrified of that one PSD2 and payments. So when you have these regulatory landscapes, you know, there's a tendency to be very cautious, very calm, and keep it behind the firewall, and you know, I think probably as long as I live, God willing, you know, we're going to see this combination of deployment models. >> Yeah, GDPR absolutely something we're going to be talking about. Nutanix actually has a couple of experts here talking to customers >> Good. >> As to how they play into it, because that's a question I've had for Nutanix, is, okay, they have kind of their core focus but as they start to go in adjacencies, you know we see companies all the time, alright, I've reached a certain level and then how do I get a little bit further, and how do I have a reason to play into those environments. You know, Nutanix says push into IOT. Nutanix is not the first company that I think of, you know, they don't make sensors, they're not a GE, even Hitachi Vantara has arms that play there so, you know, Satcham Vigani, they've got a small team working on that. So, you want a company of Nutanix' size to start, right, poking out, but where will they be successful and where will they gain traction? Anything catching your eye or interest from Nutanix as they go kind of beyond, you know, kind of the core kind of infrastructure status? >> I think it's a management layer. You know, very similar, I guess, VMware initially was known for their hypervisor and then later on they were really tooling around that to become the control pane, you know, the command center of the data center. That's where I see them. You know, frankly Stu, I'd be pretty worried if they'd made a lot of noise on, I don't know, virtual reality, augmented reality in the net of things, you know. I think they, to a certain extent, can be still have to stick to the netting, and this is a company that's very much geared around being the 21st century data center nexus, and for me, that's where the real value is, and that is a multi multi multi billion dollar segment in its own right. >> Yeah, a big question I have this week, as always, is, you know, what are the relationships that are going to help Nutanix, you know, move further. One that we always look at is the Dell relationship. >> Sure. >> Dell is their largest partner, but also their largest competitor between the VXrail that they're doing, all the Vsan pieces. I'm interested to see IBM up on stage. The power announcement is one that I don't think a lot of people really understand, how that fits. You know, Bumpage Yano was talking about, you know, AI and all of those pieces. Of course, you know, Lenovo, another hardware partner, so, you know. What are the partners that are going to drive them? Which are they, you know, what's the headwinds, what are the tailwinds as they go. Anything from the partner standpoint that you're looking into? >> Well one of the ways, you know, I guess we all try to judge companies is by the company they keep. >> Yes. >> And they've got some nice partners, as you said. The complicated one is a lot of co-optition and frenemy-type stuff going on. It's a bit like Game of Thrones-type complexity of scenario there, you know? Behind the scenes is Dell telling it's sales guys to sell this rather than this and what do they do to objection handling and are they going to eventually try and stitch up Nutanix? I don't know, I think, my feeling is now companies are mature enough that if they can get significant revenues and please the customer, then that's probably the way to go. And you know, those are big, big names and those are companies that you might think would have a history of wanting to do their own thing and go their own way, but they're not. They're going with Nutanix because, you know, it's a USP. That's a unique selling point, and it's a high-quality product, and the customers are very happy. Very high net promoter score, which was an interesting little aspect, you know, a 90+ year after year, clocking at that. You speak to the customers here, they're a happy crowd. You know, you can't say that at every enterprise IT conference, I promise you. >> Yeah, absolutely, it's the channel partners and the customers. Every single one of these events I've come to, this one's a little bit self-selecting, but the people are super excited, digging into it. Alright, Martin, why don't I give you the final word. Things you're looking into, any kind of undercurrent, you know, that we should be aware of. What should Nutanix be concerned about, or people that are looking at it? >> The one thing I would say that would be kind of a risk factor, if you are saying you're reporting into the financial markets and so on is, you know, as I said, they're really up against some of the world's largest organizations here. You know, there's a lot of very, very big companies with skin in the game. And, you know, it depends. They could flip and get much more aggressive. They could decide to go their own way. They could make strategic acquisitions. We saw HPE buying Simplivity, and maybe that would be an interesting turn in the market, but I think they're sat fair for quite a while. Now, I think they've become part of the data center landscape rather than the disruptor. I think they're now part of the status quo in a good way, anyway. >> Yeah, last year they made, you know, it was one or two small software acquisitions >> Yeah. >> That's where we would expect, you know, Nutanix to make those. Alright, well, Martin Veitche, really appreciate you helping me kick off. >> Pleasure, Stu. >> We've got two days of coverage here at the Acropolis in Nice, France. Be sure to stay with us. I have the executives on, customers, and the partners. I'm Stu Miniman here with Martin. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, we're here at the Nutanix .Next Conference in Nice, France. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, but a partnership we've been talking about since the early days of Nutanix. Bernie Hannon, Strategic Alliance Director with Citrix, and Raghu Nandan, Senior Director of Product Management, Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining me. Happy to be here. Great to be here. AlL right, so Bernie, let's start with you, how long have you been with Citrix, a little bit of background and when will you start working for Nutanix? (Bernie laughs) Ten years at Citrix, and we'll see about Nutanix. But no, I'm Strategic Alliances Director. I manage our alliance partnership with Nutanix, and I've been doing that now for about two-and-a-half years. AlL right, Raghu, little bit about your background, and you must have worked for Citrix before, right? I did, coincidentally, work at Citrix for a while, pretty close to ten years, actually, and I've been at Nutanix for almost three years now. I'm part of the product team, managing the full-stack journey that we've been on, building beyond software-defined storage with the Ember virtualization with AHB, the ops, artistration layers on top, and coincidentally, given the background with Citrix it was the first logical place for us to start to make Citrix a tailored-fit for the particular full stack offering,. That's what we've been working on too. Yeah, and let's talk about that Bernie. 'Cause most people for a couple of years, it was like oh, well Nutanix, they're that little VDI company, and do that, and that of course was a strong partnership between Citrix and Nutanix, but, it's much more that. So maybe, give us a little bit, kind of, the breath and depth of the partnership. Well, yeah, so, Nutanix was not shy about letting us know that they shared a common vision about what HCI could do, and what a partnership together could do to be able to strengthen or to further each others' strategies. And it was really all about trying to simplify the customer experience with EDI. And that's always been a challenge for our customers. And Nutanix, very quickly, was able to demonstrate that they could make deploying Citrix on the infrastructure so much easier for customers. And that's really what we've been about working on since we started this partnership. Yeah, and it's been the perfect-tailored workload like I said before, right. So we're on this journey of re-platforming the data center and collapsing as many silos as possible while bringing that public cloud-like consumption margin where people in the IT departments can go focus on applications and services and more business-oriented functions and kind of let IT be a functional thing without spending inordinate amounts of time. While we started our journey as a company with EDI, we've expanded certainly to a bunch of other workloads. But, when we brought this next new concept to the marketplace in September of 2015 by embrating the scavian derived HyperWiser as a built in part of the overall solution, Citrix was a natural place for us to start and that's kind of what we've been working on in that dimension. Yeah, Cloud has been a strategy, it's gone through a lot of changes in the industry but last year I talked to Christian Riley little bit about Citrix Cloud. Nutanix has had the Enterprise Cloud rolling out various pieces. Maybe you could both speak a little bit to kind of, those Cloud strategies. Sure, from a Citrix standpoint, we've been busy migrating our customers from the perpetual license model to a subscription model. And to leverage that through our Citrix Cloud, where we've moved the Citrix control plane up into the Cloud as a service. So, again, another step in making the whole process of deploying Citrix even easier. So, that's really been our strategy. And working with Nutanix we've made that process even easier through the automation tools that they've developed and now, shortly with the next release, Nutanix solutions are going to come Citrix Cloud ready. And that essentially means that customers can not only have the benefits of that subscription model, but they'll also be able to have the benefits of being able to manage Citrix as a service in Citrix Cloud and get the best of both worlds. And that for our customers is really a true hybrid cloud experience. And the Enterprise Cloud for us as Nutanix is really a fabric that kind of envelops the public, the private infrastructure and even stretches out into the edge, right in pleasing to use the disperse Cloud. And in the context of Citrix like Bernie said while Citrix Cloud makes the deployment of the entire Citrix software start, a non-hassle experience for customers, there is still something to be said for the actual infrastructure where the user re-amps a provision. This is the classic use case for hybrid in a sense because it all comes all the desktops and service bottlenecks where you have users on campus logging onto desktops in the public Cloud, yet the applications they need to access are having to help them back into the Enterprise Data Center and this combination of the Citrix Cloud and on tram Nutanix infrastructure, that just in one click plugs to the Citrix Cloud, lets people experience the best of both worlds. This zero, kind of like a one minute deployment of Citrix software stock and a one click experience from Prism to connect the infrastructure to start provisioning the stops and you can be from nothing to a production environment in literally minutes. Yeah. How does management play between the two of your companies, the management layer? The management layer from a Citrix Cloud standpoint, or? So talked a little bit about Prism there, to talking about how Comm fits in. Citrix has a number of software pieces. Just trynna understand, kind of, the boundaries overlaps integrations. That's really where Comm has done an excellent job of making a lot of that transparent, right. So the whole idea is that from the start, with just a couple of clicks, you're able to make the connection to Citrix Cloud, register and then drop the Citrix Cloud connector onto a Nutanix infrastructure and from there Prism is really managing that management experience. It's really two dimensions right. So think of the Citrix management layer as everything that encapsulates the policies, the governance models, everything around the performance expectations of VDI. Who gets what kind of a desktop, what kind of a profile, persistent, non persistent, all those kinds of things. Seamlessly plugs into Prism, which manages the rest of the infrastructure, physical, virtual, with ops and orchestration. So, I don't have to worry about this user needs a graphics enabled desktop, where would I go provision this? The system just automatically detects that. Or I have this thousand user environment and I don't quite know whether I've provisioned the right amount of compute and memory to the right kinds of users. Prism just tells you through behavioral learning, these users VM seem under provision, these users VM seem over provision. So you're getting the best ROI, in terms of your infrastructure span. So think of Prism as everything that manages the physical data central infrastructure including virtualizing and ops. And the Citrix management stack just plugs into that to layer on the governance policies on top. And then things that Citrix does in the background, in terms of managing the scale out. And making sure that everything is kept evergreen. And that the tools are always being refreshed. That happens automatically and seamlessly in the background. Great, Nutanix has been announced at their last show the Google Cloud partnership. My understanding, there's potential intersections between GCP, Citrix and Nutanix, talk to us a little bit about what we would see going forward, how those potentially play together. So Citrix has a new partnership with Google, Google Cloud platform, and our Citrix workspace and environment, the entire digital desktop now is available to deploy onto Citrix. I'm sorry, onto Google Cloud platform. And we believe that with a vergening partnership that's taking place with Nutanix and Google Cloud platform that there's an opportunity in the future to develop some new stories, better together, so it's something that we're just beginning to explore now, but we think there's a lot of possibilities there. I mean, I'll give you a classic example, right, last week I was speaking with a customer that's running Citrix on Nutanix and they're running it for a certain number of users, let's say a few thousand users, and every year at holiday season, they have these three or 400 contracting employees that come online, that they need extra capacity for these temporary desktops. And this combination of Citrix with Google Cloud platform and the Jorte Cloud services provides the perfect solution in which you could create on demand capacity for kind of, burst expectation of resources and once the contract was (mumbles), the environment shrinks back. So this is a start of a journey and we'll figure some things out, but there are some pretty strong synergies for the three to come together to solve for those kinds of interesting use cases. Great example and we think there's a lot more like those to come. Okay, want to give you both the last word. Either customers, any customer story you can tell, or anything else we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Well, from a Citrix standpoint, I have to say that they are really appreciative of the partnership that we have with Nutanix. I think they feel good knowing that it's an alliance partnership that we have with Nutanix. So that they can make their investments with confidence. They've had a relationship with Citrix for a long time. And there's trust that goes with that. And in the Citrix name. And the fact that we have a strong alliance partnership, makes them feel good investing in Nutanix and then seeing how that better together story is really unfolding for them. And it's a great partnership for several reasons, but I think the single most important reason is the amount of customer delight it offers. When people bring Citrix and Nutanix together. And I've lost count of the number of customers that are appreciative of how much better their environments are. And we are super excited about how much further we can take that journey with this combination of Citrix Cloud with this one take experience within Prism. Yeah it's not just a promise if it's actually being delivered in this thing, it's actually happening. Bernie and Raghu, thank you so much for giving us the update on the partnership there. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, it's The Cube covering Dot Next Conference 2017, Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. (techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman happy to welcome back to our program, from the IBM Cognitive Systems Group, we have Bob Picciano and Stefanie Chiras. Bob, fresh off the keynote, uh speech. Went a little bit long but glad we could get you in. Um, I think when the, when the IBM Power announcement with Nutanix got out there, a lot of people were trying to put the pieces together and understand. You know, we with The Cube we've, we've been tracking, you know, Power for quite a while, Open Power, all the things but, but I have to admit that even myself, it was like, okay, I understand cognitive systems. We got all this AI things and everything but on the stage this morning, you kind of talked a little bit about the chipset and the bandwidth. You know, things like GPUs and utilization, you know, explain to us, you know, what is resonating with customers and, you know, where, you know, what's different about this because a lot of the other ones it's like, oh well, you know, software runs a lot of places and it doesn't matter that much. What's important about cognitive systems for Nutanix? >> Yeah, so, first off, thanks Stu. And, as always, thanks for, you know, you for following us and understanding what we're doing. You mentioned not just Power but you mentioned Open Power, and I think that's important. It shows, actually, the deeper understanding. You know, we've come a long way in a very short amount of time with what we've done with Open Power. Open Power was very much at it's core about really making Power a natural choice for industry standard Linux, right? The Linuxes that used to run on Power a couple of generations ago were more proprietary Linuxes. They were Big Endian Linux but Open Power was about making all that industry standard software run on top of Power where we knew our value proposition would shine based on how much optimization we put into our cores and how much optimization we put into IO bandwidth and memory bandwidth. And boy, you know, have we been right. In fact, when we take an industry standard workload like a no sequel database or Enterprise DB, or a Mongoloid DB, Hadoop, and put it on top of Linux, an industry standard Linux, on top of Power, we typically see that run about 2X to 3X better price performance on Linux on Power than it would on Linux on Intel. This is a repeating pattern. And so, what we're trying to do here is uh, really enable that same efficiency and economics to the Nutanix Hyper Converged Space. And remember, all these things about insight based applications, artificial intelligence, are all about data intensive workloads. Data intensive workloads and that's what we do best. So we're bringing the best of what we do and the optionality now for these AI workloads and cognitive systems right into the heart of what Nutanix is pivoting to as well. Which is really at the, at the core of the enterprise for data intensive workloads. Not just, you know, edge related VDI based workloads. Stefanie will you, you want to comment on that a little bit as well. >> Yeah, we are so focused on being prioritized and what space we go after in the Linux market around these data centric and AI workloads. And at the end of the day, you know, Nutanix has Nutanix states. It's about invisible infrastructure, but the infrastructure underneath matters. And now with the simplicity of what Nutanix brings you can choose the best infrastructure for the workloads that you decide to run, all with single pane of glass management. So it allows us to bring our capabilities at the infrastructure levels for those workloads, into a very simplest, simple deployment model under a Nutanix private cloud. >> Yeah, I, I think back when, you know, we had things like, when Hadoop came out, you know, we got all these new modern databases, >> Right. >> You know, I wanted to change the infrastructure but simplicity sure wasn't there. >> Yep. >> Uh-huh. >> It was a couple of servers sitting under the desk, okay, but when you needed to scale, when you needed to manage the environment, um, it was challenging. We, we saw, when, you know, Wikibon for years was doing, you know, research on big data and it was like, ah, you know, half the deployments are failing because, you know, it wasn't what they expected. >> Right. >> The performance wasn't there, the cost was challenging. So it feels like we're kind of, you know, turn the corner on, you know, making, putting the pieces together to make these solutions workable. >> I think we are. I think Dheeraj and his team, Sunil, they've done a wonderful job on making the one click simplicity, ease of deployment, ease of manageability. We saw today, creation of availability zones. High availability infrastructure. Very very simplistic. So, you know, as, you know, I've had other segments with Dave and John in the past, we've always talked about, it's not about big data, it's about really creating the ability to get fast actionable insights. So it's a confluence of that date environment, the processed based workflow environment, and then making that all simple. And this feels like a very natural way to accomplish that. >> I want to understand, if I caught right, it's not Power or x86 but it's really putting the right workloads in the, in the right place. >> That's right. >> Did I get that right? >> That's right. >> What, what are the customer deployments, you know? >> Heterogeneity is key. >> How do I then manage those environments because, you know, I, I want kind of homogeneity of, of management, even if I have heterogeneity, you know, in, in my environment, you know. What, what are you hearing from your customers? >> I think how we've looked at Linux evolved. The set of workloads that are being run on Linux have evolved so dramatically from where they started to running companies and being much more aggressive on compute intensive. So it's about when you bring total cost of ownership which requires the ability to simply manage your operations in a data center. Now the best of Prism capabilities along with the Acropolis stack allows simplicity of single pane of glass management for you to run your Power node, set of nodes, side by side with your x86 set of nodes. So what you want to run on x86 or Windows can now be run seamlessly and compatible with your data centric workloads and data driven workloads, or AI workloads on your Power nodes. It really is about bringing total cost of ownership down. And that really requires accessibility and it requires simplicity of management. And that's what this partnership really brings. It's a new age for hyper converged. >> Yeah. >> What should we be looking for, for the partnership, kind of over the next 12 years, 12, 12 months. (laughs) >> 12 years? (laughs) (laughter) >> 12 years might be a little tough to predict, but over the next year, what, what should we be looking for the partnership? You know, I think back you talked about, Open Powered Google is, you know, a big partner there. Is there a connection? Am I drawing lines between, you know, Nutanix and Google and what you're doing? >> I won't comment on that yet but, you know, but, as you know we have a big rollout coming up as we're getting ready to launch Power Nine. So there'll be more news on some of those fronts as we go through the coming weeks. And I hope to see you down in Dallas at our Cloud or Cognitive event. Or at one of the other events we'll be jointly at where we do some of these announcements. But if you think about where this naturally takes us, Sunil talked about mode one and mode two applications. So what we want to see is increasing that catalog for mode one applications. So things that I'd like to see is an expanded set of relationships around what we both do in the SAP space. I'd like to see that catalog of support enriched for what's out there on top of the Linux on Power space, where we know our value proposition will continue to be demonstrated both in total cost of acquisition as well as total cost of ownership. >> Yeah. >> I mean, we're really, you know, seeing some great results on our Linux base. As you know, it's now about 20 percent of the power revenue base is from Linux. >> Uh-huh. >> And that's grown from a very small amount just a few years ago. So, I look to see that and then I would look at more heterogeneity in terms of the support of what we do, both in Linux and maybe, in the future, also what we do to support the AIX workloads, uh, with Nutanix as well. Because I do think our clients are asking about that optionality. They have big investments, mission critical workloads around AIX and the want to start to bring those worlds together. >> Alright and Stefanie, want to give you the final word, you know, anything kind of learnings that you've had, of the relationships as you've been getting out and getting into those customer environments. >> I have to say the excitement coming in from the sales team, from our clients, and from the business partners have been incredible. It really is about the coming together of, not only two spaces of simple, and absolutely the best infrastructure and being able to optimize from bottom to top, but it's about taking hyper converge to a new set of workloads. A new space. Um, so the excitement is just incredible. I am thrilled to be here at Dot Next and be able to talk to our clients and partners about it. >> Alright well Stefanie and Bob thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks Stu. >> Thank you Stu. >> Sorry we had to do a short segment but we'll be catching ya up at many more. Alright so we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix Dot Next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching The Cube. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Nice, France. It's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe. Brought to you by Nutanix. (techno music) >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE. Happy to have a welcome back to the program, CEO and Founder of Nutanix, Dheeraj Pandey. The keynote this morning, talking about how Nutanix really going from a traditional enterprise infrastructure company really becoming it's goal of being an iconic software company. So, Dheeraj, bring us up to speed as to you know, how Nutanix positioned itself for this future. >> Yeah, I think it's it's been a rite of passage because you can't start from AWS in day one. You have to sell books, and sell eCommerce. You know, you being in the eCommerce space. It was a 20 years journey for them before they could get into computing and people took them seriously. I mean, look at Apple with iPod, and then iPhone, and the iPad, and then iTunes and app store. And all that stuff was a journey of 15 years. You know, before they could really see that they've arrived. I think for us we had to build the form factor of an iPhone four so that people realize what this hyperconvergence thing was. Before we could go and ship an android as an operating system. 'Cause if hadn't android operating system come first... Just like Windows Mobile operating system was around for a while and nobody really understood how to really go and make money on it. I think we had to build a form factor first. And now that people grock it, now we can really go and make software out of this. And be swell software and make the android version of the iOS itself. And that's the thing. I think, as a company we're challenged to balance these paradoxes. Oh, I thought you were an appliance company and you believe in this Apple like finesse. Polish and attention to detail. How do you apply that to an android like the shboosh model where you leave it to others to go and build handsets and so on. I think that's the challenge that you've taken upon ourselves. Now inside, with the cloud service, we have a lot of control. With appliances, we have somewhat control because we at least know what our hardware is running on. But software we open it up. And opening it up, and yet not giving up on the attention to detail is the challenge that this company has to, actually, really go and undertake. We are looking at a lot of our tools and bill for certifications, and you know, passing the test. The litmus test for hardware and we're trying to figure out how to automate the heck out of it. Make them into cloud services. So that customers can now go an crowdsource certifications. So, there'll be some new paradigms that will emerge and the reason why we are well placed for those kinds of things is because our heritage is appliance. So now when we think of doing software a lot of the tooling, a lot of the automations, certifications, the attention to detail we had we'll need to go and make them into cloud services. We have some of them, like Cicer is a cloud service. X-ray is a cloud service. Foundation is a cloud service. So a lot of these services will then go and make the job of certifying an unknown piece of hardware easier, actually. I mean in fact, even day two and beyond we have what we can NCC which is a service that runs from within prism to do health checks. And every two hours you can do health checks. So if there's a new piece of hardware that we thought we just certified, we need to keep paranoid about it. Stay paranoid about it, and say, look is the hardware really the hardware we wanted it to be. So there's lots of really innovative things we can do as a company that really had the heritage of appliance to go and do software, as well. >> Yeah, absolutely people have always underestimated the interoperability required. Remember when server virtualization rolled out up the BIOS. You know, could make everything go horribly. Even, you know, containers could give you portability and run everywhere. Oh wait, networking and storage. There's considerations there. Do you think it's getting to a point from a maturation of the market that the software... You know, can you in the future take Nutanix to be a fully software company where you kind of let somebody else take care of the hardware pieces and then you just become their software. And then there's service software services. That seem like a likely future? >> Yeah, I think with the right tools, right level of automation, right level of machine learning, right level of talk-back. You know, I say talk-balk, I mean the fact that the hard beats are coming to us we understand what the customers are doing. And with the right level of paranoia day two and beyond. Which is NCC for example, it's, We call it Nutanix Cluster check. And it does like 350 odd health checks on a periodic basis. And it erases the load, and some things like that. With the right level of paranoia I think we can really go and make this work. And by the way, that's where design comes in. Like, how do you think of X-Ray as a service, and Foundation, and Cicer and NCC and so on. I think that's where the real design of a software company that is also not being callous about hardware comes in, actually. So I'm really looking forward to it. I think... it's not just about tech and products. It's also about go-to-market because go-to-market has a change too. I mean, the kind of packaging, and the kind of pricing, the kind of ELA's, sales compensation, channel programs, a lot of those things have to be revisited as well. As upstream engineering, you talk about, there's a lot of downstream go-to market engineering as well, that needs to be done. >> Now, when it comes to go-to-market, partnerships are key of course. There's the channel. You want to grow your sales channel, and grow a piece. But also from a technology standpoint, there's a comment I heard you make earlier this week. You know, Google has the opportunity to be kind of that next partner. As like Dell was a partner to give you pre-IPO credibility Dell's trusted you. Dell, you have Lenovo, you have IBM up on stage there. As a software company, who are the partners that help Nutanix kind of through this next phase? >> I think you mentioned some of them already. You know, the cloud vendors, though, obviously open up. And there will be new ones that'll open up over time as well. Where we're thinking about ways to blur the lines between public and private. Because I think the world, including the public cloud vendors have come to realize that. You know, you can't have silos. You can't have a public cloud that's separate from the private and so on. So being able to blur the lines, there'll be a lot of cloud partners for us as well. I think on the hardware side, we already talked about all of them, actually. Now, HP and Cisco are right now partners, in double quotes, because we go and make our software work on it, you know. But on some levels they'll probably also have to open up. And they're networking partners that've been working with you know, Arista is a good case in point. Lexi's another one. And security partners, like Palo Alto could be a large one over time because we think about what firewalls need to be look like in the next five years, and so on, you know. I think in every way, I look at even Apache foundation. Which is not really a company but the fact that we can really coop a lot of open source and build COM marketplace apps. Where the apps could be spun up in an on-prem environment and a single tenet on-prem environment. And you can drag and drop them into a side merchant intent environment. I think being able to go and do more with Apache. To me it's the... I would say, the biggest game changer for the company would be what else can we do with Apache? You know, 'cause we did a lot the first eight years. I mean, obviously, Linux is a big piece of our overall story, you know. Not just as hypervisor but a controller, and things like that is all Linux based. Which draws the pace of innovation of this company, actually. But beyond Linux, we've used Cassandra and ZooKeeper, RocksDB and things like that. What else can we do with Apache Spark, and Costco, and MariaDB, and things like that. I think we need to go and elevate the definition of infrastructure. To include databases and NoSQL systems, and batch processing hadoop, and things like that. All those things become a part of the overall marketplace story for us, you know. And that's where the really interesting stuff really comes in. >> How do you look at open source from a strategic standpoint from Nutanix? I think it's been phenomenal because we have then operated as a company that's bigger than we are. 'Cause otherwise, I mean, look at VMware. They don't have that goodness. Nor does Microsoft actually. I mean, Amazon is the only one that really goes and makes the best out of open source. >> Explain that, we say Microsoft had a huge push into open source. Especially, you know, kind of publicly the last two or three years. But they've been working on it, they've, you know, heavily embraced containers. You know, they've gone Kubernetes. You know, heavily. >> I'm going to give you examples. I think there's a lot of marchitecture. And what Microsoft is doing is open source. But, of course you know, Linux has to work on Hyper-V. So, that's a given. They cannot make a relevant stack without really making Linux work in Hyper-V. But they tried Hadoop on Windows. And Horton works actually on quartered Hadoop in Windows but there are not too many takers, as you see, you know. Containers will probably continue to make a lot of progress on Linux because of the LXD and LXC engines, and things like that. And there's a lot more momentum on the Linux side of containers then the LB on the Windows side containers >> And even Azure is running more Linux than they are Windows these days. >> Absolutely, now that being said, Azure Stack is still Azure Stack. It's still Hyper-V. It's still system centered, not user-centered and things like that. I think Microsoft software will really, really have to find itself. And change a lot of its thinking to really go and say we truly embrace open source like the way Amazon does. And like the way Facebook does. Like the way Nutanix does, I think. You know, it's a very different way we look at open source. We are much like Facebook and Amazon than someone else. I mean, VMware is way farther away from open source, in that sense. I mean vSphere, overall You know, I mean I would say that it probably is Linux based. ESX is Linux based from 17, 18 years ago. I am sure that curt path has been forked forever. And it's very hard for them to go and uptake from open source from overall upstream stuff actually. That we build, you know I mean, our stuff runs on a palm sized server. A palm sized server, imagine it. And that's where we put in a drone and that's the foundation of an edge cloud for us, in some sense. Our stuff runs on IBM power system because IBM was doing a lot of work with open source KVM that made it easy for us to port it to H-V, and so on. And so, I think H-V is a lot more momentum because it shares that overall core base of open source, as well. And I think, over time we'll do many more things with open source. Including in the platform space. >> Okay, how's Nutanix doing globally. You know, what more do you want to be doing. How would you rate yourself on kind of new tenent as a global company? >> I think it's a great question and it's one of those that's a double edged sword, actually. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So when you stop growing, non-US business become 50%, 'cause that's pretty much the reflection of ID spend. Half the spend is outside the US, half the spend is within the US. Right from here is 65/35. Which is a very healthy place to be in, actually. I don't want to just think to change to like 50/50 end because that's a proxy for are we stop growing, actually. At the same time, I'd love to be shipping everywhere, because again, I've said that the definition of an enterprise cloud is even more relevant. And, you know, parts of the world that is not US, actually. In that sense, just being able to go and maintain that customer base outside the US. I mean, being able to do it. I mean, you know we recently sold a system in Myanmar, actually. And I was telling my friends that look, now I can die in piece because we have a system in Myanmar, you know. But the very fact that they are partners, and there's the channel community, and there's technology champion and their exports. There are certified people in these remote parts of the world. And the fact that we can support these customers successfully, says a lot about the overall reach of the technology. The fact that it's reliable, the fact that it's easy to use and spin up, and the fact that its easy to get certified on. I think is the core of Nutanix, so I feel good about those things, actually. >> You've reached a certain maturity of product marketed option and we've seen Nutanix starting to spread out into certain things sometimes we call adjacencies. You've talked about some of the different softer pieces. How do you manage the growth, the spread and make sure that, you know, simplicity. We were talking to Seneal this morning about absolutely you want simplicity but you also want to, you know. Where does Nutanix play and where don't they play? You know, where >> That's a great question So, there's a really good book that I was introduced to about two years ago. And it's also... There's some videos on YouTube about this book. It's called, The Founder's Mentality the YouTube video is called The Founder's Mentality, as well. And it talks about this very phenomenon that as companies grow they become complex. So they introduce a problem. It's called the Paradox of Growth. The thing that you want to do, really do, was grow. And that thing that you covered kills you. 'Cause growth creates complexity and complexity is a silent killer of growth. So the thing that you covered is the thing that kills you. And that is the Paradox of Growth, actually. You know, in very simple terms. And then it goes on to talk about what are the things you need to do because you started an insurgent company over time you started acting like you've arrived and you're incumbent now, all of a sudden. And the moment you start thinking like an incumbent you're done, in some sense. What are the headwinds, and what are the tailwinds that you can actually produce to actually stay an insurgent. I think there's some great lessons there about an insurgent mindset, and an owner's mentality and then finally, this obsessions for the front lining. How do you think about customers as the first, last thing. So, I think that's one of the guiding principles of the company. In how can we continue to imbibe the founder's mentality in there as well. Where every employee can be a founder, actually, without really having the founder's tag, and so on. And then internally, there's a lot of things we could do differently, in the way that we do engineering, in the way we do collaboration. I mean, these are all good things to revisit design. Not just the product design piece, but organizational design like what does it mean to have two PIDs a team, and microservices, and product managers, and prism developers and COM developers, assigned to two PIDs a team, and so on. QA developers and so on. So there's a lot of structure that we can put at scale. That continues to make us look small, continues to have accountability at a product manager level so that they act like GM's, as opposed to PM's. Where each of these two PIDs a team are like a quasi PNL. You know they, you can look at them very objectively and you can fund them. If they start to become too big you need to split them. If they are not doing too well, you need to go and kill them, actually. >> Alright, Dheeraj, last question I have for you. Enterprise cloud, I think, you know when it first came out as a term, we said, it was a little bit inspirational. What should we be looking for in a year to really benchmark and show as proof points that it's becoming reality. You know, from Nutanix. >> That's a great point. You know, obviously, when Gartner starts to use the term very close term, you know what I say. Used the term enterprise cloud operating system. And in one of the recent discourses I saw, enterprise cloud operating model. That's very similar to system, vs model, but the operating model of the enterprise cloud is based on the tenants of you know, web skilled engineering you know, the fact that things aren't in commodity servers. Everything is pure software and you have zero differentiation in hardware. And all those differentiation comes in pure software. Infrastructure is cold. All those things are not going away. Now how it becomes easy to use, so that you don't need PhD's to manage it is where consumer grade design comes in. And where you have this notion of prism and calmed that actually come to really help make it easy to use. I think this is the core of enterprise cloud itself, you know. I think, obviously, every layer in this overall cake needs more features, more capability, and so on. But foundationally, it's about web skilled engineering, consumer grade design. And if you're doing these two things getting more workloads, getting more geographies, getting more platforms, getting more features... All those things are basically a rite of passage. You know, you need to continue to do them all the time, actually. >> Alright, Dheeraj, I had a customer on. Said the reason he bought Nutanix was for that fullness of vision. So, always appreciate catching up with you. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT, here in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching TheCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice. Happy to welcome back to the program Sunil Potti. Fresh off the keynote here, 2200 in attendance here at the second annual European show. Sunil is the chief product and development officer, and Sunil, your team's been busy. >> Yes. >> Product development-- >> Sunil: I hope so. >> 5.5, ton of new features in development, a lot of things going on. So let's step back for a second though, and it's a year after the IPO, I watched The Wall Street guys, they're always like, "Wait, are they boxes, or are they software, "are they infrastructure, are they cloud?" You know, you kind of step back, it's, I liked it, it was, "simplicity takes real genius," and then you're like, to try to appeal to the European cloud, it was "more tea, less clicks." So what's the kind of, as people think of Nutanix, when do we think of you, why do we think of you? >> Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I think there's a bunch of moving parts there, but I think our core thesis hasn't changed from where it was pre-IPO, post-IPO, multiple conferences. I think the core thesis as you know, Stu, is that we fundamentally think folks talk about hybrid cloud. Hybrid cloud, the first step is we know public clouds exist, true private clouds haven't been built yet. And they have to be first standardized, commoditized, and then harmonized with the public clouds, right? So I think, from our perspective, the core thesis is the fact that, if you can bottle up the AWS or GCP experience and funnel it inside the data center, there'll be a ton of workloads that stay inside. But with the right experience, for the right cost, right? >> Yeah. >> And essentially, that journey hasn't wavered from our perspective, right? So we're still on that. >> Yeah, absolutely, at Wikibon, we said, you know, cloud isn't a destination, it's really more of an operational model. >> Sunil: Sure, sure. >> So, if we can capture that, as you say, true private cloud, we said, we're starting to get there, and we actually credit Nutanix. So you know, of course, the messaging of enterprise cloud was probably a little bit aspirational-- >> Sure, sure. >> At the beginning, but you're filling in the pieces, you've got the partnerships, you've got the products rolling out, so, let's talk about your bread and butter. You know, what's new, what's launching now, I like that you're as a software company, you show a little bit more. Here's when we test some things out, it's that balance of, for the enterprise it's like, "Wait, is this going to work the way I think it is?" You put stuff out like the community edition first, let people play with it and then you GA it-- >> I think we talked a little bit about it and essentially, rather than me list out a whole series of functionality, I think the way we are also looking at it as well as building it, as well as rolling it out is in the form of what a customer can consume. So we are investing at Nutanix, like, capabilities that cross the life cycle, right? So we're investing and ensuring that communication gets a lot more emphasis because we think this paradigm of one-click data centers is something that people need the ubiquity to kind of play around with, right? So you see community relation from a learning side, then we're looking for capabilities for people to actually say and compare, "Look, Nutanix is one architecture, "we experienced another architecture, "three tiers in other architecture, "maybe public cloud." At some point in time people need the flexibility to actually have in the old world of TPC benchmarks the new world of what I would call production world benchmarks so we had a whole bunch of tools such as X-Ray coming out, then rather than leave it to professional services and so forth, rather than just worry about reducing the number of clicks once you have Nutanix, even before you get to Nutanix, how do you reduce the number of clicks? You get to Nutanix, right? That's where Xtract, which is a very popular tool from us again, that has been shipping for a month, for now, where you can actually click at a certain VM environment, at a certain database environment, and essentially, literally, without a whole bunch of lift and shift move into a private cloud environment, right? >> And my understanding, Xtract is, I could take my VMs really from VM environment to an AHV environment-- >> That's correct. And it also works on databases as well, like SQL databases, and so forth, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, that migration is something that, you know, it's like a four letter word for most people in IT. One of the things that we were early on kind of beating the drum on, is traditional three-tier architecture with the storage, your migration cost was at least 30% of the total cost of ownership because you had to bring data on, eventually you had to take data off, as opposed to, if you really have more like a pool, which is what HCI does, you know, that first, once I get on to it, that's the last time you need to do a migration because now I can move and add, remove, it knows, and we just kind of manage it there. Absolutely the other company I hear talking a lot about this thing is Amazon. You know, they've been working on database migration lots of companies, changing away their environment, and it's something that customers are looking for. >> Yeah, and it's almost like, for us with the public cloud at least you have a genuine sort of big hop in lift and shift, just because of the boundaries. It's a shame if we can't solve that problem without what we call make lift and shift invisible inside the data center at least so that's why we invest in things like Xtract so that people can, look, we're still less than one percent of the market so we expect a whole lot of migration to happen over the next few years. So anything that we can do to kind of accelerate customers to the point of ensuring that their architectural integrity is preserved in terms of environment I think it's a big focus for us. So you're going to see as emphasize Xtract not just for there for VM's or databases to Nutanix on pRAM. We're also going to see that as a fundamental construct for app mobility because imagine Calm as a construct that you're able to go in, proficient work loads and it's on pRAM or off pRAM but at some point in time you want to move them back and forth. You know the thing that we used to always say? "App mobility is slowly coming to fruition "with some of these constructs." >> Calms is the centerpiece of really your multi-cloud strategy. We've talked to some customers that some of the early folks pretty excited about it. A lot of the others have been like, "Okay, well, I've seen some slides and a demo," kind of squinting, looking at it. Reminds me of the early days, "I bet it can't really "do what they say it does." >> I think they have to taste the wine, just like everything else. There were a bunch of early believers who saw the product, who used the product, which we used as an early access program. But we took a step back when we acquired Calm a year ago, we had the choice of releasing a reasonably big product to mainstream. It's been seven years building our product, they had rewritten it two times. So they had already done a rewrite or two. What we took was, we took the time to ensure that it was burned into the Nutanix fabric. It had to fit into a Prism, it had to fit into a life cycle manager, it had to fit into a one-click update. It needs to look and feel like a natural extension versus a power-sucking alien, which is what we've seen with many of our competitor's products where you just buy some things and you put it in there and the more successful it is, the harder it is to homogenize. So we took our time, and that's what you're going to see in 5.5, customers can now actually genuinely use the product. And day one it'll have AHV support, AWS support, very quickly it'll have ESX, and GCP and Azure and it's a separate code train by the way, in a sense that the same code-base but it's being delivered as a service and you're going to see more and more of that paradigm where Nutanix is no longer going to be this blob of capabilities that in itself comes out fast but there's a bunch of microservices now that are going to be released. Not just on the cloud, but also on pRAM. So AFS is a good example, Xtract is a good example, Calm is a good example and now with 5.5 even Prism Central is going to be detached so that you can consume that at a different velocity than the code. >> How do you make sure that you balance that with the simplicity that really is the core piece of your business proposition? >> Yeah, yeah. I mean I think this is where we just have to be measured in ensuring that it's still one single code-base for example. What we want, we can't afford to have 18 different branches. So simple things like that will actually go a long way to make sure that somebody can still go to a console and say upgrade, it checks the right provisions. It's a little bit invisible, sort of like version mismatch of that is our problem, not a customer problem. >> Absolutely, so a lot in 5.5, which we haven't touched there but also really unveiling some of the next step in the journey, what you're working on for the next six months. What's the focus there, ya know cloud is, I think you talked about visible infrastructure to invisible cloud so looks like kind of expanding out and building out some of those cloud services. Take us through some of that. >> So I think the general theme is continue to fulfill our ambition around making infrastructure more invisible and then at the same time in parallel try to make clouds invisible and I'll break it down into three kinds of products. The first one is, we still have our journey, our things cut out to actually fulfill what I would call the A block, the Amazon block for the enterprise, and you can call it the Azure block or you can call it the Alphabet block now that we support multiple clouds. The point being that simple things suggest, we've done a great job of computer storage and virtualization. What about networking? And we've always said look, the problem is not in the data plane not working, top of the ax switches are pretty commodity, they work, you name it. The issue is always in the control plane, when something goes wrong, what are doing wrong, so that's one of the big things coming in 5.5 is built in network virtualization, provisioning, and one-click micro segmentation. And again the point being rather than buy very expensive products such as NSX or some other overlay products where you're virtualizing the network to secure the network. If you go to Amazon, or you go to Google, or you go to Azure not only do they not require to virtualize, the way that micro segmentation is built is genuinely with the simplicity of one click. You take out 10 VM's, put them in a secular group you're off to the races right? And the same paradigm then basically moves to us so in that vein of fulfilling that stack is one dimension. And a couple of key things that are new there that are in the next six months timeframe, not in the 5.5, the fact that when everything's said and done we've got a file service, we've got blocks, we've got containers, everything else, but what about object storage? Sounds obvious, right? So we've taken our time to kind of build a next generation object storage service, not a first generation one that can scale obviously to the levels of webscale that these days customers want, but is deployed with gentle requirements. An example of a gentle requirement is, you can't build an object story service that is simply on pRAM or simply off pRAM anymore. It has to be hybrid from day one. My primary needs to be data locality quote unquote to be invisible under the cover so my primary stuff is closer to my compute whereas my secondary and backup can be pulled out into the cloud. And the same thing applies on, even something much more simpler, which is EC2. What about EC2 for the enterprise? And that's where I think we were inspired to actually go build us Acropolis Compute Cloud, AC2, which essentially says you can take my Nutanix class, computer storage, and all of that, but then only have compute only nodes, and you could have SAB, SK lab requirements, you could have IBM power, you could have Oracle running on those, but they are essentially being managed with that single pane of glass. So this is the first time that you're seeing, based on a customer demand, now EH3 is now almost one of the three nodes being shipped is an EH3 node. We've come a long way in the last two years right? So people covet that simple virtualization, especially if we can, we extend it from a computer only fabric to the hyper-con only fabric. So I think that's one dimension-- >> It's interesting, just happenstance, that in the news recently, Amazon just announced that they're switching from Zen to KVM base so similar. Come on, you couldn't get Amazon to just sign on for AHV? >> No, see I think see what it is is that frankly AHV from our perspective was all about just ruggedizing KVM right, make it storage, Iops work well, the management plan work well, in fact, the fact that AWS is doing that is actually a good sign for us to go deeper with them frankly just as a tangent, rather than just go deeper with say Zi or GCP and so forth just natively as well now with C-fi instances there's an opportunity for Nutanix fabric to kind of seamlessly leverage that because the core constructs are similar with KBM right? So you're going to see some interesting stuff come up there, maybe that's for the next CUBE, the next conference. >> Sunill, it's interesting I've had a chance to talk to a few customers already and we talk about kind of that cloud, everything from the Germans that well I've got governance and compliance and I'm not not doing public cloud to, you've got a customer speaking today in a session that's like "I'm going to do "everything SAS and what I can't do SAS "I'll do infrastructure service," and then there's a little bit of stuff I can't do because I don't have enough network or things like that, and that's when Nutanix fit in for me. Making products and dealing with customers on such a broad spectrum is a little challenging and trying to fit where Nutanix is on that cloud because right if they're buying SAS from a lot of pieces it's like well you're not going to be as critical as opposed to somebody that's like well hey my data center is really my temple and you can help there so-- >> Yeah I think the philosophy that we use in terms of our product strategy and roadmap there is to maybe just give some color on it is it's the curse of the platform. The wealth of the platform which is like we are a platform company and we've internalized that, we're not a simple product company, so a lot of this comes down to what do we not do as well right which is versus what we just do. And one simple filter that we use is, is it directionally in a secular motion for enterprises or not. So a simple example is look, a lot of customers, and we would have probably quite a bit of sales if we simply said look I can take my existing Nutanix class serve, I just bought a three part array, I've bought a narat box, why don't you guys just co-exist with that. But then if you really think about it, it's like AWS coming to you and saying, "Oh by the way, take my service environment, "put my AWS software on it." It's like Apple coming out and saying, "Here's iOS, "I want it on Blackberry." So one click upgrades won't work, it's not the right thing. So there are things like that that we stayed away from that allows us to, even if we are stretched, lean in on the forward looking circular motions such as first, continue to finish the job inside, then harmonize inside and outside, and then go provide specialized services like Zi, in addition to what we're doing with DCP or Amazon, and others. >> Alright, last question I have for you, what's exciting you in the marketplace today, getting your engineers kind of fired up as kind of this next wave? >> Yeah I think look, I think some of the biggest thing is around how apps are now being re-platformed themselves, not just infrastructure and people used to word pass and all that other stuff but essentially I think we are now getting into the golden era, or the initial golden era where IAS re-platforming is more or less known. Now, of course it's going to take you five, 10 years to do it, but I don't think people are debating the way to do that. It's no longer open stack inside, it's no longer hosted clouds and all that crap right? It's two clouds, right? I think that wave has to emerge on the application side as well, you're starting to see some of that with communities, now becoming a defacto for one sliver of it, but there's so many other services that are up for grabs. So I think you're going to see in the next 12 to 18 months and you're obviously going to see Nutanix play a role there, is what does it mean to not hybridize my data center but what does it mean to hybridize my app. And I think there's a lot of interesting opportunity, interesting inspirational stuff there from an innovation perspective that keeps our guys going. >> Absolutely well Sunil, always a pleasure to chat with you, look forward to catching up with you at the next time and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT conference in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching theCUBE.