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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the District everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special presentation of Nutanix NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost for the two days of coverage at this event. Adam Japhet is here. He's the head of infrastructure at Scholastic Corp. Adam, thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, is this your first .NEXT? >> This is my first .NEXT. >> Dave: What do ya think? >> There's a lot of energy here. It's a tremendous amount of energy. Just even in the size of the place. But the number of partners that you've got here and the number of customers, I'm really excited to be here. >> Well, the best is yet to come. Nutanix always does a really good job with the keynotes. >> Adam: Yeah, you haven't even opened the keynote yet, and it's already this much energy. >> Yeah, always very crisp messaging. They have great outside speakers. Robert Gates last year, Condi Rice and then, who was the illusionist? They had a-- >> Oh yeah, the guy in the box, David Blaine. Yeah, David Blaine held his breath for like nine minutes. >> He was holding his breath under water while the SE configured-- >> For the entire session? >> Yeah while the SE configured because the argument was it only takes eight minutes to configure a Nutanix solution. >> Wow. And then he came out, after eight minutes. You know he was able to configure the solution. Big hugs afterwards. Wet hugs. But anyway, it's a fun show here and it really hasn't even started yet. It started with Cube interviews. >> We've been interviewing. >> Now I'm even more excited. >> Dave: Yeah, so we've been interviewing practitioners all day. So tell us about Scholastic Corp. What do you guys do? >> Sure, so Scholastic, if you went to school in the US, you probably heard of Scholastic, but I'll reiterate it. It's the, actually, the world's largest, not just in the US, the world's largest children's book publisher and distributor. It's also a major education technology firm, so we do a lot of work within the education space with administrators, librarians, and other educators in your school system. But we're probably most recognized for our trade businesses. Which, Book Clubs, which is now called Reading Clubs, fairs and trade, and just the access to so many of the titles that so many kids in the US have grown up on. >> So, you're making sure the next generation will at least have the opportunity to read. (laughing) >> It's interesting, because I don't know if you're aware of this, but it was actually just two days ago, was the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book. What was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in England and now it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US. And actually they did some analysis. Some of the articles I was reading about it about literacy and they actually think that the Harry Potter series has contributed to, I guess we're calling them Gen Z or the post millennials or whatever, they grew up with Harry Potter, really improving literacy in the US. That's how important some of these books that we publish over the years have been. >> So you actually said, used to call it Book Club, now you call it Reading Club. So, that's sort of an indication that your business model's evolving, going digital. So when we talk about some of the drivers there. >> Absolutely, I mean that was really one of the key drivers, I think. I've been at Scholastic a long time now. 17 plus years. So I've seen lots of different evolutions have been evolved and a lot of different technology projects have been evolved, different launches. And I think in particular in 2011, when the iPad came out, and we saw such a rapid transition with newspapers, and periodicals, and magazines. Myself included, I felt myself going through it. Switching to using electronic devices for consumption. The next immediate question is, is this going to make all physical books go away? And so, you know, we really pivoted hard into the digital arena at that time, because we wanted to be where our constituencies are. And interestingly, we found that actually digitization in the children's book space, maybe a little bit in the young adult space, but especially in the elementary school space, it actually has been fairly resistant of digitization. It's there. We've got a number of excellent products there. With Storia and a number of other products for delivering digital content to our consumers, but primarily children. But ultimately kids still read physical books. My kids are 11 and nine, and our house is full of physical books and we really kind of segregate the two together so that they have both the digital reading experience, which is somewhat different from the physical reading experience. Nevertheless, it is continuing to transform our industry. >> We were talking to to Virginia Gambale before. She's an advisor, a strategic advisor, to a number of companies, board member, investor. And she was talking about capital allocation and one of the questions I have is when you guys sort of look at this digital disruption, the change, at what point do you decide, okay hey, we've got to change or we'll be changed. Or we need to get ahead of this. How does that all take, how did it take place in your organization? Was it more reactive, proactive, and sort of where are you headed? >> I mean, I think the proactive elements around it is that we want to make sure that when our consumers are ready to go digital, we've got a viable product that responsive to as many devices as we think our consumers are going to use. And parallel information there, we've been watching really in the last three years how much Google has sweeped into the educational space and they have kind done that at the expense of Microsoft and Apple. And so, we see trends like that and we see how quickly digital can move into the educational spaces which is where the primary customers are and how we sell our products to children. And we knew that we needed to have a viable product there, so I think a lot of things for us are looking at different channels. Making sure that we've got a singular view of our customer and recognizing that our primary customers are really educators. That we're connecting with them and we're understanding how they're using our different models, our different lines of businesses. How they're communicating our products to the parents and children that consume them. And really getting that right balance of physical and digital products in front of every kid. I mean, our core mission is to get kids to learn to love to read. It's to generate literacy so that kids become young adults and full adults and they love to read, and that's really what the core mission is behind Scholastic. And however we can deliver the products to satisfy that mission, we're prepared to do that. >> Adam, reaching the ultimate user in that whole digital transformation, that tends to put a lot of stresses on infrastructure which is the hat you wear. So, maybe explain a little bit some of those challenges you were having and what you've done to transform on the infrastructure side to meet the requirements of the business. >> Absolutely. So in my role, in my various roles that I've had at Scholastic over the years, one of the things I've been able to experience is how different parts of the company move at different speeds. And some of it is just the nature of the function of the company. You know, your back office corporate spaces obviously are going to move somewhat slower than your digital engagement and your e-commerce space. In a role I had several years ago, where I was delivering e-commerce and digital services, I quickly realized that the traditional infrastructure models simply wasn't going to cut it at this point. We were delivering infrastructure trying to scale it out for very seasonal demand. Three, six month lead times trying to stack text stacks all stuff that end up being undifferentiated heavy lifting. So ultimately, for us, we took a couple of big leaps. One of the big leaps that we took was really moving into the public cloud several years ago and that worked out tremendously for us and we've really been able to find the right infrastructure model for delivering our customer engagement experiences has been the public cloud. But when we started to pivot towards the fact that we move physical products, you know a lot of companies don't necessarily deal with physical products anymore. I could be wrong but I don't know that Facebook has a physical, Well I guess they have their VR. They acquired, I forget the name of the VR company now but generally, companies don't deal with physical products. An all in public cloud model can work pretty well for them. But when you're dealing with physical products, latency matters. Geodata locality matters. And some of the applications that you're dealing with can be very centric to the delivery of your manufacturing and your warehouse operations. So, that's actually part of why we've been investing in Nutanix. Because we want to have that same kind of agility with our infrastructure and get out of mixing and matching various vendors text stacks deliver essentially what's a foundational platform for us to deliver business value out of. I'd rather go with one vendor, right? And have a finite set of vendors where we're delivering network and compute and storage and the service delivery of our applications on top of that, and Nutanix has worked out very well for us. >> Appreciate that Adam, and it's really interesting. We talk to customers, the two terms that get thrown out are hybrid or multi-cloud and you laid out where you're using public cloud. Do you consider your Nutanix solution, is that private cloud, hybrid cloud? (speaking over each other) Does that interact with multi-data center or any other services? >> I've kind of avoided the term hybrid cloud because what was originally marketed to us as hybrid cloud was the idea that your workload is seamlessly portable between all these different cloud providers. And we kind of realized that was never really our intent. I think multi-cloud is probably a better model for us, because we're finding that our various cloud provider services, and if you even scale beyond just the basic IS, you get to the pads and the especially SaaS layer, they're all cloud services but they're fairly fit for purpose. And a lot of what our role is as a technology organization has moved towards assembling all of these fit for purpose cloud solutions together into a service delivery that we from a technology group can deliver to our internal and external customers. And so I prefer the term multi-cloud. >> So if we could follow up on this, if I may, skepticism on hybrid cloud, but this idea of a control plane that spans multiple physical clouds, including on-prem. Is something that, am I understanding that you don't feel that that's needed in your organization or that's not feasible technically? >> I think it really depends on the applications that will be delivered to that. So for example, we're finally making our first real foray into containers. And so, we've looked at a couple of different technologies. There's a number out there like OpenShift and Kubernetes and that's really we feel the best opportunity for us to find a way to deploy a true hybrid cloud model where you can actually provision your workload. Maybe not to get so far as to the Priceline type Kayak type view of I want to deploy this workload right now and GCP is the most optimal at this point in time for that. That could be a potential future state, but again, even that feels like it's still a fair amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting for our service delivery. So we find the right mix of products so that we can deliver a kind of a cost optimal workload. And in many cases, I think that technology vendors still haven't quite figured out how to handle state. It works great with the stateless part of your applications but you need to persist your state somewhere. We're probably in the earlier stages, I would say, around utilized service delivery. >> What I heard I think is, you chose by application whether this is going to be something we do in-house because whether there is the locality, the analytics or data processing, something I need it for a reason, as opposed to other things. It's undifferentiated. Public cloud can take care of it and there's not a need to own it in town. >> Yes, you said it better than I said it. >> So the question, I think Dave's asking is how do you manage across? Do you manage them separately or do you want to manage it together? >> Probably at our maturity level, at this point we're probably really only at the governance stage. So we understand what we've got. We've got a good understanding of our cost structures in the public cloud. We don't nearly have as good as an understanding of our cost structures when we're doing hybrid deployments or on-prem deployments. And so that's probably as far as we've matured at this point, I would say. I think we do want to get to a future state where if we take other considerations in particular latency, the particular nature of that application or any other sovereignty or legal concerns outside, that we want to maintain maximum flexibility. Part of my role in the infrastructure group is to provide that kind of foundation. So, hoarding that workload is seamless across these different cloud providers and those application teams can really position the application where it is the best fit for purpose aligned with the price performance I have in mind. >> So bring it back to Nutanix for a little bit. Where do they fit? Talk about your journey a little bit. Maybe paint of picture of the infrastructure of the before, the after, what business impact it had. >> So there were really a couple of drivers for us through Nutanix. One of them is that as we moved a vast majority of our assets out of our data centers to these various cloud providers, we were left with a number of physical data centers and in many cases now, the only data centers that we're actually left with are our on-prem data centers that were no longer sized in accordance with the workload we want to maintain. Additionally for us, a lot of the investment of moving to the public cloud, we deferred a lot of the regular capital investments that we made in traditional infrastructure and we accepted the aging of that infrastructure but we recognize now that there is a fair amount of infrastructure there we need to maintain for these more local applications. And so, I wanted my team, I challenged my team last year to really take a modern approach, right? I don't want to necessarily assemble everything that we've done in the past, but in a much smaller scale to manage the local applications. I know that conversion, in particular hybrid converge, had matured pretty far by 2016. You know, what are the options out there? And so when we do our due diligence and we settled on Nutanix, we really felt that, it's both pioneering, at times even a little bit scary, because it was moving into a new foray with us. But I think it's worked out tremendously. We've started in our back office so that was actually really for that location if some mission critical workload in terms of how we actually do the fulfillment of our physical books, and we're in the process of bringing on a number of those applications off of traditional infrastructure with your segregation between your blade servers, and your chassis, and your racks, and your fiber storage, and your inline networking switches, and your storage array, and just having one condensed box that's going to run that system. >> So, for your in-house deployments, is that all Nutanix today or what's your mix? >> I'd say Nutanix is probably more, I'm getting up to the 20% range, and so 80% is still on traditional. But my goal is about a year from now that we'll, I don't know if they will be necessarily flipped but it will be more than 50 percent Nutanix. >> Is there anything that you're waiting for from Nutanix to be able to move those or is it just kind of budgets. >> It's our own people and process. >> Yeah, people and process. At this point, we're not, with any of these cloud providers, we're not as much hindered by the technology. The technology at this point is in many cases lapped our ability to actually consume it. We're drinking from several simultaneous fire hoses now, and it's which one we turn our mouths to, so. >> And you're taking advantage of Acropolis hypervisor or? >> Absolutely. That was also one of the key drivers. That was the hyper part of it really. I challenged the team. I said I want a solution where we can present a general purpose operating system and our application stack and to me bringing on a third party hypervisor at this point, it just felt like undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> And the container discussion, is Nutanix part of that too? >> Probably in our early stages. When we look at our workload right now, we don't have any on-prem workload that's been designated with containers. But I know having made the choice of Nutanix, if and when we come to that time, we'll be able to provision that on Nutanix and Acropolis. >> Not sure if you heard actually. This morning there was an announcement of partnership between Google and Nutanix so that should accelerate us on containers. >> I saw. That's very exciting. >> What's exciting about that to you? >> Well Google Cloud is one of the cloud providers we actively use today and I think they've really been a great thought leader in this space. We use a number of their services and I know they've really advanced the community around containers with Kubernetes and some of the technologies that they're working on. They have a very mature cloud offering today. And so I think the opportunity for us, that Google and Nutanix to work more closely together, I think a company like Scholastic is really only going to see the fruits, the benefits, of that relationship, and ease our growth into both platforms. >> Right. Adam, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCube and sharing your insights and your story. >> Adam: Appreciate it, appreciate it. Thanks having me on. >> You're very welcome. >> Adam: Okay. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix.Next. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Washington, DC, it's theCube, covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back, Rachel Mushahwar is here, from Intel. She's the general manager and head of America's Industry Sales, and she's joined by Jason Kimrey, who's Managing Director of America's Sales at Intel. Folks, welcome to theCube, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright so Rachel, let's start with you. First of all, this event, you guys are partners with Nutanix, we'll get into that in a minute, but what's Intel doing here, what's the vibe of the event, what are you talking about? >> So there's a variety of things that we're talking about, first of all, Nutanix is a fabulous partner of ours, but it's not just about the technology that Intel is supplying to Nutanix, and that's what's great about this event, is you see so many different business folks that are focused on what are the right outcomes for their businesses, and how do you start to use technology to solve business problems, and that's a big part of what Intel is helping companies do, it's all about the digital transformation, and how to keep pace with your competitors, so that you don't fall behind, or worse, fall off the Fortune 500 list, like most companies have done. >> So Jason, how's that conversation translate into the discussions you're having with customers? >> You know I think digital transformation, that topic is everywhere, and there isn't a company on the planet that isn't trying to figure out how to transform their business through digital, and at Intel there's pretty much two ways the company can transform their business, either through culture, or through technology, and we see Intel playing a key role in being that technology enabler to a digital transformation strategy, and that's a big part of our conversations and our strategy with Nutanix, is how to enable companies to be more data driven, move towards a more on demand infrastructure, be more secure, and really look at how we can help companies adopt those technologies faster. >> And frankly, how do we help them move more quickly, right? The average age of a company used to be about 60 years. The average age of a company today is less than 12 years old. Think about what that means from a digital transformation perspective, and how fast companies have to move to adapt to what consumers are expecting, and that's a big part of what we do. >> So Jason, I'm glad you mentioned data, so Rachel, you were talking about digital transformation, it's kind of a buzz word that's thrown around, but when we unpack it, it seems like it's all about the data. Becoming data driven, digital means data. We just saw Amazon buy Whole Foods, and you would never think that a retailer would get into the grocery business like that, but data allows you to sort of jump these industry value chains. So I wonder if you could talk about digital disruption and the data relevance. >> So there's a variety of digital disruptions that are happening across every industry, whether you're, you know, retail, or you're a transportation company, or you're a health and life sciences company. Data is at the heart of all of that, and figuring out how do I address what my consumers are looking for, in as close to real time as possible. How do you make those decisions just like that so that you can provide those answers back to you consumers? Amazon, is it a retailer, is it a supply chain company, it's all of... >> Content company. >> It's all of those things, and a lot of companies are taking a step back saying "Holy moly, how do we start "to transform everything all at once, "and how do we use technology "to leapfrog where are competitors are?" They don't want to be knocked off that Fortune 500 list. Who's saw >> Yeah, that... >> Yeah, go ahead. That's what's... There's just so many cool examples of where traditional mainstay companies are integrating digital, and becoming data companies almost overnight. We looked at John Deere, which is one of these old line agriculture companies that's really now a data company, they're applying analytics to help do more crop forensics and determine what the optimal time to plant. They're using IOT with the use of drones to survey fields. They're even using autonomous driving capabilities, inputting sensors in directly into the equipment to make sure that they're planting within, you know, driving large 120 foot wide pieces of equipment to one inch of accuracy. Just seeing incredible use of technology, and it's all centered around better use of data to transform their business. >> I mean John Deere comes up a lot, we hear that example. Do you feel like they're sort of a leading edge of the bell curve, or are they to the more mainstream now? I mean they're certainly a mainstream company, but I feel like they're advanced, in terms of their data, more advanced than the average bear, with their data usage, what do you think? >> What's interesting about that is between now and 2018, the board of directors from all of the major companies out there will have digital transformation as part of their agenda. Probably about 60% of all of the companies that we talk to are talking about some level of digital transformation, so it's not just John Deere. You think about all of the big brands, especially with some of the big changes that are happening from a technology perspective, whether it's autonomous driving, it's you know, the use of the smartphones, right? Apple just celebrated what, it's tenth birthday for an iPhone? This is the least amount of change that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Just because of how fast technology is moving. >> So Jason, we've been interviewing Intel I think every show we go to, the cloud shows, server storage, you know, across the board. How did Nutanix differentiate itself, how do you partner with them? Understand of course, they've got the x86, but a lot of it's software, the hooks that Intel's been building for a long time. Bring us a little bit inside some of the sausage making. >> We've been talking about re-imagining the data center for years, and I think what's been really cool about Nutanix is they really are bringing that concept alive, and really re-imagining the data center platform. And I think what we've done is through silicon and a lot of our enabling technologies, we've always tried to provision those up for our partners to build innovation on top of, and Nutanix has done as good of a job as anyone, has really taken advantage of those capabilities, and bringing them to their customer in a way that they can consume and digest quickly, implement quickly, and really start moving fast on a data center transformation strategy, almost overnight. >> So you talked about the digital transformation, Nutanix is one of those leading indicators out there, as a strategic partner for us, of how do you help companies evolve to what they need to be to make consumer demand, and using some of those amazing data center technologies, and re-imagine what the data center looks like, that's Nutanix. >> Yeah, and Rachel, it's curious, you know, I said I've yet to find a CIO that said they have a convergence challenge or issue. Talked to lots of companies that are trying to figure out their cloud strategy, but it's more how are they transforming into being more a software company? I interviewed a large financial service company that says "We're going to be a software company that happens "to deliver these type of solutions." So what are those critical issues that your customers are talking to and how do you see Nutanix, you know, you said they're helping with the digital transformation, how do they get there? And how do they do even more? >> So there's a variety of ways that Nutanix is really transforming that whole data center industry, and a big part of it is time to market. One of the biggest roadblocks from a CIO's perspective, as you said, it's not about what they want to do, it's about how they go do it, and they start running up against a variety of roadblocks, of "Oh my gosh, that particular application stack "isn't certified on this, or this software won't work "on this hardware", and all of a sudden, a project that should take three to six months is now over a year, right? Time kills all deals, and it includes, it, you know, kills all innovation. So with the Nutanix and Intel platform, that time to delivery is shrunk so dramatically. You don't have to worry about certifying all those different types of things, and when you go to an upgrade, it's invisible. That's the way technology should be, it should just work. When you answer your phone, do you think about it not working? >> Yeah. I want to go back, you said 10 years ago was the slowest that things will ever be, if you look going forward. How do you find customers are keeping up with this? Continuous innovation, continuous change, continuous updates coming. We used to just know the tick tock of Intel, and that made upgrades a little bit easier, Now it's a software world. How do you find customers are keeping up with it, how do they try? >> So I think customers are struggling with how fast technology is moving, but one way to start to start to keep up with it is to use products like Nutanix. It takes some of the guesswork out of a variety of things in your data center. >> So how should we think about Nutanix inside of the Intel? I mean Intel is the gold standard of how to build an ecosystem. Where does Nutanix fit? How should we think about this new type of company? >> I think it starts with looking at them not as a hardware company, as much as a software company. They are truly agnostic across the platform that they deploy on. Their whole goal is to extract the applications from the hardware that it sits on, and I think really providing cloud-like capabilities for an on-prem environment so I think that's a pretty big differentiator, because they really have this software platform that runs on multiple Intel based hardware platforms, and our goal working with them is to really help proliferate that as quickly as we can because it really creates an upgrade path and a path towards transformation much quicker than was historically possible. >> So we call that, what you just described, cloud-like on prem, we call it true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the public cloud, we came up with that term because there were so many fake private clouds out there. You obviously, you see the growth, in all these markets, and the decline in many markets. You see the public cloud explode. We see this notion of mimicking the public cloud on-prem as a huge growth area. Are you seeing the same thing, can you add some color to that narrative? >> When we talk to customers, again, across multiple industries, whether it's an energy industry, it's a transportation industry, it's manufacturing, you name the industry, they're all struggling with the same thing. Yes, public cloud is exploding, but a lot of CIOs are taking a step back saying, "Hey, there's some part of my data "that I want to keep absolutely inside of my private cloud. "There's some data that I always want "to keep on prem, and there's some pieces that I want "to put out to the public cloud." So we're seeing a lot of companies kind of normalize back in that middle, where the pendulum swung so far to the right of "Hey, boom, public cloud", and now I think they're taking a step back from a privacy and security perspective saying "What's the happy medium here?" >> I think we just, public Cloud, which we love, did an incredible job of making people aware of how quickly it was possible to deploy resources or deploy VMs very quickly, in a way that was never possible before in an on-prem environment. Partners like Nutanix, and I would say Nutanix really led a lot of this, really bringing that public cloud capability to an on-prem environment. The application at rationalization and the application virtualization, a lot of those capabilities that were very simple in a cloud environment are now just as simple in an on-prem environment. That's why we see that normalization that Rachel was talking about. >> So just when we thought that this was a zero sum game, it was like public cloud versus on-prem, IOT comes in and advances in connectivity and data, it's like a tide that lifts all boats. What are you guys seeing in IOT, maybe you can make some comments there? >> Sure. So I think IOT is just beginning to catch the next wave. For a while folks have been talking about the internet of things and how it's going to help transform industries, and how you can use sensors to detect everything from soil erosion, as related to the John Deere, to "What are we doing for an average consumer "who walks down in the aisle in your favorite retail store. "How do we start to deliver them personalized messages?" So IOT is again, changing that game and moving up that sigmoid curve of change. And you go back to, look, today, right now, at this moment, is the least amount of change that you'll see, in five minutes from now, there's going to be some other big tech announcement or some big evolution, and that's the beauty of where we sit in today's world. About every hundred years we enter this big change, or this big disruption, and this one is going to be driven by compute and Intel is all about compute. >> David: Are you guys paranoid? >> Absolutely >> I think we're excited, but paranoid as well. >> Only the paranoid survive. >> That's right, that's right. >> This data explosion through IOT, it really fuels what Intel calls our virtuous cycle of growth. The more data, the more endpoints, that hit the network, the more data that creates, the more requirement for data center and data capabilities >> I totally agree, we used to say it was kind of customers that were the flywheel, and data is the potential to be the flywheel for the next ten years. >> Jason: Yeah to Rachel's point, we're excited. >> Data is the new oil. But the magic is going to be in how we refine that data. >> Yeah, I mean, I always say data is plentiful, but insights aren't, and those companies that can find those insights, and gain a competitive advantage, and as you've been pointing out, both of you, Rachel and Jason, the cycles are so fast, one insight is not enough, it's not sufficient, you have to continuously innovate, speed is the game. >> Rachel: It is the game. >> And you guys play that game well, so thanks very much for sharing your insights. Great segment. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're welcome, alright, keep right there everybody. Stu and I will be back right after this short break, this is theCube, we're live from DC, and Nutanix .NEXT, we'll be right back. (techno music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C., it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT, everybody, Nutanix' big customer event. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Virginia Gambale is here. She's the managing partner at Azimuth Partners, LLC. Virginia, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So tell us about Azimuth. What do you guys do? >> Well, we focus on helping companies grow, transform, and remain or become relevant. We work at both ends of the spectrum, so we work with early stage private companies that are either trying to raise capital, prepare to go public, or just get to that next level of growth. And then on the large public side, we work with companies who are more legacy-oriented in their traditional products and services, and really help them jumpstart a transformation process. Whether it be through setting up an investment venture arm, or through creating a transformative independent business that begins to create a different model, but at a distance from the original organization. >> You're a former CIO, you're an investor, you're a board member; a board member of our favorite airline, Jet Blue, and a strategic advisor. >> The best. (laughs) >> You're the best. >> Boston Base. >> We love Jet Blue. >> So, you know, a good hub, (mumbles). >> Best app. You know. >> That's right. >> Love you guys. So kind of an interesting and varied background. How did you get to this spot? >> I'm always focused, from the time I was a CIO, on looking at the companies that are going to change the game, and they could be the smallest companies that really have something that will allow us to leapfrog. I really believe in the concept of leapfrogging next chapter, and you want to be there first if you can. So, that's been the thread in my life, whether it be in a financial services business or an airline. It's always trying to double, triple, and multiply the value of the company, and also its relevance with its customers. >> So you believe technology is a sustainable differentiator, presumably, and despite what Nick Carr wrote way back when. >> I was one of those CIOs where the consultants would say, "Don't say what you're saying, because you're saying that technology is the driver for the business model, and we're saying it's an enabler," and I'd say, "No, it's really a driver." So I'm really happy that we've come into that, where it's not only acceptable, but it's the right thing to think about when you're sitting at a board. "How is technology going to drive my business?" And its relevance with my customers. >> Well, there certainly was a period of time where CEOs could call that into question because, as a CIO, you were spending a lot of money on heavy lifting that maybe wasn't adding value to the business, but now every company is a technology company. >> It is. >> There's far more SAS companies outside of tech than there are inside of tech. Everybody talks about the buzz word of digital disruption, but it feels like that's actually happening. Brings us to Nutanix. I mean, that's kind of my view anyway, what they're doing is to try to help us cut out that IT labor cost and shift the resource elsewhere. What's your take? >> Well, many times I talk about capital allocation. When you're sitting at a board level, you really want to be allocating your capital efficiently, and on the right aspects of your business going forward. And Nutanix, I think, offers incredible value proposition. If I can literally take my infrastructure costs down by 60 or more percent, and actually redeploy that capital into game-changing technology, then, to me, it's a no-brainer. >> Yeah. Virginia, I love that. When we came to the first Nutanix conference in Miami two years ago, it was great to hear IT people say, "I got my weekends back," but what's exciting is when we had PXP Solutions on, who's in the financial tech industry today, and he said, "What Nutanix allows me to do is allow my team to work on the fun stuff," which means they're off coding, or they're creating a new app, or, you know, creating more value for the business rather than just, you know, running around keeping the lights on. >> And I see the early adopters of Nutanix actually are the more vision-oriented CIOs who get that. It doesn't mean that we are going to not be able to use the talent that we have on board, but again, we have to use it more efficiently and to the best yield that we possibly can. And so I think the companies that are a little afraid, or they actually delegate that to a group who is concerned that that may mean they will no longer exist, we have to really break down that misconception. >> And Virginia, it often requires either some retraining, or, you know, there might be changes in kind of the makeup of your environment. What are you seeing out there? What are you advising companies as to how they manage their IT staff? >> Well, what's really interesting more and more now is Nutanix is now public and it's continuing on with its future strategy. I really believe they are completely redefining the concept of Cloud in context of the new world, and so the possibilities of starting businesses, transforming businesses in a very quick-start manner, but also deploying fundamentals of other industries where some industries thought they never could, so speed of execution and processing of enormous amounts of data, again, are made possible with a Nutanix type infrastructure. >> So, you're giving a keynote later on. Today, or is it tomorrow? >> Today. Yes. >> Okay. What are you talking about? Can you just set that up for us? >> Well, today I'm on a panel with a few other constituents who represent different aspects of the world today. And tomorrow, I'm going to be focused on a topic that's near and dear to my heart, which is in the executive session, and that is where we're going to talk about the market today as established in Wall Street is really focused on any number that is already public and how they can analyze that to the nth degree. But the question they really should be asking is, "How much are you spending on technology? How are you using your technology dollars? What are you doing with them?" And instead, if you think about the Amazon moment, which I call the "a-ha!" moment. I loved listening to Bloomberg Radio the day that AWS really became known as a business entity within Amazon, which was in the fall a couple of years ago. And the analysts on that call were actually saying, "I'm going to have to rewrite my model," because for so long we were saying Amazon was not profitable, and we would sort of discount that stock because of that. But meanwhile, they were siphoning off, you know, billions of dollars to create a business that is actually going to continue to support the technology revolution that's happening today. >> Well, so, let's unpack that a little bit. So investors today, they clearly want growth. You look at a company like Nutanix, Pure, you know, decent valuations, whereas companies like IBM struggle. You know, whatever, 12 straight quarters or 26 straight quarters of declining revenue. Amazon growing nicely. Throwing off a ton of cash. Not necessarily profitable. Do investors have that wrong in your mind? >> I really do. You know, I think that all the long-term businesses that have existed are standing at the edge of a cliff today, looking down at the abyss. And that is the reality. And so, if they listen to Wall Street, they're just going to perpetuate that getting closer and closer to the end of the cliff before they're going to fall off. Wall Street should actually be facilitating a conversation which allows them some time to actually speak about a transformative process. I would put my money into a company who talks about transforming their business or investing in new technologies as opposed to someone who's standing up there as The Emperor Has No Clothes and saying, "Oh, no, business as usual. In fact, we're cranking out higher margins." To me, that's a warning signal. >> What do you think of the private equity model these days? We've talked on theCUBE a lot about how it's changed quite a bit. You know, it used to be just suck as much cash out of the business as you can and leave the carcass for somebody else, but you're seeing some strategic investors... You see companies like certainly Riverbed, BMC's gone private, Dell obviously appears to be doing quite well. They're not on the 90-day shot clock. IN4's another one that we track. There are many, many more. I'm sorry I'm leaving some out. But is there a new private equity model in your mind where they're trying to invest more, get the valuations up, and maybe go back to the public markets? What are your thoughts on that? >> Certainly I see there are two models that are taking place. There's the private equity model where people are saying, "I need air cover," so I have to take my company private in order to reinvent it. But only still a small percentage of those private equity investors are really investing in the fundamental transformative aspects of those businesses There are still a lot of them who still see the opportunity to really manage the balance sheet, and the pure financials in order to make it look good and put it back out in the market. And there's several examples of that, I think. The other is the activist investor who is standing by, listening to the analyst conversation as I am, and saying, "Well, this is not going to bode well for this stock or for this company, and we want to proactively now start to influence how capital is allocated and how the company starts to make those transformative decisions." >> Well, and oftentimes, they're pushing for for a buyback or a dividend. I mean, that's kind of what happened to EMC. They couldn't weather the storm. Again, is that a good thing or a bad thing? >> Well, some of them, again, are in for the short-term gain, right? But there are increasing numbers of firms that actually believe that that is the way to transform an industry, whether it be media or the airline industry, or consumer goods is by beginning to get in and take seats on the board. Because at the end of the day, the buck starts and stops at the board level no matter what. >> Yeah. Virginia, wondering... You've been a CIO. What's your opinion on the role of the CIO going forward when we have things like the public Cloud, we're making infrastructure invisible, you know, great shift into kind of the roles and responsibility. What's the CIO of the future look like? >> I think this is a pivot point for a CIO. And whereas before the real enablement of the Cloud, CIOs had really A They were either going to become a chief digital officer, or they were going to stay sort of running the day-to-day shop. Because they didn't have the tools to be able to transform their existing day of operations. Today I think actually the CIO has the opportunity to make the choice, "Do I want to be driving the digital business in terms of product and service and move into that area, or do I actually want to begin to drive a transformation of my original cost structure and then begin to have the dialogue where the two are meeting now?" So the chief digital officer and the work the chief digital officer is doing is becoming day-to-day of operations, and the CIO is handling day of operations. So they actually have the ability to meet and transform the company. So I think that is a really important question that CIOs need to be asking themselves today. "Which of these roles do I see myself in?" >> We only got a couple of minutes. I got so many questions for you. So what's rhe I'm going to totally pivot here. The security discussion at the board level. What is that like now? How has it changed? And how should the CIO be communicating to the boards about security? >> Well, I fall in the camp, and I think I was one of the early drivers of making sure that the chief information security officer does not report to the CIO. It's a conflict of interest to me, plain and simple, like any audit principles one would have. But, and I think that will change over time in terms of the security that we are so hypervigilant about will become threads within the fabric of our infrastructure, and it will become day-to-day needs that will be put in by the CIO. Today they have to work very complimentary and very cooperatively, and so one should not feel that a CIO is failing in their job because the CISO is on top of them. Their job as the CISO is to be out in the market, and be understanding what is happening in the world today, and to the degree they can anticipate what will happen. They also need to be talking to the boards and educating the boards. Boards today have become... I would say cyber security is one of the main top three topics on conversation with every board. It should be talked about at every board meeting, at least a readout as to where we are, and what's happening and what are we doing? So it's a very important role. >> Before we go, I just want ask you about women in tech. About, we know, 50% of the population roughly are women. Only 17% of the tech industry comprises women. Thoughts on that? Do you feel like this industry is making progress, is going in any movement, wrong direction, right direction? What can be done? >> I think there are a lot of different philosophies in the world today about helping drive more women into tech. Certainly I've been in this business for, I hate to say, but it's multiple decades, and I was the only woman CIO at the time I was the CIO, or one of the first women board members sitting at a board table of all men. And some of the arguments say that women should be coding from very early ages, and that we have to get women coding. You know, I think women, just like men, fall into the category of broad spectrum talents. Not every woman is suited for a code job, but today, the great thing about technology is, we have visualization components, we have design components, we have strategy components more than ever, and I think when we educate our young girls, and I have one myself, we should understand where their best talents are, where their interests are, and help shape them in the areas that are tech-related, but not hardcore coding at all. There's a lot of organizations about women who code, and I think that's great, but that's not all that women need to do to be in the tech world and be successful in the tech world. >> Love it. Alright, we're out of time. My last question is sort of advice for Nutanix. What do you think Nutanix should be doing? What can you share with us? >> I'm very impressed by the CEO, because I think the first and foremost role of a CEO is to have vision, and I really believe that this CEO has vision. The difficulty now, once you're in the public markets, and you're under the scrutiny of a public market, and yet you as a company are in your infancy in how you grow, they have to walk that line between, "Yes, I hear you, Wall Street, but these are the things that I need to do to be the best, the biggest, and the most enabling company to my customers that I can possibly be." And that is a fundamental that they can never lose sight of. Don't listen to the street too much, and don't err on the side of only one way. >> Great. Virginia, really a pleasure having you on. I hope you come back to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you, thank you. >> Appreciate it. Alright, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back in D.C. at the .NEXT Conference right after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> We're back. Welcome to Nutanix.NEXT. NEXTConf. #NEXTConf. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm joined by my co-host Stuart Miniman. Mike Day is here as the CEO of PXP Solutions. Financial services company and a customer of Nutanix. Mike thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> So, tell us a little bit more about PXP Solutions. >> We're a payment gateway which is a part of the financial services industry that most people don't even think about. And if you think about going into a store. Going into a hotel. Presenting a card. We're the bit between there and the bank. So, talk about mission critical piece of service. That is a very complicated process involves many banks, many card scans. Visa, Mastercard and so forth. So we actually have to be the piece between the retailer or the merchant. The consumer and the bank. >> So, in thinking about your industry. Some of the drivers and changes of the industry. How has that affected your strategy with regard to information technology? >> For us it was about expanding our business. We came from that really old three tier model. Big investments, they're a lumpy IT. We're moving more and more to a global business. We worked in the US. We have some big retailers here involved in EMV rollout for the US. And that creates demands on us where we have to have processing in the localities. So we have to create a new infrastructure here in the US. So we've taken up Hostess space in New Jersey. And we had to build a whole new processing infrastructure. I don't want to have teams here. Nothing personal. We're a small business, we don't want to have teams dotted around the world. Which means I have to think about getting manageable IT in the right territory. >> So Mike, I hear things like that and it comes to mind. Well, why don't you just use the public cloud or what is the edge implications of what you're doing. Edge computing, may have been talked about a lot. So maybe sketch out for us a little bit about. You know, kind of this scope of what you do. And do you tie into the public cloud? I think of like CDN's. Are you related to that or what do you deal with and what don't you deal with? >> It's an interesting conversation. It's one I've had with the public cloud vendors. For us it's all about PCI scope. You'll get all the merchants talking about this. It's about card data. There's a lot in the press about companies being compromised. We provide secure processing. So, as soon as that card is either on somebody's webpage or is delivered into a pad. We encrypt that data. Now, if we start putting that encrypted data and those tokens and card records. And we manage over a billion card records. Into the public cloud. That brings that cloud infrastructure into scope of PCI. You don't want to be doing that. So, we kind of have to use our own infrastructure but we want to leverage. Leverage, nice American way of saying it. We want to get some leverage to way that we want all the benefits of public cloud. But we need to do it ourselves. Now, I'm sure a public cloud vendor will say. Oh, we can be PCI compliant. Right this time. We don't want to do that. So, we have a cloud solution. But it's our cloud. >> Okay, so you're essentially trying to mimic that public cloud experience on-prem. >> Mike: Yeah. >> And so presuming that's where Nutanix comes in. That's their whole message. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> So, can you maybe take us through how you. Where you came from and where you are now, how you got there. >> Okay, again the benefits to being a small business. The benefits of being an ex CIO means that we can make decisions quite quickly. You're not going through layers of the CTO and his infrastructure guy and the sequel guy and so forth. You can play fast and loose. We had a three tier architecture. Largely coming to end of life. We had a big sand. So you had lots of single points of failure actually in the process. And we needed to do something different. We've been bumping into Nutanix. And they were very aggressive three years ago. As you can imagine as a new entry. They did the puppy dog sell. You know, here have one. See how you get on. We deployed that. We were going to do a VDI deployment which seems to be how most people start. But actually, we thought why? Why do you do that? So, we went straight to heavy lifting. And we put production into a production environment into Nutanix. And immediately kicked it out. The two new data centers with Nutanix kit. It means that a whole storage compute piece is gone from our daily management. >> And Mike, can you talk about the operational model. You said especially you've got some remote sites that you don't even want anybody there. How many people do you have managing this? How's that different from the old sand days that you had before? >> I hesitate. Six people operate our entire infrastructure. They're not located anywhere near the infrastructure. The infrastructure is in the London Docklands and in New Jersey. We go to New Jersey for physical inspections once a year. Everything else is done remotely. >> I'm from New Jersey originally and I understand why people don't want to go there too often. >> Mike: It's a nice place to visit. >> But right, so. Does it live up to that invisible infrastructure that Nutanix? What do your people, in operative? What do they touch, what would they have to worry about? >> Okay, so I'm going to give you a scenario. Where we obviously have processing in more that one data center. One of the things that we need to be able to do with that processing is to move stuff. Either for reasons of operational requirements where your trying to take a part of your infrastructure down for maintenance. Or if you had a disaster recovery incident you need to be able to move your processing to these different DC's. What we can do and what we do on a regular basis is that we will ship our processing between the different stacks and the different locations. And that's the press of a button. I mean, obviously our infrastructure and our systems and solutions are designed to operate in that way. But literally we can move processing to a new data center. And in terms of consumer experience. No change. Technically there's about a half a second delay. In half a second, no problem at all. So we can move stuff between data centers. And we do that on a regular basis. >> Mike, you mentioned that initially you were considering just doing a VDI workload. Kind of testing the waters. And you decided, no let's just go forward. What were your concerns at that point? >> I think the concerns for us was does it live up to the hype. We were being given lots of figures. All the vendors were doing that. Telling us how much quicker it would be. How much less compute we would need. How cheap it would be. But only when you do this thing in real life. When you actually do some real heavy lifting. When you start installing sequel service into a Nutanix environment, does it work? I had a queue of people telling me don't do it. It's going to be a disaster. And we did it and it wasn't a disaster. It was outstanding. >> So, we always talk about the labor costs. As a former CIO you know how labor intensive IT is. >> Mike: Yeah. >> And our premise is, you know what you've described. Mimicking cloud on-prem. Our premise has always been. You know, research indicates that a lot of the savings are in the productivity of the IT people. You can shift those resources elsewhere. Guys like you are trying to do digital transformations. Which sounds like such a buzz word. But it's actually starting to gain foot hole. It's a real deal. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> And you can't be doing long provisioning and fund that and fund these analytics and data driven transformations. So, is that a correct premise? Does it have a sort of major business impact on your IT staff? >> It does, I mean. Basically what it means now is our guys can get on doing the fun stuff. When we started doing this, they all thought they were loosing jobs and we were going to be cutting head count. We were never doing that. Because we never got out of the soup. You know, the IT guys would understand this. You spend all day fighting fires. You never get to do the fun stuff. But what we've managed to do is. We've managed to get to the point where our fundamental processing is just solid. We can deploy service at the click of a button. We can move service between data centers at the click of a button. We can do the stuff that everybody aspires to. But then, now those guys can then go and do the fun stuff. >> Interviewer: What's the fun stuff? >> The fun stuff for us is the analytics. It's using tools like Splent to truly understand what's going on. Getting predictive in what we do. That's the fun stuff. >> Were the skill sets of the guys who are putting out fires with the infrastructure compatible with the fun stuff or did you have to reskill? >> We trained. It's very easy to take a bunch of guys that you always asked to do one job. Then change the job and then assume the guys are bad guys. That's not how it works. I do think it's 80% personality, 20% skill. You can fill it in. So what we did was the guys who have been previously just fire fighting. It took a while. And it took a while for them to trust us. That we weren't really taking them into a trap of some sort. But we reskilled them. We didn't just bring new people in. >> Would you had. You feel like you would have had to hire more people if you didn't make this move? >> I'd say we couldn't have actually deployed in the model we currently did deployed to with the people we have. We were looking for operation efficiency. But we want resilience. Think about payments. You don't get two chances to take a payment. >> I mean, there's a very high level. Let's not be precise by the way. In percentage terms, how much more? What percent more IT labor would you have needed if you didn't make this move? Was it a 10% factor or 20%, 50%, double? >> Remember, we're a small company. We're talking about six people now. We'll probably need another four or five people. And at one point we had that as vacancies. And we've done other things recently. So in terms of our corp environment we're going to have to office 365. You know we're taking away again stuff that doesn't add value to us as a business. And pushing that out of what we do. >> That's a substantial business impact. >> It is. So Mike, you seem really happy with Nutanix but what's on your wish list? What would you like to see from Nutanix or maybe their Ecosystem? We've got the big expo floor here. What would make your companies life easier, you know simpler? >> I think for us it's just having some clarity as to where they're heading next. They've been an excellent start up. They've been moving the market. They've been ahead of the market. The problem I've always seen is companies as they get to this size. Almost like the wave go the market swamps back over them. They start hiring in from all the companies they used to be different to. And it's how do they stop that happening? How do they preserve the essence of what made them dynamic? So, you talk about functionality. You talk about the hypervisor. We're a EXS house. We use Vmware. But we're now using a cropless hypervisor in some of our environments. The issue for that is. >> Any information you can give us as how you make that decision? Whether you go ESX or AHV? >> It's purely down to the. Not so much the capabilities of AHV or ESX. We think AHV from a price point prospective is incredibly attractive. But as you know, everybody's infrastructure isn't just the hypervisor. It isn't just the hardware. It' all of the other ancillary platforms. You know, the security platforms, the thin platforms and so forth. And until those vendors start saying they support AHV. That's a barrier to us for using it in a production environment. Nutanix are great. They'll say they'll look after us. But no CIO ever got praise for just trusting a guy that he met on the street. You know, you've got to be careful. >> So you want that ecosystem to develop further? >> Mike: Very much so. >> Whether it's Nutanix, you know. Writing, integrating with a particular platform that you need or vice versa. >> Yes, definately. And you can see that here. There are some announcements I know that are coming from some other vendors here. Where they have much tighter integration to AHV. That's got to pick up a pace. >> Well, and that's their philosophy I would presume. We're going to write you our API, at least make that open. Now, but somebody's got to write to the API. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> So the work has to be done. But fundamentally it's there. It's not a closed sack as it were. >> But there's got to be a compelling client driver for that. So I can understand where these other vendors haven't made investment in the past. Because until they know they can make money with it. Having full on deployment with AHV. Why would you invest in that? But I thing Nutanix has got to the point now where there's no doubt they're a player. So now you have to be bold. >> Well, being a public company helps. >> Mike: Yeah. >> And seeing the growth rates and it's just you know. Helps with that sort of advertising the brand. But that takes time and they're still a small company. >> Mike: Very much so. >> Mike, you said you started out with VDI and kind of got to know it. You kind of look back at what you've done. Were there any surprises or anything you'd give advice to people that are just starting this journey from your learnings? >> I'll use a really bad analogy that I used last year. And most people don't sort of like it as much as I do. When people start on VDI and we never did it. We actually have never gone down the VDI route. We looked at it and went ahhh. We've got more important stuff. More fun stuff to do. Going down this road. Taking a VDI approach. I said it's like driving your Ferrari down the high street. You might think you look cool. But you're not really driving a Ferrari. You got to take this kit out on the road. And you need to give it some heavy loads. Because in the early days, the new tanks box hated being quiet. That they took time to spool up and so forth. That problems gone away now. But if you're going to really look at this stuff and you're going to get proper return on you're investment. Give it heavy lifting to do. And use it in anger. And don't just take the easy option. You know, the option where you don't have to convince the production guys. I would say, for us, the biggest lesson. >> Absolutely, find one of those hard problems. Throw something meaningful at it. >> Mike: Yeah, and you learn then. >> You learn then, absolutely. >> How about any thoughts on the events? I mean it's early but you know inner access. >> This is my third. My third .NEXT. So they've only had three. >> Okay, so you've been to all three in the US? You didn't go to the one in Vienna? >> I did as well. My head office was in Vienna so I actually wasn't at the event. But I attended the parties. >> Oh, okay. Even better. What do you get out of event like this? >> Two things. First of all, we get to understand what's going on. We do get briefings from Nutanix, so obviously we're quite involved with them. But it's good to hear it and hear the reaction from other customers. I think more importantly is an opportunity to network with other customers in Nutanix. Understand their issues. Share ideas. It's a great networking event for like minded people. And I think for me, it's worth the trip over to the US to do that. >> Good, Mike thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. Appreciate your insights. >> Mike: Yes. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back at Nutanix.net NEXTConf. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back. (tech music)