>> 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.