>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of A New Era In Database Management. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation with Nutanix. We're talking about A New Era In Database Management. To help us dig into it, first of all, I have the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Nutanix Era Databases and Business Critical Applications, that is Bala Kuchibhotla. And one of our other CUBE alongs, Monica Kumar. Who's an SVP also with Nutanix. Bala, Monica, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you so... >> Great to be here. All right, so first of all, Bala a new Era. We, have a little bit of a punj. You've got me with some punjs there. Of course we know that the database for Nutanix solution is Era. So, we always like to bring out the news first. Why don't you tell us, what does this mean? What is Nutanix announcing today? >> Awesome. Thank you, Stu. Yeah, so today's a very big day for us. I'm super excited to inform all of us and our audience that we are announcing the Eratory dot two GA bits for customers to enjoy it. Some customers can download and start playing with it. So what's new with Nutanix Eratory dot two? As you knows 1.0 is a single cluster solution meaning the customers have to have a Nutanix cluster and then have around the same cluster to enjoy the databases. But with Eratory dot two, it becomes multi-cluster solution. It's not just a multi-cluster solution, but customers can enjoy database across clusters, That means that they can have their Always On Availability Groups SQL servers, their Postgres servers across Nutanix clusters. That means that they can spread across Azure Availability Zones. Now, the most interesting point of this is, it's not just across clusters, customers can place these clusters in the cloud. That is AWS. You can have Nutanix cluster in the AWS cluster and then the primary production clusters maybe on the Nutanix and primary enterprise cloud kind of stuff, that's number one. Number two, we have extended our data management capabilities, data management platform capabilities, and what we call them as global time mission. Global time mission with a data access management. Like racing river, that you need to harness the racing river by constructing a dam and then harness it for multipurpose either irrigation projects or hydroelectric project kind of stuff. You need to kind of do the similar things for your data in company, enterprise company. You need to make sure that the right persons get the right amount of data, so that you don't kind of give all production data to everyone in the company. At the same time, they also need the accessible, with one click they can get the database, the data they want. So that's the data access management. Imagine a QA person only gets the sanitized snapshots or sanitize database backups for them to create the copies. And then we are extending our database engine portfolios too to introduce SAP HANA to the thing. As you know, that we support Oracle today, Postgres, MalSQL, Mariadb SQL server. I'm excited to inform that we are introducing SAP HANA. Our customers can do one click sandbox creation into an environment for SAP HANA predown intense platform. And lastly, I'm super excited to inform that we are becoming a Postgres vendor. We are willing to give 24 by seven, 365 day support but Postgres database engine, that's kind of a provision through Nutanix setup platform. So this way the customers can enjoy the engine, platform, service all together in one single shot with a single 180 company that they can call and get the support they want. I'm super duper excited that this is going to make the customers a truly multicloud multi cluster data management platform. Thank you. >> Yeah. And I'll just add to that too. It's fantastic that we are now offering this new capability. I just want to kind of remind our audience that Nutanix for many years has been providing the foundation the infrastructure software, where you can run all these multiple workloads including databases today. And what we're doing with Era is fantastic because now they are giving our customers the ability to take that database that they run on top of Nutanix to provide that as a service now. So now are talking to a whole different organization here. It's database administrations, it's administrators, it's teams that run databases, it teams that care about data and providing access to data and organizations. >> Well, first of all, congratulations, I've taught for a couple of years to the teams at Nutanix especially some of the people working on PostgreSQL really exciting stuff and you've both seen really the unlocking of database. It used to be ,we talked about, I have one database it's kind of the one that everything runs on. Now, customers they have more databases. You talked about that flexibility is then, where we run it. We'd love to hear, maybe Monica we start with you. You talk about the customers, what does this really mean for them? Because one of our most mission critical applications we talk about, we're not just throwing our databases or what. I don't wake up in the morning and say, Oh let me move it to this cloud and put it in this data center. This needs to be reliable. I need to have access to the data. I need to be able to work with it. So, what does this really mean? And what does it unlock for your customers? >> Yes absolutely, I love to talk about this topic. I mean, if you think about databases, they are means to an end. And in this case, the end is being able to mine insights from the data and then make meaningful decisions based on that. So when we talk to customers, it's really clear that data has not become one of the most valuable assets that an organization owns. Well, of course, in addition to the employees that are part of the organization and our customers. Data is one of the most important assets. But most organizations, the challenges they face is a lot of data gets collected. And in fact, we've heard numbers thrown around for many years like, almost 80% of world's data has been created in the last like three or four years. And data is doubling every two years in terms of volume. Well guess what? Data gets collected. It sits there and organizations are struggling to get access to it with the right performance, the right security and regulation compliance, the reliability, availability, by persona, developers need certain access, analysts needs different access line of businesses need different access. So what we see is organizations are struggling in getting access to data at the right time by the right person on the team and when they need it. And I think that's where database as a service is critical. It's not just about having the database software which is of course important but how you know not make that service available to your stakeholders, to developers to lines of business within the SLAs that they demand. So is it instantly? How quickly can you make it available? How quickly can you use have access to data and do something meaningful with it? And mind the insights for smarter business? And then the one thing I'd like to add is that's where IT and business really come together. That's the glue. If you think about it today, what is the blue between an IT Organization and a business organization? It's the data. And that's where they're really coming together to say how can we together deliver the right service? So you, the business owner can deliver the right outcome for our business. >> That's very true. Maybe I'll just add a couple of comments there. What we're trying to do is we are trying to bring the cloud experience, the RDS-like experience to the enterprise cloud and then hybrid cloud. So the customers will now have a choice of cloud. They don't need to be locked in a particular cloud, at the same time enjoy the true cloud utility experience. We help customers create clouds, database clouds either by themselves if that's big enough to manage the cloud themselves or they can partner with a GSIs like Wipro, WorkHCL and then create a completely managed database service kind of stuff. So, this brings this cloud neutrality, portability for customers and give them the choice and their terms, Stu. >> Well Bala, absolutely we've seen a huge growth in managed services as you've said, maybe bring us inside a little bit. What is free up customers? What we've said for so long that back when HCI first started, it was some of the storage administrators might bristle because you were taking things away from them. It was like, no, we're going to free you up to do other things that as Monica said, deliver more business value not mapping LUNs and doing that. How about from the DBA standpoint? What are some of those repetitive, undifferentiated heavy lifting that we're going to take away from them so that they can focus on the business value. >> Yep. Thank you Stu. So think about this. We all do copy paste operations in laptops. Something of that sort happens in data center at a much larger scale. Meaning that the same kind of copy paste operation happens to databases and petabytes and terabytes of scale. Hundreds of petabytes. It has become the most dreaded complex, long running error prone operation. Why should it be that way? Why should the DBS spend all this mundane tasks and then get busy for every cloning operation? It's a two day job for me, every backup job. It's like a hobby job for provisioning takes like three days. We can take this undifferentiated heavy lifting by this and then let the DBS focus on designing the cloud for them. Looking for the database tuning, design data modeling, ML aspects of the data kind of stuff. So we are freeing up the database Ops people, in a way that they can design the database cloud, and make sure that they are energy focused on high valid things and more towards the business center kind of stuff. >> Yeah. And you know automation is really important. You were talking about is automating mundane grunt work. Like IT spends 80% of its time in maintaining systems. So then where is the time for innovation. So if we can automate stuff that's repetitive, stuff that the machine can do, the software can do, why not? And I think that's what our database as a service often does. And I would add this, the big thing our database as a service does really is provide IT organizations and DV organizations a way to manage heterogeneous databases too. It's not like, here's my environment for Postgres. Here's my environment for my SQL. Here's my environment for Oracle. Here's my environment for SQL server. Now with a single offering, a single tool you can manage your heterogeneous environment across different clouds. On premises cloud, or in a public cloud environment. So I think that's the beauty we are talking about with Nutanix's Era. Is a truly, truly gives organizations that single environment to manage heterogeneous databases, apply the same automation and the ease of management across all these different environments. >> Yeah. I'll just add one comment to that. A true managed PaaS obviously customers in like a single shop go to public cloud, just click through and then they get the database and point. And then if someone is managing the database for them. But if you look at the enterprise data centers, they need to bring that enterprise GalNets and structure to these databases. It's not like anyone can do anything to any or these databases. So we are kind of getting the best of both, the needed enterprise GalNets by these enterprise people at the same time bringing the convenience for the application teams and developers they want to consume these databases like utility. So bringing the cloud experience, bringing the enterprise GalNets. At same time, I'm super confident we can cut down the cost. So that is what Nutanix Era is all about across all the clouds, including the enterprise cloud. >> Well, Bala being simpler and being less expensive are one of the original promises of the cloud that don't necessarily always come out there. So, that's super important. One of the other things, you talk about these hybrid environments. It's not just studied, in the public cloud want to understand these environments, if I'm in the public cloud, can I still leverage some of the services that are in the public cloud? So, if I want to run some analytics, if I want to use some of the phenomenal services that are coming out every day. Is that something that can be done in this environment? >> Yeah, beautiful. Thank you Stu. So we are seeing customers who two categories. There is a public cloud customer, completely born in public cloud cloud, native services. They realize that for every database that maintaining five or seven different copies and the management of these copies is prohibited just because every copy is a faulty copy in the public cloud. Meaning you take a backup snapshot and restore it. Your meter like New York taxi, it starts with running for your EBS   and that you are looking at it kind of stuff. So they can leverage Nutanix clusters and then have a highly efficient cloning capability so that they can cut down some of these costs for these secondary environments that I talk about. What we call is copy data management, that's one kind of use case. The other kind of customers that we are seeing who's cloud is a phenomenon. There's no way that people have to move to cloud. That's the something at a C level mandate that happens. These customers are enjoying their database experience on our enterprise cloud. But when they try to go to these big hyperscalers, they are seeing the disconnect that they're not able to enjoy some of the things that they are seeing on the enterprise cloud with us. So this transition, they are talking to us. Can you get this kind of functionality with Nutanix platform onto some of these big hyperscalers? So there are kind of customers moving both sides, some customers that are public cloud they're time to enjoy our facilities other than copy data management and Nutanix. Customers that are on-prem but they have a mandate to good public cloud ,with our hybrid cloud strategy. They get to enjoy the same kind of convenience that they are seeing it on enterprise and bringing the same kind of governance that they used to do it. so that maybe see customers. Yeah. >> Yeah. Monica, I want to go back to something you talked about customers dealing with that heterogeneous environment that they have reminds me of a lot of the themes that we talked about at nutanix.next because customers have they have multiple clouds they're using, requires different skillsets, different tooling. It's that simplicity layer that Nutanix has been working to deliver since day one. What are you from your customers? How are they doing with this? And especially in the database world. What are some of those challenges that they're really facing that we're looking to help solve with the solution today. >> Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, what customers at least in our experience, what they want or what they're looking for is this modern cloud platform that can really work across multiple cloud environments. Cause people don't want to change running, let's say an Oracle database you're on-prem on a certain stack and then using a whole different stack to run Oracle database in the cloud. What they want is the same exact foundation. So be so they can be, for sure have the right performance. Availability, reliability, the applications don't have to be rewritten on top of Oracle database. They want to preserve all of that, but they want the flexibility to be able to run that cloud platform wherever they choose to. So that's one. So that's choosing the right and modernizing and choosing the right cloud platform is definitely very important to our customers, but you nailed it on the head Stu. It's been about how do you manage it? How do you operate it on a daily basis? And that's where our customers are struggling with multiple types of tools out there, custom tool for every single environment. And that's what they don't want. They want to be able to manage, simply across multiple environments using the same tools and skillsets. And again, and I'm going to beat the same drum, but that's when Nutanix shines. That's a design principle is. It's the exact same technology foundation that you provide to customers to run any applications. In this case it happens to be databases. Exact same foundation you can use to run databases on-prem in the cloud. And then on top of that using Era boom! Simple management, simple operations, simple provisioning simple copy data management, simple patching, all of that becomes easy using just a single framework to manage and operate. And I will tell you this, when we talk to customers, what is it that DBS and database teams are struggling with? They're struggling with SLS and performance on scalability, that's one, number two they're struggling with keeping it up and running and fulfilling the demands of the stakeholders because they cannot keep up with how many databases they need to keep provisioning and patching and updating. So at Nutanix now we are actually solving both those problems with the platform. We are solving the problem of a very specific SLA that we can deliver in any cloud. And with Era, you're solving the issue of that operational complexity. We're making it really easy. So again, IT stakeholders DBS can fulfill the demands of the business stakeholders and really help them monetize the data. >> Yeah. I'll just add on with one concrete examples too. Like we have a big financial customer, they want to run Postgres. They are looking at the public cloud. Can we do a manage services kind of stuff, but you look at this, that the cost difference between a Postgres and your company infrastructure versus managed services almost like $3X to $4X dollars. Now, with Nutanix platform and Era, we were able to show that they can do at much reduced cost, manage their best service experience including their DBA cost are including the cloud administration cost. Like we added the infrastructure picture. We added the people who are going to manage the cloud, internal cloud and then intern experience being, plus plus of what they can see to public cloud. That's what makes the big difference. And this is what data sovereignty, data control, compliance and infrastructure governance, all these things coupled with cloud experiences, what customers really see the value of Era and the enterprise cloud and with an extension to the public cloud, with our hybrid cloud strategy. if they want to move this workload to public cloud they can do it. So, today with AWS clusters and tomorrow with our Azure clusters. So that gives them that kind of insurance not getting locked in by a big hyperscaler, but at same time enjoy the cloud experience. That's what big customers are looking for. >> Alright Bala, all the things you laid out here, what's the availability of Era rotically dot two? >> Era rotically dot two is actually available today. The customers can enjoy download the bits. We already have bunches of beta customers who are trying it out with the recall big telco companies are financial companies, and even big companies that manage big pensions kind of stuff. Let's talk about that kind of stuff. People are looking to us. In fact, there are customers who are looking for, when is this available for Azure cluster so that we can move some of our workloads to and manage the databases in Azure classes. So it is available and I'm looking forward to great feedback from our customers. And I'm hoping that it will solve some of their major critical problems. And in the process they get the best of Nutanix. >> Monica, last question I have for you. This doesn't seem like it's necessarily the same traditional infrastructure go to market for a solution like this. If I think back to, people think of HCI it was like, Oh! well, it was kind of a new box. We know Nutanix is a software company. More of what you do today is subscription based. So, maybe if you could talk a little bit to just how Nutanix goes to market with a solution like this. >> Yeah. And you know what, maybe people don't realize it but I'm hoping a lot of people do that. Nutanix is not just an infrastructure company anymore. In the last many years we've developed a full cloud platform in not only do we offer the infrastructure services with hyperconverged infrastructure which is now really the foundation. It's the hybrid cloud infrastructure. As you know, Stu, we talked to you a month ago and we talked about the evolution of XCI to really becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. But in addition to that, we also offer other data center services on storage DR Networking. We also offer DevOps services with application provisioning automation, application orchestration and then of course, database services that we talking about today and we offer desktop services. So Nutanix has really evolved in the last few years to a complete cloud platform really focusing on the application and workloads that run on top of the infrastructure stack. So not just the infrastructure layer but how can we be the best platform to run your databases? Your end is the computing workloads, your analytics applications your enterprise applications, cloud native applications. So that's what this is. And databases is one of our most successful workloads that's that runs a Nutanix very well because of the way the infrastructure software is architected. Because it's really great to scale high performance because again our superior architecture. And now with Era, it's a tool, it's all in one. Now it's also about really simplifying the management of databases and delivering them speedily and with agility to drive innovation in the organizations. >> Yep. Thank you Monica. Thank you. I I'll just add a couple of lines of comments into that. DTM for databases as erotically dots two, is going to be a challenge. And historically we are seen as an infrastructure company but the beauty of databases is so and to send to the infrastructure, the storage. So the language slightly becomes easy. And in fact, this holistic way of looking at solving the problem at the solution level rather than infrastructure helps us to go to a different kind of buyer, different kinds of decision maker, and we are learning. And I can tell you confidently the kind of progress that we have seen for in one enough year, the kind of customers that we are winning. And we are proving that we can bring a big difference to them. Though there is a challenge of DTM speaking the language of database, but the sheer nature of cloud platform the way they are a hundred hyperscale work. That's the kind of language that we take. You can run your solution. And here is how you can cut down your database backup time from hours to less than minute. Here's how you can cut down your patching from 16 hours to less than one hour. It is how you can cut down your provisioning time from multiple weeks to let them like matter of minutes. That holistic way of approaching it coupled with the power of the platform, really making the big difference for us. And I usually tell every time I meet, can you give us an opportunity to cut down your database cost, the PC vote, total cost of operations by close to 50%? That gets them excited that lets then move lean in and say, how do you plan to do it? And then we go about how do we do it? And we do a deep dive and PC people and all of it. So I'm excited. I think this is going to be a big play for Nutanix. We're going to make big difference. >> Absolutely well, Bala, congratulations to the team. Monica, both of you thank you so much for joining, really excited for all the announcements. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you >> Stay with us. We're going to dig in a little bit more with one more interview for this product launch of the New Era and Database Management from Nutanix. I'm Stu Minimam as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (cool music)

(upbeat music) >> The cloud is evolving. You know, it's no longer a set of remote services somewhere off in the cloud, in the distance. It's expanding. It's moving to on-prem. On-prem workloads are connecting to the cloud. They're spanning clouds in a way that hides the plumbing and simplifies deployment, management, security, and governance. So hybrid multicloud is the next big thing in infrastructure, and at the recent Nutanix .NEXT conference, we got a major dose of that theme, and with me to talk about what we heard at that event, what we learned, why it matters, and what it means to customers are Monica Kumar, who's the senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix, and Tarkan Maner, who's the chief commercial officer at Nutanix. Guys, great to see you again. Welcome to the theCUBE. >> Great to be back here. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Okay, so you just completed another .NEXT. As an analyst, I like to evaluate the messaging at an event like this, drill into the technical details to try to understand if you're actually investing in the things that you're promoting in your keynotes, and then talk to customers to see how real it is. So with that as a warning, you guys are all in on hybrid multicloud, and I have my takeaways that I'd be happy to share, but, Tarkan, what were your impressions, coming out of the event? >> Look, you had a great entry. Our goal, as Monica is going to outline, too, cloud is not a destination. It's an operating model. Our customers are basically using cloud as a business model, as an operating model. It's not just a bunch of techno mumbo-jumbo, as, kind of, you outlined. We want to make sure we make cloud invisible to the customer so they can focus on what they need to focus on as a business. So as part of that, we want to make sure the workloads, the apps, they can run anywhere the way the customer wants. So in that context, you know, our entire story was bringing customer workloads, use-cases, partner ecosystem with ISVs and cloud providers and service providers and ISPs we're working with like Citrix on end user computing, like Red Hat on cloud native, and also bringing the right products, both in terms of infrastructure capability and management capability for both operators and application developers. So bringing all these pieces together and make it simple for the customer to use the cloud as an operating model. That was the biggest goal here. >> Great, thank you. Monica, anything you'd add in terms of your takeaways? >> Well, I think Tarkan said it right. We are here to make cloud complexity invisible. This was our big event to get thousands of our customers, partners, our supporters together and unveil our product portfolio, which is much more simplified, now. It's a cloud platform. And really have a chance to show them how we are building an ecosystem around it, and really bringing to life the whole notion of hybrid multicloud computing. >> So, Monica, could you just, for our audience, just summarize the big news that came out of .NEXT? >> Yeah, we actually made four different announcements, and most of them were focused around, obviously, our product portfolio. So the first one was around enhancements to our cloud platform to help customers build modern, software-defined data centers to speed their hybrid multicloud deployments while supporting their business-critical applications, and that was really about the next version of our flagship, AOS six, availability. We announced the general availability of that, and key features really included things like built-in virtual networking, disaster recovery enhancements, security enhancements that otherwise would need a lot of specialized hardware, software, and skills are now built into our platform. And, most importantly, all of this functionality being managed through a single interface, right? Which significantly decreases the operational overhead. So that was one announcement. The second announcement was focused around data services and really making it easy for customers to simplify data management, also optimize big data and database workloads. We announced capability that now improves performances of database workloads by 2x, big data workloads by 3x, so lots of great stuff there. We also announced a new service called Nutanix Data Lens, which is a new unstructured data governance service. So, again, I don't want to go into a lot of details here. Maybe we can do it later. That was our second big announcement. The third announcement, which is really around partnerships, and we'll talk more about that, is with Microsoft. We announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure, and that's really taking our entire flagship Nutanix platform and running it on Azure. And so, now, we are in preview on that one, and we're super excited about that. And then, last but not least, and I know Tarkan is going to go into a lot more detail, is we announced a strategic partnership with Citrix around the whole future of hybrid work. So lots of big news coming out of it. I just gave you a quick summary. There's a lot more around this, as well. >> Okay. Now, I'd like to give you my honest take, if you guys don't mind, and, Tarkan, I'll steal one of your lines. Don't hate me, okay? So the first thing I'm going to say is I think, Nutanix, you have the absolute right vision. There's no question in my mind. But what you're doing is not trivial, and I think it's going to play out. It's going to take a number of years. To actually build an abstraction layer, which is where you're going, as I take it, as a platform that can exploit all the respective cloud native primitives and run virtually any workload in any cloud. And then what you're doing, as I see it, is abstracting that underlying technology complexity and bringing that same experience on-prem, across clouds, and as I say, that's hard. I will say this: the deep dives that I got at the analyst event, it convinced me that you're committed to this vision. You're spending real dollars on focused research and development on this effort, and, very importantly, you're sticking to your true heritage of making this simple. Now, you're not alone. All the non-hyperscalers are going after the multicloud opportunity, which, again, is really challenging, but my assessment is you're ahead of the game. You're certainly focused on your markets, but, from what I've seen, I believe it's one of the best examples of a true hybrid multicloud-- you're on that journey-- that I've seen to date. So I would give you high marks there. And I like the ecosystem-building piece of it. So, Tarkan, you could course-correct anything that I've said, and I'd love for you to pick up on your comments. It takes a village, you know, you're sort of invoking Hillary Clinton, to bring the right solution to customers. So maybe you could talk about some of that, as well. >> Look, actually, you hit all the right points, and I don't hate you for that. I love you for that, as you know. Look, at the end of the day, we started this journey about 10 years ago. The last two years with Monica, with the great executive team, and overall team as a whole, big push to what you just suggested. We're not necessarily, you know, passionate about cloud. Again, it's a business model. We're passionate about customer outcomes, and some of those outcomes sometimes are going to also be on-prem. That's why we focus on this terminology, hybrid multicloud. It is not multicloud, it's not just private cloud or on-prem and non-cloud. We want to make sure customers have the right outcomes. So based on that, whether those are cloud partners or platform partners like HPE, Dell, Supermicro. We just announced a partnership with Supermicro, now, we're selling our software. HPE, we run on GreenLake. Lenovo, we run on TruScale. Big support for Lenovo. Dell's still a great partner to us. On cloud partnerships, as Monica mentioned, obviously Azure. We had a big session with AWS. Lots of new work going on with Red Hat as an ISV partner. Tying that also to IBM Cloud, as we move forward, as Red Hat and IBM Cloud go hand in hand, and also tons of workarounds, as Monica mentioned. So it takes a village. We want to make sure customer outcomes deliver value. So anywhere, for any app, on any infrastructure, any cloud, regardless standards or protocols, we want to make sure we have an open system coverage, not only for operators, but also for application developers, develop those applications securely and for operators, run and manage those applications securely anywhere. So from that perspective, tons of interest, obviously, on the Citrix or the UC side, as Monica mentioned earlier, we also just announced the Red Hat partnership for cloud services. Right before that, next we highlighted that, and we are super excited about those two partnerships. >> Yeah, so, when I talked to some of your product folks and got into the technology a little bit, it's clear to me you're not wrapping your stack in containers and shoving it into the cloud and hosting it like some do. You're actually going much deeper. And, again, that's why it's hard. You could take advantage of those things, but-- So, Monica, you were on the stage at .NEXT with Eric Lockhart of Microsoft. Maybe you can share some details around the focus on Azure and what it means for customers. >> Absolutely. First of all, I'm so grateful that Eric actually flew out to the Bay Area to be live on stage with us. So very super grateful for Eric and Azure partnership there. As I said earlier, we announced the preview of Nutanix Clusters and Azure. It's a big deal. We've been working on it for a while. What this means is that a select few organizations will have an opportunity to get early access and also help shape the roadmap of our offering. And, obviously, we're looking forward to then announcing general availability soon after that. So that's number one. We're already seeing tremendous interest. We have a large number of customers who want to get their hands on early access. We are already working with them to get them set up. The second piece that Eric and I talked about really was, you know, the reason why the work that we're doing together is so important is because we do know that hybrid cloud is the preferred IT model. You know, we've heard that in spades from all different industries' research, by talking to customers, by talking to people like yourselves. However, when customers actually start deploying it, there's lots of issues that come up. There's limited skill sets, resources, and, most importantly, there's a disparity between the on-premises networking security management and the cloud networking security management. And that's what we are focused on, together as partners, is removing that barrier, the friction between on-prem and Azure cloud. So our customers can easily migrate their workloads in Azure cloud, do cloud disaster recovery, create a burst into cloud for elasticity if they need to, or even use Azure as an on-ramp to modernize applications by using the Azure cloud services. So that's one big piece. The second piece is our partnership around Kubernetes and cloud native, and that's something we've already provided to the market. It's GA with Azure and Nutanix cloud platform working together to build Kubernetes-based applications, container-based applications, and run them and manage them. So there's a lot more information on nutanix.com/azure. And I would say, for those of our listeners who want to give it a try and who want their hands on it, we also have a test drive available. You can actually experience the product by going to nutanix.com/azure and taking the test drive. >> Excellent. Now, Tarkan, we saw recently that you announced services. You've got HPE GreenLake, Lenovo, their Azure service, which is called TruScale. We saw you with Keith White at HPE Discover. I was just with Keith White this week, by the way, face to face. Awesome guy. So that's exciting. You got some investments going on there. What can you tell us about those partnerships? >> So, look, as we talked through this a little bit, the HPE relationship is a very critical relationship. One of our fastest growing partnerships. You know, our customers now can run a Nutanix software on any HPE platform. We call it DX, is the platform. But beyond that, now, if the customers want to use HPE service as-a-service, now, Nutanix software, the entire stack, it's not only hybrid multicloud platform, the database capability, EUC capability, storage capability, can run on HPE's service, GreenLake service. Same thing, by the way, same way available on Lenovo. Again, we're doing similar work with Dell and Supermicro, again, giving our customers choice. If they want to go to a public club partner like Azure, AWS, they have that choice. And also, as you know, I know Monica, you're going to talk about this, with our GSI partnerships and new service provider program, we're giving options to customers because, in some other regions, HPE might not be their choice or Azure not be choice, and a local telco might the choice in some country like Japan or India. So we give options and capability to the customers to run Nutanix software anywhere they like. >> I think that's a really important point you're making because, as I see all these infrastructure providers, who are traditionally on-prem players, introduce as-a-service, one of the things I'm looking for is, sure, they've got to have their own services, their own products available, but what other ecosystem partners are they offering? Are they truly giving the customers choice? Because that's, really, that's the hallmark of a cloud provider. You know, if we think about Amazon, you don't always have to use the Amazon product. You can use actually a competitive product, and that's the way it is. They let the customers choose. Of course, they want to sell their own, but, if you innovate fast enough, which, of course, Nutanix is all about innovation, a lot of customers are going to choose you. So that's key to these as-a-service models. So, Monica, Tarkan mentioned the GSIs. What can you tell us about the big partners there? >> Yeah, definitely. Actually, before I talk about GSIs, I do want to make sure our listeners understand we already support AWS in a public cloud, right? So Nutanix totally is available in general, generally available on AWS to use and build a hybrid cloud offering. And the reason I say that is because our philosophy from day one, even on the infrastructure side, has been freedom of choice for our customers and supporting as large a number of platforms and substrates as we can. And that's the notion that we are continuing, here, forward with. So to talk about GSIs a bit more, obviously, when you say one platform, any app, any cloud, any cloud includes on-prem, it includes hyperscalers, it includes the regional service providers, as well. So as an example, TCS is a really great partner of ours. We have a long history of working together with TCS, in global 2000 accounts across many different industries, retail, financial services, energy, and we are really focused, for example, with them, on expanding our joint business around mission critical applications deployment in our customer accounts, and specifically our databases with Nutanix Era, for example. Another great partner for us is HCL. In fact, HCL's solution SKALE DB, we showcased at .NEXT just yesterday. And SKALE DB is a fully managed database service that HCL offers which includes a Nutanix platform, including Nutanix Era, which is our database service, along with HCL services, as well as the hardware/software that customers need to actually run their business applications on it. And then, moving on to service providers, you know, we have great partnerships like with Cyxtera, who, in fact, was the service provider partner of the year. That's the award they just got. And many other service providers, including working with, you know, all of the edge cloud, Equinix. So, I can go on. We have a long list of partnerships, but what I want to say is that these are very important partnerships to us. All the way from, as Tarkan said, OEMs, hyperscalers, ISVs, you know, like Red Hat, Citrix, and, of course, our service provider, GSI partnerships. And then, last but not least, I think, Tarkan, I'd love for you to maybe comment on our channel partnerships as well, right? That's a very important part of our ecosystem. >> No, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Monica. As you suggested, our GSI program is one of the best programs in the industry in number of GSIs we support, new SP program, enterprise solution providers, service provider program, covering telcos and regional service providers, like you suggested, OVH in France, NTT in Japan, Yotta group in India, Cyxtera in the US. We have over 50 new service providers signed up in the last few months since the announcement, but tying all these things, obviously, to our overall channel ecosystem with our distributors and resellers, which is moving very nicely. We have Christian Alvarez, who is running our channel programs globally. And one last piece, Dave, I think this was important point that Monica brought up. Again, give choice to our customers. It's not about cloud by itself. It's outcomes, but cloud is an enabler to get there, especially in a hybrid multicloud fashion. And last point I would add to this is help customers regardless of the stage they're in in their cloud migration. From rehosting to replatforming, repurchasing or refactoring, rearchitecting applications or retaining applications or retiring applications, they will have different needs. And what we're trying to do, with Monica's help, with the entire team: choice. Choice in stage, choice in maturity to migrate to cloud, and choice on platform. >> So I want to close. First of all, I want to give some of my impressions. So we've been watching Nutanix since the early days. I remember vividly standing around the conference call with my colleague at the time, Stu Miniman. The state-of-the-art was converged infrastructure, at the time, bolting together storage, networking, and compute, very hardware centric. And the founding team at Nutanix told us, "We're going to have a software-led version of that." And you popularized, you kind of created the hyperconverged infrastructure market. You created what we called at the time true private cloud, scaled up as a company, and now you're really going after that multicloud, hybrid cloud opportunity. Jerry Chen and Greylock, they just wrote a piece called Castles on the Cloud, and the whole concept was, and I say this all the time, the hyperscalers, last year, just spent a hundred billion dollars on CapEx. That's a gift to companies that can add value on top of that. And that's exactly the strategy that you're taking, so I like it. You've got to move fast, and you are. So, guys, thanks for coming on, but I want you to both-- maybe, Tarkan, you can start, and Monica, you can bring us home. Give us your wrap up, your summary, and any final thoughts. >> All right, look, I'm going to go back to where I started this. Again, I know I go back. This is like a broken record, but it's so important we hear from the customers. Again, cloud is not a destination. It's a business model. We are here to support those outcomes, regardless of platform, regardless of hypervisor, cloud type or app, making sure from legacy apps to cloud native apps, we are there for the customers regardless of their stage in their migration. >> Dave: Right, thank you. Monica? >> Yeah. And I, again, you know, just the whole conversation we've been having is around this but I'll remind everybody that why we started out. Our journey was to make infrastructure invisible. We are now very well poised to helping our customers, making the cloud complexity invisible. So our customers can focus on business outcomes and innovation. And, as you can see, coming out of .NEXT, we've been firing on all cylinders to deliver this differentiated, unified hybrid multicloud platform so our customers can really run any app, anywhere, on any cloud. And with the simplicity that we are known for because, you know, our customers love us. NPS 90 plus seven years in a row. But, again, the guiding principle is simplicity, portability, choice. And, really, our compass is our customers. So that's what we are focused on. >> Well, I love not having to get on planes every Sunday and coming back every Friday, but I do miss going to events like .NEXT, where I meet a lot of those customers. And I, again, we've been following you guys since the early days. I can attest to the customer delight. I've spent a lot of time with them, driven in taxis, hung out at parties, on buses. And so, guys, listen, good luck in the next chapter of Nutanix. We'll be there reporting and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you so much, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and, as always, we'll see you next time. (light music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .Next 2018 here in London, England. We're gonna be talking about developers in this segment. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost is Joep Piscaer. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests, Bala Kuchibhotla is the General Manager of Nutanix Era, and sitting next to him is Greg Muscarella who recently joined Nutanix, is Vice President of Products at Nutanix. Both of you been up on stage, Greg was talking about Carbon and cloud native, and of course Era is the databases of service. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to be here. >> Alright, so look, developers. You know, we were thinking back, you know, I love the old meme, developers, developers, developers! Balmer had it right, and style might not have been there. Microsoft, company that does quite well with developers. You know, my background is in the enterprise space. I'm an infrastructure guy that goes to cloud, and the struggle I've had a little bit is, you know, developers really work from the application down. It's like that's where they live, and as an infrastructure guy, it's a little uncomfortable for me. So maybe to set that stage, because you know I look at Nutanix, you know, at it's core, infrastructure's a big piece of it, but its distributed architectures, it's built from the architecture from like really the hyper-scale type of environments. So help connect the dots as to where Nutanix plays with the developers, and then we'll get into your products and everything else after. Bala, you want to start? >> Cool, okay. So as you know, Nutanix is definitely addressing the IT ops market. We cannot simply its storage, compute, networking, and build the infrastructure as service. Obviously if you look at the private cloud, the IT operators are becoming the cloud operators and then giving them to the developers. We are basically trying to build a cloud for IT operators so they can present the cloud to developer. Now that we have this infrastructure pretty much there for quite some time, we're not expanding the services to other things, the platform, the platform as service. Now going back to the developer community, you will have the same kind of cloud-like consumption. That these cloud operators, the IT operators are providing the cloud for you. US developers get the same kind of public cloud consumption. They lack ability, that the ability you are trying to do, easy tools, (mumbling), and S3s, that kind of stuff, EBS, you have the same kind of APS for our Nutanix that you can spin up a VM, spin up a database, spin up a storage and then do what you want to do kind of stuff. So that's the natural journey for that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, Greg? >> Yeah, I have to agree. Look, the world has changed quite a bit for developers, and it's gotten a lot better. If you look at the tooling and what you can now do on your laptop and spinning up what would be a pretty complex environment from a three tier application with a robust database, an app tier, anything else you might have on the storage side, spin it up, break it down, and with your CICD pipeline you can have it deployed to production pretty rapidly. So we look at doing is, you know, recreating that experience that the cloud has really brought to those developers and having the same type of tooling for those enterprise-grade applications that are going to be deployed, you know, on that infrastructure that is needed in private data centers. >> So looking at, you know, one of the reasons why developers love cloud services so much, it's easy for them. They can just consume it, it's very low friction. They don't even really, you know, need to go through a purchasing process, other than credit card maybe paid for themselves in the beginning. So you know, low friction is really the key word here. So I'm wondering, you know, looking at the Nutanix, the IT ops perspective, how are you kinda bring that low friction into the developer world? >> Yeah, so I'll take the question. So essentially what I am seeing is the world in the enterprise world is very fragmented. People doing silos kind of stuff. As you rightly said, developers really want to be liberated from all this bureaucracy, right? So they really need a service kind of world where they can go click on it, they get their compute kind of stuff. There's a pressure on the IT ops to give that experience, otherwise people will flee to public a lot. As simple as that, right? So to me, the way I see is the IT ops, the DB ops, the traditional DB ops inner ring, they are understanding the need that, hey well, we gotta be service-ified. We want to provide that kind of service-like interface to our teams who are consuming that kinda stuff. So this software, Nutanix as the enterprise cloud software, lets them create their own private cloud and then give those services to the developers kinda stuff. So it's a natural transition as a company for us. We got to start from the cloud operators, now we're exposing the cloud services from the cloud operators to the cloud consumers. Essentially the developers. >> Greg, up on stage you talked about cloud native, and your premise is that cloud native is a term for a methodology, not necessarily that it's born in the cloud. Maybe help explain that a little bit, and you know, we think Nutanix is mostly in data centers today, so, you know, why isn't this just saying, "No, no, no, we can be cloud native, too." >> Fair point, and I think we're not alone in that as well, in being an enterprise infrastructure company that was looking at enabling cloud native applications, our cloud native architecture within the private data center Say look, really it's a form of doing distributed computing, right, and that's the core to it, right? So you have a stateless, ephemeral infrastructure. You're not upgrading things, you know, you're blowing it away and rebuilding it. There's some core things like that, that will move across whether it be in the cloud or on prem. And of course you need tooling for that, right, 'cause that's not the methodology most enterprise developers or operators are really going through, right, so everything's pets, not much cattle. We're really trying to change that quite a bit, and that's both enabling technology but it's also the practices that people will deploy. And we're seeing is, it's not so much us trying to sell this it's more like hey, we're used to this in the cloud, why can't we do this on prem in our private data center where we have all of our data, and the other services that we need to interact with, like, that's where the demand's really coming from. So it's that mass of data they want to interact with with the type of architecture that they've gotten used to for rapid development and deployment. >> So one other thing, you mentioned pets versus cattle. One of the things I've been seeing from, you know, an IT ops perspective is you need a good ecosystem of management products around your pets or your cattle to be able to make it cattle, right? If you don't have the tooling, you're gonna do manual interaction, and it's going to become pets. So I'm wondering, you know, in that cloud native space, how are you helping the IT ops to actually make it a cattle experience, and you know, towards management or monitoring, or backup stuff like that? >> So, you know, a lot of that is surrounded around Kubernetes, right, as a center of mass. So it's not just us doing it, it's us pulling in a lot of the support and ecosystem that is being built by the community for that and leveraging that piece. And then we have other things we'll either add onto that as it integrates with our platform and some of the capabilities there, or things that we may do, just again, pure open source. Give you a couple examples of that, so I mentioned Epoch on stage, right, so it's sort of something that brings additional metrics to Prometheus. So in addition to CPU and memory storage consumption, you're actually getting latency and other more business metrics that you might be using to trigger things in Kubernetes, like auto-scaling. I don't necessarily always scale on CPU or memory, maybe it's a customer experience that's difficult to measure The other thing is because we have the storage layer underneath, you know, we look at doing things like, again it's early in Kubernetes, but snapshotting from within Kubernetes. Right, so if we have a CSI provider, why not from within Kubernetes let an application or a container trigger a snapshot. Underneath our storage layer will take that snap and then it becomes an object that's available from within Kubernetes. So there's a whole lot of things happening. >> I just want to add a couple of comments to that. This pets versus cattle is standardization, right, like we're talking about it. In typical, old legacy enterprises there are let's take the example of databases. Like, every application team has their own databases they are trying to pass, they're all trying to do management around it kind of stuff. When we do a couple of servers, like we looked at around 2,400 databases for a typical company, they have 400 different configurations of the software. And so like this is one of the biggest companies that we talking about kind of stuff. With that kind of stuff they cannot manage cloud, obviously. This is not no more a cattle kind of stuff. But how do you bring that kind of standardization, right? That is where the Era as a product is actually coming into this. We are trying to standardize, but when you try to standardize these database environments for on premise enterprise cloud, you have to do it at their terms. What I meant to try to say is when you try to go for public cloud, you have this catalog 11204 pull the node to PSE5, you can only create databases with whatever the software the public cloud guys are doing it. But on premise needs are slightly different. So that is where Nutanix, Era, and this products will come into. We allow to people to create the cloud, and then we allow them to create their own catalog of software that they can standardize. So that is what I call standardization at their customer terms, that's what we're trying. >> And let me add to that, though. It also brings in this convenience, 'cause not only is it coming up with standardize, but we've made it even more convenient, right, because now a developer can go provision their own database, they're gonna get a standard configuration for what that is, and so you made it easier for developers and you're getting something that is more cattle-like. >> Bala, I think you're in a good seat to be able to actually give us a little bit of independent commentary, you know. The movement of databases is one of the hottest topics in the industry. I haven't seen whether Andy Jassy was sparing back with Larry Ellison, you know, at re:Invent this week, but you know, we've been watching the growth of things like Postgres, and lot of these changes, you know, Era sits clearly in that space. So what do you seeing from customers, you know, the modernization of applications is, you know, what I call the long pole in the tent. It's the toughest thing for me to be able to do. I said we usually want to first, you know, you modernize your platform, Nutanix helps with that, public cloud helps with that, and then I can modernize my application. You know, database tends to be, it's the stickiest application that we have in the industry. So what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so there are two class of applications that we see. This space is completely green field We are starting off completely. People love cloud-like experience and cloud native databases that's where the public cloud can kind of try to help them. But if you see 70 to 80% of the money still is with all the traditional apps. You're trying to now cloudify them. The cloud native stack that we talk about, the cloud native database, is not going to the game. Like you really need to think about how do you kind of take these big, giant databases that are there with Oracles, and DBTools, that kind of stuff but give the cloud-like experience, right? So the actually very difficult game for any public cloud, that's why you don't see rack provisioning and a dot list is still not there, or even if JCP natively. Oracle does that but little bit difficult. Data gravity forces people to come to on premise, that's my humble take on this, right. But how do you build, how do you make this gray area I call it a brown field, and convert them into more of a consumer-centered kind of stuff? That's where Era actually tries to play. It has two roles that, if you have existing databases, we turn to kind of convert them into more of a cloud-like databases for you, or if you have a green field then we can get you directly onto the cloud native experience. Or if you're trying to migrate from technology to other technology, definitely we would like to help. These are the three things that we try to do through Era kinda of stuff, yeah. >> So looking forward, you know, we're starting out with databases, you know, making that simple, making that small so that there's less friction in that. So maybe a question for Greg, so what's the future for Nutanix in, you know, enabling other services, other cloud-like services on a Nutanix platform going forward? >> In addition to databases. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, so we're a big proponent of standard APIs, as I talked about, right, so we have that in storage for a long time, that makes things easy with databases. We have a standard client talking to standard database backends. As we see other core building blocks, those are the kind of things that we're gonna want to build and deliver as well. So S3 is a defacto standard for object storage, for instance, so people are following that. You'll get Pub/Sub with Kafka APIs, Druid. There's a whole bunch of things, especially from the Apache project, that have become sort of defacto standards, so really it's like, okay, well which building blocks are needed by developers to build these applications that they want, and how do we really work the the community to establish those as open standards. 'Cause we really want, you know, I talked about the portability quite a bit. So we don't want anyone locked into our stack or anyone else's stack, it's like hey, let's build with the best toolkits, let's use standard, open APIs, and then developers get what they need which is portability, or run the application where they want to run it. So that's our strategy of going forward. >> Into some-I-tab we have easy to equal end, which is AHV, we have EBS equal end, we have our called Acropolis Block Services. We have S3 equal end, which is called Buckets, we have database RDS equal end, we have Era, and now we are going with content as which we call Carbon. So we are trying to kind of look at those critical services for anyone, especially for developers, to say that man, it's all ecosystem, it's not like one piece, single piece It's not this compute, it's not this storage, but it is an ecosystem of services that we need to kind of predict. >> Want to just come back to what we were talking beginning, the relationship with developers. How much of what Nutanix does is really kind of the IT ops that then enables developers, and how much direct developer engagement is it? Like, you know, is there development activity here at the conference going on that we should know about? I know that Nutanix goes to a lot of the developer shows. But maybe if you could give us some commentary on that. >> Yeah, I can start that, it's a path, right? So currently we certainly have the bulk of our interactions are gonna be on the IT operations side, and so it's only through them, because their customers are the developers that we really interact primarily today. But you should see that changing quite a bit, and I think that you'll that with the tools that we're providing directly to developers to interact with you know, through the APIs like they have Era. So for instance, if IT has deployed Era internally, then if I want a database I can go straight to those APIs or command line to grab those things. And you'll see that continuously be a trend as we let developers interact directly with our products. >> Just to give you an example, right, within the company, within Nutanix, we are drinking our own champaign, right. So we are operating a private cloud and we are exposing our APIs to all our developers. Today, if someone wants a database in Nutanix, they go to a control plane and say I want a database. Right, that's the API. How the infrastructure is getting, it's a means to an end for them, right. That's where we are going with our customers, too, hey, here is how you build your private cloud, here is how you expose all your service end points for different services, and your developers just need to enjoy them. And then there's a building aspect of it, that's the nuance that private clouds need to deal with. How do they charge the developers, how do they charge meter, that kind of stuff that people will talk about today. >> You know, I definitely heard when I talked to all the product teams, especially everything in Zai cloud, you know, extensibility with APIs is built into everything you're doing. So we're going to have to leave it there. Greg, we're gonna be catching up with you and the Nutanix team in two weeks at the Cube-Con show in Seattle. So thanks so much for joining us. Bala, pleasure, thanks for giving us all the update. And thank you, we're gonna be back with more coverage here. From Nutanix .Next 2018 in London, I'm Stu Miniman and Joep Piscaer is my cohost. Going to be do a Dutch session in a second, so be sure to stay with that. First foreign language interview on theCUBE, and thank you for watching. (electronic music)

(digital chime) (camera shutter) (bright pop music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> This is SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE, live in New Orleans, Louisiana, I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program, fresh off the keynote stage, marching band, you know, floats coming in, Mardi Gras atmosphere, and a slew of new products and updates. Sunil Potti, Chief Product & Development Officer at Nutanix. Sunil, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, likewise Stu, anytime. >> Alright, so a lot that you covered in, so let's get into it, start with, you know, some of the broad company updates. We've been talking about this journey for making everything invisible. I'm waiting, the next time you're going to have the invisible man. Is a... no, no, no, you're putting the IT person forward. >> Yeah, you know we talk about that continuum between all the way from mainframes to like, whatever, HCI to now we've got cloud instance, hyper-converge, then cloud, and then there's functions. Then eventually we'll have NaaS, which is nothing as a service. Right, something like that, but I mean our journey I think of invisible infrastructure started off at hyper-convergence, so computing storage, and essentially it's just increased layers of convergence is how we see it, so if you can converge the networking stack, we converge the automation aspects, then we go in invisible data centers, and then eventually if you hyper-converge the cloud, CapEx and OpEx, public cloud, private clouds, distributed clouds, then you get an invisible cloud. So it's essentially, I think that's really how we've sort of professed this conference is invisible infrastructure evolving to invisible data centers to evolving to invisible clouds. >> You know, so Sunill, one of the things, if we've been talking to your customers, the question is, "Who is the Nutanix customer?" So, when we talked about kind of HCI, even before it was HCI, let's get ourselves out of the silos, you were working with the administrators and the architects. You've built some of these things, you know, you've got a new SaaS offering, you've got micro-segmentation. You're touching more of the business, and sometimes going up the stack too. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Who do you see as the primary customers? >> Yeah, I mean, I think for us, you know, if we just stayed as a broad HCI platform play, then we would probably be slowly making up our way of, between the server guys and the storage guys and maybe the director of infrastructure and so forth. And a lot of it has been groundswell movement for Nutanix over the last six, seven years, right? But, you know, this is what I talk about it to our customers, like when you actually go to cloud on AWS or GCP, there is no storage admin, there is no server admin, there's no one. There's only a cloud architect, and so I think that's what we've seen over the last few years is this evolution to this one single org called the cloud org within enterprises, and then you heard me say this before about this, you know eventually as we move up, our value up the stack, as we go from invisible infrastructure to clouds, our relevancy is also growing to the CIO, because the CIO can now be the CAO, which is the Chief Amazon Officer, or the Chief Alphabet, or the Chief Azure Officer, essentially the Chief Cloud Officer, where we can help them blur the lines between AWS inside, which is Nutanix, and then AWS outside. >> Yeah, I love that, because when we talk to customers, it's not "I'm building out "my multicloud, hybrid cloud, composite," whatever you want to call it, it's "We're "figuring out our digital transformation, "and we've got applications, we've got stuff we're SaaSifying, "there's cool things I've built, you know, "in the public cloud, and I've got, you know, "my data center and the transformation that "I'm going through there." So, the question I have for you is, what is Nutanix's position in the cloud? I didn't hear you going up on stage saying you're going to put five to 10 billion dollars a year into building out data centers and availability zones, and all those things there. Sometimes people misconstrue some of the journey and things like Zy, and they're like, "Oh, it rhymes with what Amazon's doing," or even many times, you know, similar services to an Amazon there, but partnerships with the public cloud providers, and you know, please help us set the record straight, that you're not standing up a public cloud. >> Yeah, I think look, we think increasingly the world, of the world of clouds is a dispersed world, right? I mean, you had to say that we think this construct called the core cloud, which is essentially both, you know, a private version and a public version that's harmonized together into this one enterprise core cloud, but then increasingly we are seeing cloud-like architecture in a remote office branch office or in a retail store, so we call that the distributed cloud, and then it's also with IOT especially, it's getting extended all the way to the edge, whether it be a one-node Nutanix deployment talking to a data center of clusters talking to GCP for machine learning. So we think that the world of clouds is going to emerge as the de facto standard, and public cloud just happens to be a big percentage of that. Private cloud will also be a decent percentage of that. So will these other clouds, so what we need is, I guess, one OS to bind them all, right? And that's the end goal for what we're embarking on, so one of the things that we've recognized is that one of different kinds of clouds is an extended enterprise cloud, where instead of having two primary data centers and two secondary data centers, and then having five cloud availability zones, why even be in the secondary business? What if the secondary data centers were subsumed into a cloud as a service, but you retained the same operational tooling as your primary data center? And that's really where Zy's footprint comes in is, it's to augment what a customer is going through's journey of private cloud or public cloud to this distributed cloud environment, that there will be some news cases that need to be fulfilled using the same cloud architecture. >> So Sunil, let's talk about the customer journey alongside Nutanix's journey. You guys are walking, term I heard a lot so far in the conference is, Nutanix is our partner, our partner in this journey in digital transformation. However, the customer today is very much infrastructure customers. You guys talk to developers, internal customers of your customers. What has been that story, and what has been that conversation? What have, what have you guys learned, and what have you taught your customers along the way? >> I mean I think it's, look we generally know, as I've mentioned on stage today, that we're in another decades worth of journey, as we go from invisible infrastructure to invisible clouds. That's not going to happen in six six months or so, but what we're finding is that, in the last, I would say four to five years, the view of what cloud can be used for, the "why" of cloud has changed. Initially, there used to be, "Oh, I need to get past IT," by developers, then it eventually became, "Oh, no, no, no, I need to use it as a way to, you know, to deliver a better IT." Now it's being used as a way to actually drive my business. And that's why we use the word digital transformation, just because it's a direct connotation to driving the top line, right? So, when you look at our customers and the journey that we're on, we also want to set expectations of what we are versus what we are not, right? So we're not about enabling the applications to be built, in the sense that, you know, we're not application software companies, but at the end of the day though, if we can abstract out all the, if I can call it, issues below an app and allow IT or the business to focus on a new org that we're calling, you know, the CIO and the CTO merged to be the CDO, right, the Chief Digital Officer, that becomes one org, and that's what we're seeing with many of our large customers is, many of our customers are, their orgs, either they were in the CIO organization, or the infrastructure organization, or the cloud organization, they're all now being merged into the CDO org, and the goal then becomes for it to power a digital transformation through various apps, but with our, essentially leveraging infrastructure as a boat anchor, right? It's more of an accelerator at that point. >> So, there's debate on where that ends, like you know, we can talk about with edge computing, like where does edge start and the core begin. The same thing with infrastructure. You guys made a really interesting announcement around your capability with databases today and being able to, I don't even know the term but, to put a prism-like experience to databases. Talk about those areas around what we've considered traditionally infrastructure, storage network compute, going to this middleware layer, where do you think you can help customers simplify their journey? >> I mean, I think just to recap, some of the ways that we've, you know, approached this year is, look we think about it as three layers of the cloud stack, which is we had computer storage virtualization and we sort of completed the IA stack with our Flow product, which delivers one-click secure networks. And then for the first time, even though our stack is good for running third-party workloads, just like the public cloud runs a lot of PaaS services, increasingly in enterprises, customers are asking for an opinionated view of a PaaS service. So we do have third-party partnerships with Cloudera, Hortonworks, a whole bunch of other third-party providers, but the core database workload, especially with Oracle being such a complex beast, but it's mainstream, the customer has said, "Look, "can you provide a one plus one "equals three kind of solution "for the world of database?" And that's what Nutanix Era is, and that sort of becomes sort of cornerstone of our first PaaS service, where we're trying to simplify database operations, including things like Oracle RAC, and that's what we demonstrated was to actually provision Oracle RAC in minutes, make clones, create dev instances, and democratize databases for the rest of developers using APIs. So that's the sort of evolution of the stack for us with Nutanix Era, and then we didn't stop there. We also sort of innovated with our first Nutanix SaaS service, with this product called Beam with the acquisition of Minjar, which essentially says, look multi-cloud needs to start with stability, and then obviously you enable control and then you add operational automation, and then visibility and so forth, right? So, with Beam there, it's sort of, sort of sets the stage for the fact that we can now add more to the multi-cloud portfolio. >> Sinil, Beam's an interesting one. Your first SaaS offering. Keith and I were talking before this. There are lots of companies out there that are trying to tackle this challenge. >> Sunil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> With that have, you know, every single platform company out there is trying to tackle this, and then there's lot of independents. There's a lot that goes into, you know, maintaining, advising, you know, the whole consultancy world has spent decades doing this. How do you balance product development efforts there versus, you know, your core platform? You know, should this be an indication that you're going to build out a SaaS portfolio in the future? >> Got it, got it, got it. I know, that's a great question. So, so I think, just to take a step back, Minjar was an interesting company, because Netsil, the other acquisition, is also a bought in the cloud SaaS service that will integrate for hybrid, you know, visibility and networking, but also stand-alone application operations. But Minjar had this interesting history where it was originally a high-end advisory service for AWS. >> Stu: Right. >> It was in the top-five service partners for AWS, and they actually had dozens of customers that they still operate and manage and provide, you know, get a lot of learnings from helping customers, sort of, they are like the Navy SEALS of AWS and so forth, right? And when they built this product, which is now called as Beam, what we think about it is that, look that particular capability is a feature of a platform. It's not a stand-alone product category. What people are going to be looking forward to is a multi-cloud operational fabric, that has an app store and a marketplace, where I can go in and consume services, whether it be on prem or off prem, have a single pane of glass for visibility, again on prem or off prem, and then do one-click automation or orchestration, right? And so the fact that this single pane of glass has to cut over on prem as well as public cloud is the reason why we believe Nutanix has a play here to kind of make it a core feature, because we at least own one pillar of it, which is the on-prem stack, and to the extent that we can do an honest job of extending it to a deep job on AWS and DCP and others, then I think there's value added. >> How do you get closer to the application? When I look at this space, Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft have all been talking some similar messages on this, and that, the cloud strategies that they've gone through have that operational model, and you know, they own these applications, so you know, why Nutanix? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's another interesting question. So look, I think the world of apps, and I would say that power shift is happening obviously. We know that with IBM, but even with Oracle, as a mainstream enterprise app, if you really look at, say a public cloud conference, especially AWS's conference, if anything, the only vendor that they take potshots at is Oracle, because they see it as long-hanging fruit in the enterprise from a complexity side, right? And I think with the advent of cloud, the first time the customers have seen a real alternative to move away from this SQL engine on Oracle to potential Postgres or other alternatives. But to do that, you need abstractions. I need to be able to simplify my current environment of Oracle. At the same time, do it in a way that I can actually harmonize the API so that, oh, at some point, can I actually create another instance, but it's on Postgres, right? And the more I can provide that abstracted APIs, the more, you know, flexibility that's there for the customers to actually move from this legacy apps to the next generation apps. So I think, I guess the simple answer to your question is, look for us, even if you're not in the app business, if anything it's an asset than a liability, because then we can be completely neutral to the transformation from the old to the new. We have no skin in the game of keeping you in the old architecture, so if a customer says, "Look, I need to manage "my old, but I need an accelerated "way to get to the new cloud-native apps," then we are all for it. >> So Sinil, one of the, I think I would call this one of the first principles of Nutanix is this ideal of want-quick provisioning, the ability to simplify really complex, really hard things. You guys did it with HCI. The database management piece is another example. You're talking about it now, with ACS and the cloud. Let's talk about the, what happens when you zig when you should have zagged. In the case of going with Docker, the leading solution at the time, >> Sure, sure. >> Seemed like the right approach to go, now you guys are zagging. What makes Nutanix capable of making such a quick change and providing the consistent layer, like as customers go along with you on this journey, 6they count on APIs, they count on integrations, they count on just to, that basic capability and that it's stable. What gives customers the comfort level, that you know what, the complex stuff, Nutanix will take care of, if there needs to be a course correction from a culture and development platform perspective, they can right the ship? >> Yeah, no I think to your first question there Keith, I think, look, in this era now, it doesn't matter which business you're in, the time to succeed obviously is accelerated, but the time to fail is also accelerated, right? We just have to internalize that in our DNA. I would say of any high-growth company is to just be honest about failing fast. And I, yeah I mean I think Docker was a thing a year and a half ago, and we were early to market, and in fact, I would say it was our ACs and a couple of guys in Europe who actually recognized that, look why are we focusing on all this, when every customer that I talk to is testing out Kubernetes. And sure, we were sitting in Silicon Valley and Kubernetes was just coming up and so forth, and so I think it's two things, one their internalization that look, we have to fail fast in a high-growth business like ours. And then two, having the sensors that give us indications of, are we in the right course or not is also important. And so, the other thing that I would say that has worked well with this company than my prior companies is the fact that it, while it is hierarchical for scale, it is one inch to end from a communications perspective. Things like Slack, things like the communication mechanism, allow us to have that real-time touch with the front guys that focus on the customers and so forth. So, so for example, once the clarity was there around ACS to kind of zag on Kubernetes, the whole system was able to lean in, because the "why" of doing that was clear. The "what" and the "how" follow, right? I mean that's really what, how we will keep it going. >> Alright Sunil, before we let you you go, I want to bring back to the infrastructure side. You've had a few of the solutions that are growing really fast. I know you've highlighted the AFS, the Acropolis File Services. I've got the new object service that just got announced. At core platform, what are the areas that are catching wildfire for your customers? >> That's a great question, so on the core platform, which is still our bread and butter to some extent, our core focus has been about it becoming like the OS for the enterprise, period, right? And there's no workloads left as an island. And right now if I can, you know, three years ago we were talking about workloads that we're good for. Nowadays, I talk about workloads that we're not good for. So if I'm a scale-up database that requires certification, I can tell you about some of those that we are short of getting certified, but once that happens, there should be no workload that we're not good far. And that's where AFS comes in, that's where object services come in is, these are all requirements in the core OS that are needed to solve for those kinds of workloads. And, one thing though, to Keith's earlier point, that we have tried to keep honest, and that's why some of these take longer to come out, is that they still have to hold the bar of instant upgrades. Start small, start quickly, pay as you grow. They all have to follow the same ground rules, right? And that is what is keeping us honest frankly, in the overall desire. >> Okay, want to give you the final word, as Keith said, your customers consider Nutanix a partner. As they leave Nutanix .NEXT 2018, how should they be considering Nutanix? >> Yeah, no I think leaving Nutanix, they should recognize us as a company that obviously needs to be hungry, that needs to have a bold vision. We, you know, in our core values, we will make mistakes, we are vulnerable. But we are, you know, hopefully transparent about it, so that that's the, at the end of the day, the core essence of a partnership is that level of transparency between two people, right? And that's what we are hoping that customers will take away from the conference. >> Alright, well Sunil, it's always been a pleasure to document everything going at, since the inaugural .NEXT back in Miami, and we'll look forward to seeing you at the next show, where we'll make sure to pin you on, you know, how we've gone first. >> Sounds good. >> Sunil Potti and Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, be back with lots more coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)