>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Dheeraj Pandey CEO and Founder of Nutanix. Great guest, been with us for 10 years. Was on the cube in 2010 when we first started doing theCUBE coverage of events was at VMworld, Dheeraj, great to see you. >> Pleasure. >> Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you. >> You've had such a great journey. I've been so impressed with you as an entrepreneur, the hustle, the early days when you were misunderstood to the growth and going public and continuing to compete. Congratulations to you and your team. It's been great. >> Thank you, no, it's been a journey and it's going to continue to be a journey. >> A lot of competitive pressure. A lot of cloud happening, a lot of server dynamics in the marketplace with On-Premise now getting validated as a part of this multi-cloud hybrid equation, certainly not going away, but still growth of the cloud has been huge. What's the big focus, 'cause you have your Nutanix Next conference coming up in May. I'll be there with theCUBE, what's the focus, what is the theme of the event? What's the big focus? >> Yeah, no, in fact we complete 10 years this September, so it's a decade since the beginning of time for Nutanix. And we are focusing on the things that we're good at. We are good at what I call the three D's. So it's a three D view of the company. The first D's data, we are really good at data. And we're doubling down on data. We're very good at design, we've done a very good job of simplification making elegant consumer grade and taking clicks away rather than things taking months, how can it be done in seconds and hours, and we're very good at delivery, you know, the third D being delivery, you know, it's not just delivery of our software through all different form factors and our appliance and software and subscription and other servers, but also customer support, customer success, which has really endeared us to our customers. So if you think about what this conference is all about, obviously it's about the customers and as the power of social proof, the fact that they learn from each other and we learn from them. But it's really about reinforcing the three D's. Data, design, and delivery. >> And the theme is invisible clouds. Period, visible IT, invisible cloud, so I'm assuming that's, make that, abstract that away, multi-cloud in there, probably a theme. Visible IT, that's supposed to be invisible too, but what does that mean? I get the invisible cloud 'cause you want to make it seamless, multi-cloud, hybrid cloud. But what's visible IT, how do those words play? What's the play on words there? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, we, first of all the word invisible is really powerful and we use it a lot and it's very unique to Nutanix, you know, not everybody uses the word invisible as much as we do, but the idea is that machines should become invisible. Software and systems and tools and those things should become invisible. And then humans should become visible and by the way, there's this really good antithesis, sort of the polar opposites of machines versus humans that goes on in many other walks of life, I mean zero trust when it comes to security. Machines should not trust each other. But full trust, when people need to trust people. So when it's an organization of people you need to be the opposite of zero trust. Same thing is true for invisible machines invisible clouds with visible people visible careers and I think what's happening is that as the cloud hype cycle actually matures, CIOs are talking about cloud cloud cloud, but the grassroots is basically saying like do you even know the legacy apps of the last 20 years? Do you understand the challenges of what we call the laws of the land? Data compliance and regulations, laws of physics which is the gravity of data and the gravity of people and operations and laws of economics, owning and renting. So I think what's happening is that the cloud revolution is really being dug like a Eurotunnel, from two sides. Top down from C-level people are saying let's go transform ourselves to the cloud. And we are helping the grassroots really go and translate that, say look, this is only possible by doing these things because we have to be respectful of data sovereignty, data gravity, and applications and the economics of that. So, in really helping the CIOs build trust with the grassroots. As opposed to-- So essentially, you're operational as a cloud 'cause I can hear. We've interviewed a lot of CXOs on theCUBE as you know, take that hill, go to the cloud, move everything to the cloud. Wait a minute, we got, we're closing a pin. So to make sense of that vision, it's got to be operationalized, that's kind of what you're getting at. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And then finally there's a, I mean look what happens in computing, we make things smaller all the time, you know, we started with mainframes and we ended up with serverless. And along the way we had obviously Unix and x86 and container, VMs and containers and so on. Same thing with personal computing. We started with desktops and we ended up with wearables. So the fact that there's a billion dollar data center is the new mainframe. The fact that there's going to be a big cloud data center only two places in a big country is actually quite the antithesis of computing, we have to make cloud be everywhere and make it about software. To operationalizing the cloud and making it into a half a trillion dollar market will be about software. >> This whole mainframe is in the cloud or mainframe distributing computing. Software industry kind of come back in vogue. It doesn't go away, it's all the same game. It's just distributed out around in different formats, that's kind of what's going on here. >> Absolutely, I mean go back in time to distribution. Apple was a vertically integrated stack. So how does Microsoft come and really compete against Apple, they said look PC is about software, they said look PC's not about hardware, it's about software and the market becomes 10 times larger because they really bring in other partners who make money with the Windows Operating System. >> That's just more enabling. There's more demand, there's more growth. >> Absolutely, and the same thing happens again 15 years later with iOS versus Android. So Apple says smartphone is about vertically integrated stack, and Google comes and says no, to make the market 10 times larger, Android is about software. And then other handset manufacturers come and make money, so cloud is at this juncture where to take it beyond, 50, 60 billion dollars to half a trillion dollars, it has to be about software. >> Dheeraj, one of the things that I'm impressed with with you as an entrepreneur and your team is you fit the profile of the classic big idea. Be different, have good product leadership and pick a way that's going to have a big, totally adjustable market. You did that and you didn't waver, so I reviewed your analyst meeting from Wikibon and involved third party analysts. A hundred billion dollar addressable market. So big market, check, private cloud trend which you called early and Stu Miniman also called that on Wikibon is not going away, you have a stack for that. Large customer base, you have what 12 thousand customers plus and growing. Great revenue, strong revenue, and you got refreshes coming because the technology continues to shift in the wave that you're on. So, congratulations, that's good health meters. But there's now competitive pressure. The genie's out of the bottle. People know what you're doing. They figured it out and they're going to try to compete with you. This economy of scale that you have there's economy of scales others have specifically Dell, Dell EMC, VMware have been highly competitive with you. How are you responding to that and what's the landscape look like? >> Yeah, look, we've always been about disrupting ourselves, and that's the way we've actually grown our company. Very contrarian way of thinking about it but if we go back in time four, five years ago we're an appliance company, and we said we're going to do an OEM relationship with Dell and then Lenovo and others. All of a sudden people started competing with yourself, and for us it was like the more we compete with ourselves the better it is, today I think if you think about where the company's real response to any competition is to really compete with ourselves. I typically don't get wavered or changed by what's out there, we don't compete with anybody else, if we can keep competing with ourselves and get better in solving our customers and those three D's I talked about being even deeper in data, that VMware can't even touch us on simply because they have to compete with EMC on that and I don't know whether they actually have the gumption to do that, we do actually. We have to be better at design. Make the control plane even simpler. Understand what it means to virtualize the cloud. And get better at delivery, so if we can keep getting better in the three D's and we can keep competing with ourselves. We just did a really good announcement at HPE where we're going to compete with ourselves one more time because-- >> Talk about that announcement 'cause I think this is different. So HPE bought Nimble Storage so they already got the storage piece. They've got tons of servers, they also compete with Dell, what's your position with HPE, what's the announcement? What's the partnership? >> Yeah, so we're going to do a two-way relationship where we're going to be able to our sellers can quote HP servers and their sellers can actually quote our operating system. We have this rainbow which we call core essentials enterprise, Nutanix Core which is about hyper-convergence. Modernize your infrastructure. Nutanix Essential which is how we build a private cloud, and then Nutanix Enterprise which is really about navigating and simplifying the multi-cloud journey of the customer. And HP's going to take this stack to its customers. Again, we started to compete with ourselves because our appliance business was not based on HP, but now it will. Similarly, they will compete with themselves. And that's how companies transform themselves. When they compete with themselves rather than somebody else. >> And it's always the old expression, eat your own before your competition does. That's a cannibalization, kind of MBA concept. You guys are aggressive on that. You don't mind doing that and taking that risk. >> No, in fact if you don't do it, someone else will. It's better to do it in the controlled way ourselves. >> Got great, great management styles. So let's talk about, you mentioned control plane earlier, you have a quote on your deck that says, that I reviewed, it says control plane matters, this speaks to some of the product leadership. What does that actually mean, the control plane message, 'cause we hear this a lot come up in multi-cloud hybrid, and certainly within the data conversation around data control planes, control planes. For you guys, what does that mean? Control plane matters? >> Well if you take back like 10 years ago. We were very bold and audacious. We were the only company to say look we will not be building a tab in vCenter. Contrarian, highly contrarian. Most people said you'll lose a lot of deals because you are not adjunct to vCenter. You're not a tab in vCenter, every hardware renderer was really bending over backwards to please VMware because that was the only way to the heart of the virtualization administrator. We took a very different stance. Prism was the control plane, they said if you do a really good job at Prism make it a distributed scale out platform. Make it consumer grade one click delight. Then customers will actually look at this as a very powerful thing, and then we virtualized the hypervisor. So Prism was a multi hypervisor platform. It worked for Vmware, it worked for Hyper-V and it worked for Nutanix AHV. So over time, we just kept doing more of it. So now we have a control plane for multi-cloud. We were saying look, the world does need an automation orchestration engine. That is multi-cloud come is that thing for us. We've taken Prism to the next level with Prism Pro which is about ML and AI and what does it mean to really do operations management and capacity planning and security and analytics. So, we've doubled down on design which is the second D that I talked about with these control planes and going forward and as you see us getting to multi-cloud desktop delivery, we acquired a company almost a year ago, which is really about a cloud native desktop delivery solution where, now the control plane of desktops could belong in the cloud but the desktop itself could be running on prem. And that's a very powerful concept that you can have these cloud enabled cloud holstered cloud serviced control planes but the data place could actually be anywhere. It could be running-- This is the invisible cloud concept you're talking about. Absolutely, yeah. In fact the fact that the controller could be running anywhere, and the thing it controls could be running someplace else. >> The question, that's great stuff and that's great product leadership and again, invisible cloud, people don't want to deal with multiple code bases They want to have seamless operations. So with that I got to ask you your cloud positioning because every enterprise now because it's from the top end. Now it's top comparative, what's the cloud positioning because we now see on premise, super important a-du-is-ca outpost. The data's going to reside on premise in the cloud, it's all going to move around. What is the cloud positioning that you talk to your customers about when they say hey, we like Nutanix but we got to go to cloud, what's the positioning? >> Well our positioning is that cloud has to be about software. It has to seep everywhere, it has to be injected everywhere, our software should run no just on prim but in an AWS bare metal. There's a bare metal service and our software should run there. There will be an Azure bare metal. We already run in GCP metal so our software can run on top of GCP as well. Of course it is on prem and we are already working on our own disaster recovery as a service, desktop as a service where we become the service provider for many of these hybrid services that customers actually need from us. So cloud is about ubiquity, it's about portability, I mean the strength of any software company is portability. If we can make ourselves available in every server, every hypervisor, and every cloud, I think we've done a very good job. >> My final question I want to ask you is when you go to your event coming up invisible clouds, visible IT, you got to give the customer the 20 mile stare. You got to show 'em the 20 mile vision and the bridge to the future that they want to cross with you, that's the main value every company has to do as CEO. What is that story, what's the pitch to the customer saying we've got you covered today as you're organically building that operational cloud path, but I really want to know that I have a partner for the next generation, what's that story that you tell them? >> Yeah, I mean, even as I said before. Any big project, whether it's Panama Canal Suez Canal, Eurotunnel, you have to dig it from both sides and then you eventually shake hands and it becomes a historic picture, which is what we've known about the way the English side and the French side met. I think the way CIOs are talking about the cloud, the way grassroots is perceiving more of the cloud as you called it operationalizing. I think we really have to do it from both sides. And we really don't talk about the three D's. Data, we've done so well in data. We've done so well in design, we've done so well in delivery, and then at times we've actually screwed up like in the last two, three, four years, we might have gotten more complicated, we might have gotten more complex, so we go and even ask for forgiveness and open ourselves up, talk about the evaluability of the company and people like that, they didn't want to connect to an auto machine, but they wanted to connect to humans on this other side. As a business, we are not machines. We're actually humans, and that's what resonates in the conference. >> Dheeraj, thanks for coming in and sharing your insight, great to see you again, congratulations on the business performance, we'll see you at Nutanix Next in May, May 7th, thanks for coming in. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (jazz music)