>> Narrator: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube covering .NEXT conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Minimin joined by Keith Townsend, and we're here at Nutanix .NEXT 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program Binny Gill, who's the CTO of cloud services at Nutanix, and welcome a first time guest, a long time watcher, first-time caller, Vijay Rayapati, who's the general manager of Nutanix Beam a brand new service at NEXT, came from the Minjar acquisition. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Vijay what, so for those that don't know, bring us back a little bit, you know, Minjar tells a little bit about the company, how many people and then we'll get into the integration and the launch. >> Yeah, so we started Minjar in 2012, late 2012, primarily focused on building our public cloud optimization service, so our flagship product is Bot Metric, which is one of the which is one of the high straighter interview solution in the (mumbles) marketplace. We are primarily based in Bangalo, and focused on helping customers as they're moving to this public, our journey, how can you help them deliver governance across their consumption, from a cost perspective. And compliance from a security perspective. That's what we were focused on, and we joined Nutanix last quarter. I'm really excited to be here, I look forward to continue building on it. >> Alright, Binny maybe you can help us connect the dots, so, look at Zai, look at the services that Nutanix is building, usually it starts with your infrastructure. >> Yep. >> And that's not where Minjar came from so, help us connect the dots as to how, what led to the acquisition, how it expands the portfolio, and what's your first SAS product? >> Yeah, I mean if you look at what we are talking about as our true north, what we're doing is we're building a hybrid cloud. We started with building a private cloud, and customers asking us, hey solve the public cloud problem for us, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. And most of the enterprises today are dispersed. So when we talk about enterprise cloud what we mean is dispersed cloud including IOT devices, you'll see some of that in the demo this evening. So the first question that comes to mind is okay, how am I going to manage all my dispersed cloud entities? And not all of them are owned by Nutanix. So when we looked at Minjar and the capabilities, it was right on target, they're helping customers, consume the cloud and solve the two problems that they have that they lose sleep on, one is do I have control on cost? And the other is do I have control on security compliance? So that's a good capability to have and with Vijay's teams help, we're going to expand it to all the clouds including Nutanix and beyond and provide it to all the customers. >> So today, where is the service, how do I consume it? Help me understand that. >> So this is the first SAS service that Nutanix has launched and it can be consumed from beam.nutanix.com. And we intend to continue on the service in future as a SAS offering, for customers. Both Nutanix customer and non-Nutanix customers. What we have today is we support Amazon cloud, and Azure, and we're working on bringing integration for Nutanix and then we'll bring support for other cloud providers as well. >> So, I'm sorry, just how many customers did you have running on the Bot Metric service in the past? >> We had a couple of hundred customers using Bot Metric, we track close to about a billion dollar plus in public cloud consumption through Bot Metric before it became Nutanix. >> So Vijay, help us understand the larger industry and this larger space. It's been relatively acrotic space for some time, there's been a lot of solutions that helped with cloud security, performance monitoring, et cetera. What was the unique gap or value opportunity you saw at Bot Metric? >> Yeah I mean there are two unique things that we found when we work with these public cloud customers. The challenges are, (mumbles) which are providing this ability, right? But there weren't many tools providing ability to remediate those things that you detect. Essentially form day one, when built Bot Metric platform, we built it like an action-oriented platform. So we not only get visibility, you could essentially automate those issues, either for an optimization or for control. To an automation agent, so there is a lot of invisible automation in Nutanix Beam, versus just being this beautiful UI, which can give you a lot of insights and reports. And that's a big differentiator, that's one of the reasons why a lot of customers when they write reviews of the product, they say man I really love it because it not only tells me what I need to do, I don't need to go and do those hundred things as an engineer, and I can rather click to fix of deploy an automation that can go an do these things, right? >> And one of the other things that was very interesting in what Beam does is, it also can predict what the cost is going to be at the end of the month, instead of being surprised by the end of the month bill, you know how it is today, and how the system is predicting it, and that gives you more control on making sure that if there's an over-expenditure that's going to happen, you can take actions today. >> So what type of automation and adjustments can be made on my behalf? >> Yeah, I think pretty much anything that a cloud ops, or devops engineer do, what we don't do is we don't do any provisioning or orchestration, right? Even as a Bot Metric, we never did that. What we were focused on is, how can we solve operational issues on a day-to-day basis? Whether they're related to cost, or they're related to compliance, or they're related to automation. So it can detect things, you can do custom scaling from Beam, you can do resizing of things, you can clean up unused resources, you can go and run custom audits using Python on Beam. So there are lot of things that day two or a day three on a continuous basis as a cloud ops or a devops engineer that you need to do. That's what we deliver as a invisible automation, or we call it event automation. And so when events happen, how can we automate those things, or right ones use, multiple times. >> Binny, can you walk us through, what kind of Nutanix stamp has been put on the product leading to the Beam, maybe give us a little bit of your philosophy as to how the software acquisitions, what they have to go through before they become real Nutanix products. >> First of all, any acquisition, we want to make sure that the team is a great team. People are the most important. From a technology perspective, they need to be solving the pinpoints of the customers. Now when we integrate any service into our cloud platform, we focus on three things, one is identity. So when a customer logs in to our Zai cloud services, or logs in on PRAM, they should be able to use a single sign-on across all the services. Second thing is billing, we're going to make sure that how we bill the customer, it's not like separate bills that come and they have to put them together, it has to be single billing. Also in terms of how you spend, we're working on programs where you can buy some Nutanix currency coins, and then you can use it either in the private cloud or in the public cloud, but the decision could be a late binding decision. And finally, it's about making sure that the one-click simplicity that we keep talking about and delivering is there. And we've been lucky that with the Beam product, a lot of it is already there, that's why it's already giad. But we make sure that it goes through the same rigor of making sure that the user experience is awesome. >> So let's talk about that time to integration I'll call it. The ability for you guys to take Beam or Bot Metric at that time, a completely separate product from COM, Zai, and then you take that, turn it into Beam, a SAS product, which isn't your first SAS product, How do you keep that consistent view across the entire Nutanix portfolio experience, so that administrators are not leaving one tool to go into another one, which a SAS offering is very different than what you guys have offered in Apetex. >> So we're working on that, both on premises view and in the cloud view. So as you might have noticed when we came up with Zai, we said it's like cloud services. And DR is the first service. 'Cause when you log into Zai, you're logging into all of the cloud services. And then the menu of services will show up, and Beam is one, DR is one, and more will come in, so we wanted to be taught through that. On premises, if you'll notice in our history, we had Prism Central, and then we announced Com Support, and it's baked into Prism, it's not a separate tool. We took one and a half years to make sure that it does not look like a schizophrenic set of products. When we announced Flow, if you look at other vendors like VMware, they have separate NSX manager, and SS controllers, in our case, it's the same Prism Central, once you upgrade, you get that feature. So that's in our discipline, and anything we do, we take the time and make sure it's going to be a single experience for the customer. We're doing the same thing so, Vijay's team this quite rapid and agile and doing stuff, they've integrated with our single identity system, integrating with a single billing system. So that has happened rapidly with this case. >> I think we focus a lot, at least at Nutanix, when I joined, there is a lot of emphasis on experience. How do we make sure we deliver consistent experience for the user from an identity perspective, from a service use perspective, as well as from a support perspective, right? I know it's a common support, it's a common identity, and it's a common billing, and you already touched upon it as we are innovating on a lot of the services, you know, there is a lot of thinking going on, saying you know, how do we bring a common experience, unified experience that is seamless, rather than having different endpoints, people need to go on and try to remember these things. I think we will continue to work on, you know, innovate on that front. But experience is one thing that Nutanix is very good at, you know, if you go onto social media and look at, you know a lot of people are saying, oh man, we really like what we saw from a user experience perspective of the product. And we already took a lot of those design concepts, you know, Nutanix has, in terms of the UI and UX. The Beam that you see today is completely consistent with that 3.0 design philosophy, internally for our products. So the customer has same kind of, experience. Of course it's a SAS service, as Binny said, we are trying to bring lot of this SAS services and Zai cloud services so the user can consume it, just like they consume a GCP or an azure, or AWS, right? And of the day, you have EC to RDS. There is a common frame that brings all this together. >> One additional thing that we're doing, which has not been done before is, providing these services in a hybrid mode. Right, so some of these services like COM, and infrastructure as a service capability, we've announced ARA, how do we provide it in hybrid cloud world where you can run the service on PRAM, you can migrate, adapt it, depends on the service. So the service should also be available in the cloud. And those are some of the hard problems that we are working on, but we believe that we have the tools and the experience to make that happen. >> So, Vijay, just one that was announced, you got some cool new T-shirts you're going to show us. What should we be looking for from the roadmap there? And yeah, show that T-shirt off. (laughter) >> There are two primary things that we are very focused on. One is, how can we bring in lot more intelligence, not just from insights and actions. How can we help customers make those choices of moving the workload, because if you see there're a lot of components that Nutanix is building. Even today we announced Cloud Extract, which is kind of a one-click mobility, not just from cloud to Nutanix, it is going to support from Nutanix to other clouds as well. Because there is a strong cultural belief within the company, that we need to have, give customers the freedom of choice. And deliver a good service, that I prize, so that they feel feel confident about what they're doing, and what we deliver to them. So in that context, one is obviously, bringing multiple clouds. Currently we support Amazon and Azure, but we will bring GCP support, and we will launch, Nutanix, we will launch, other providers as well, we won't start just with them. And the next thing is, how do we make this experience a lot more seamless? And we'll also integrate with COM and a couple of other products that we have as we accline. So that customers can get visibility of cost by workloads by apps, they don't need to come to Beam to consume them. >> So Binny one last question. This is critically important as you bring out your first SAS offering. Billing and procurement, what is the average experience for the Nutanix customer who hadn't- The infrastructure team didn't whip out a credit card and buy a NX system, what is the experience for setting up billing with your SAS services? >> Right, so a lot of it is not giad yet, but if you look at some of the demos that we have done for Zai cloud services, including DIA, It's, the customer can provide a credit card, and consume it as they're used to with the public cloud. But we also have programs where they can buy some credits, Nutanix coins up front, and use them both on PRAM, and in the cloud. So these things are in the works, and we are listening to our customers. One size does not fit all and we know that in the enterprise. But we'll have multiple options for them. >> Excellent, sounds just like, I've listened to my children saying, I get the coins to do fortnite, and things like that that the millennials will be good. They buy some credits, buy it here, buy it there, use it up. Binny and Vijay, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the launch of the product we look forward to keeping an eye on it as that grows and the portfolio grows. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you for having me. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Minimin, back with lots more programming here at Nutanix.next 2018, thanks for watchin' theCube. (futuristic music)