>> Live from Anaheim, California, it's the Cube! Covering Nutanix.next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are the Cube. We are the ESPN of tech. We have two tech athletes on with us today. We have Asvin Ramesh, AVP marketing and alliances technology services at Cognizant. Welcome. And we have Inder Sidhu, EVP global customer success at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Inder. >> Thank you. >> So why don't I start with you. For viewers who are not familiar with Cognizant, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do, what you're all about. >> Sure, so Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies. We focus on transforming clients' business model, operating model and technology model. Naztech listed at 16 billion revenue last year. We are a Fortune 200 company. We work with about half of the Fortune 200 companies. And companies trust us to help transform the work that they're doing. >> Those are tall orders. (laughs) So what are you hearing from customers right now? What are their biggest challenges that they're facing? >> So, I think customers are basically in two buckets, as we see it, right? We see customers who are inherently excited about the challenges that they're facing, and there are other customers who are still grappling how to figure out the onslaught that's coming at them. And if I just abstract this beyond technology into the overall spectrum of how I look at it, it really transforms to what I call, are customers set or not? And that translates to social, economic and technology. There are a lot of social changes that are happening because of all the things that are going on. How well are companies able to adapt to those social changes? Really makes a difference in their ability to engage with the consumer. There are a lot of economic changes, economic martyrs that are being brought. How well are companies being able to adapt to those economic models? And more importantly from where Nutanix and Cognizant sit, technology is playing a huge role, both on the social and the economic angle. So how do companies leverage technology to be able to drive that change? And how well you do these three things really makes a difference in customers' lives. >> Talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's the relationship? Obviously partner, you have customers. They got the software now and hardware before, all coming together. What's the relationship how you guys work together? >> It's fantastic. We've been a partner with Nutanix for more than three years. And, I think the critical piece and foundational elements of the partnership with Nutanix, more than the products that they bring out because they're constantly innovating all the time, I think is on a bedrock of transparency, flexibility, and specificity. So there's a lot of transparency in terms of their roadmap, and we get a sense of where they're headed. They get a sense of where we're headed and how we are focused and what our strategy is. That allows us to really lock into what the customer's demanding. Second is flexibility with the elements that I talked about around social, economic and technology. It's very important for a flexible combination, because I kind of look at this age of cooptition as a battle of ecosystems. So, we are locked in with Nutanix in this battle of ecosystems, so in my role, I build value chains, and Nutanix is a critical partner in that value chain and being able to adopt to what the customers are demanding of us, and we are very specific about what we do in the market place. Because all of us have choices, and it's very important to be specific to solving customers' issues. It's been a great partnership-- >> It's interesting, we always talk on the Cube around automation. DevOps has been a big driver with multi cloud now. If you have all these value activities strung together in a set of value chains, no one company can own it all. But automation requires end-to-end visibility, so the big trend we're seeing is who's going to enable that? Because I can imagine, your environment you can talk to the top customers. We do the Cube hundreds of events a year. The same theme comes back over and over again on the Cube. It's a refrain. It's the anthem of the customer which is, look, I need to innovate my business model. I got to move quickly to a new operating model cloud. 'Cause they all taste the cloud, and they want the cloud everywhere. And then they want to make sure they have a technology partner. So all three of those theaters are exploding in innovation, and all at the same time. This has been a big challenge. How do you guys work together to address the business model innovation, the operating model challenges, the skill gaps training or whatever? And then obviously technology selection? >> So I think the most important thing is to be able to sense and engage, right? I think that's where it starts. If you've built a ecosystem of the value chain, in our case with Nutanix, in a way that we stay close to the consumer changes, we build a method of engagement that allows us to sense and engage better. I think that addresses a big part of what you talked about. Then it's about figuring out what elements of technology and being able to advise the customer in the right way in their journey to what they want to achieve in introducing those technologies to the table. >> Inder, I want to bring you in here on this. You are the EVP of customer success at Nutanix. You have a lot of success. You have net supporter scores on 90 which is really unheard of in this industry. I think so many people out there watching this want to know what is your secret sauce. How do you get that? (laughs) >> I think it's a combination of things. I think the first and foremost is being extremely customer centric in everything that you do, not as a function within the company but across the company. Customer success isn't just a function. It's a philosophy; it's a cultural value. It's a mindset; it's everybody's job. You got to start there. Second, you hire people who have a great deal of empathy for the customer and a great deal of expertise in what the customer is looking for. So to bring empathy and they're deeply technical in terms of bringing that expertise and actually applying that towards the customer's problems. And then, maybe the third thing I'd say is always being focused on the customer's outcomes as opposed to your own desire to either sell more services or more products or whatever, because if you're customer-outcome centric, everything else follows from that. Keeping that as a north star, I think has been the primary factor that's driven that. There's one other thing that I'd add to that, and that is something, I think, John, you were referring to a little bit earlier which is this notion of automation. So in the past, people would drive customer success by throwing more and more bodies at the problem, more and more people at the problem. That's so yesterday, right? Now it's all about, you still need people, absolutely, but you need to empower them with a great deal of data, with a great deal of insight, with a great deal of automation. Do that in real time, be predictive, be proactive, and so on. That last element, that secret sauce is pretty important. >> That's interesting. We had a session earlier; I talked about the tech landscape. We talked it out from cloud to politics, and how technology without accountability and responsibility with people can be a bad outcome. Right? (laughs) You give the tools to the wrong people, or someone, say government, doesn't know what the technology can do, bad outcomes happen. Same with cloud selection. When you start to get in some of these new areas where this market shift's going on, where there's real lives on the line in terms of jobs, re-skilling training, you guys are on the cusp of this next shift. You're on the front lines, putting it all together as a global SI for all the top customers. So digital's transformation, although it sounds very buzz-wordy, is actually real in the sense that these are material changes to companies, how they're operating and their business model. So the impact's pretty high, so the role of people is super important. What's going on there? How's the progress, in your view? Are customers ready? Are they getting trained up? Are their IQs moving faster? Are they more accountable? >> Couple of observations over there, I think I would say that in the last 90 days, I've probably met 100 customers. I don't think there's probably, with the exception of maybe a couple, I don't think there's been any conversation where talent hasn't come up. Specifically, the shortage of talent. Which is why, by the way, it becomes hugely critical for us to have partners like Cognizant with whom we have a fantastic relationship. They are so complementary and so critically interwoven into our skill and their skill jointly. Every customer basically says, look, I used to have a virtualization admin, a security admin, a network admin, a database admin, and this, that and the other. And what you've done is you've hyper-converged, not only technology but you've hyper-converged the roles. Well, hyper-converging the roles means you need one person instead of 10 people, but that one is really hard one to find. So help me train them and work with your partners to bring that capability. So talent shortage, especially as you move away from the larger metropolitan areas, is a real issue. And we're working towards that. We're trying to address that by making products simpler. As you know, that's been a hallmark of Nutanix is simplicity and support and service. Those have been our hallmark. So making it simpler is very key, but no matter how simple you make it, you still need that element of human intelligence, human touch, and the automation. Those are the ways. >> And the risk, too, from the customers, love to get the integration standpoint, because, one, that's a lever for you guys. You get leverage out of that. When you take 10 to one or reduce down the roles, hyper-converge things, but the outcome is pretty positive. You're enabling new things, but it allows for people to be redeployed, as well. The existing roles, they're not really going away. They just get shifted. So, yes we need more people, need new people, but also, the dynamic of fear. Is my job going away? So there's leverage and you get efficiencies and potentially redeployment capabilities. How's that affecting your job at Cognizant? >> So, at Cognizant, people are extremely core to the way we operate, so, as I mentioned, we are a $16 billion organization, but we are almost 200,000 people. 185,000, just to be precise. So, for us, the retraining and re-skilling of people is ingrained in the way we've operated since our inception 25 years ago. And it's about two, three things. One is a basic understanding that while technology curves at exponential, the change management in people are linear. So that fundamental understanding of that shift is very important that we continue to invest into the training and change management of individuals to allow them to progress through the value curve as technology shifts happen. And for that, you need both a culture and a structure for that to happen. And because we have grown through this environment, we have Cognizant Academy, and we have few other systems and processes and communication elements that we have put in place that allow our employees to grow as the technology shifts happen. That's one. Second piece is, I think, a very important reason why customers work with us is because we understand their industry. So we serve almost 20 industries, but almost 70 to 80% of our revenue comes from a few industries. And customers really engage and continue to work with us because of our deep understanding of their business, right? So it's this ability to be able to understand technology and the progress of technology from companies like Nutanix. And then, be able to stitch that appropriately to the business of the customer, and put a structure in place that allows the shift to happen, that allows us to grow. >> But going back to what Inder said earlier, so many of the skills that are necessary today, I mean, yes of course, it's about keeping up with the shifts in technology, but so many of the reasons that Nutanix has been successful is that its employees are empathetic, that they listen, that they're paying attention, that they ask good follow-up questions. So when you're talking about Cognizant Academy and the re-skilling, are you also helping them learn these important skills? >> No, I think, I have a 10-year-old son, so as I think about what his future would look like, I definitely feel that the relevance of IQ, as a race is reducing, and empathy to the point that Inder made and your EQ is far more important. And we live in this world where the virtual world is almost taking over the physical world. We're on that cusp, right? Somewhere. >> You're talking John's language there. (laughs) >> You can take a guess on who's ahead and who's losing. So it becomes very important not only to build a sense of empathy in the real world but also a sense of empathy in the virtual world, in the way you communicate with customers, in the way you listen to customers, how you listen to customers and engage. So that is a very critical component of how we train our employees so that we're continuously staying ahead, in terms of even sensing and engaging with them. >> One of the things that brings up in conversation we had earlier with a customer, they love the efficiencies of how you guys can collapse with the hyper convergence which you've done in modern enterprise now and going to the cloud, you know, hyper-converged clouds, we get that strategy, and I think it's going to be bigger than you guys forecast in my opinion. But what that really points to is a cultural shift. And the cultural shift is, okay, I had this before, all this legacy stuff. Then it's the question of, okay, how do I get people on the right tune here? How do I organize internally? So it's not so much a technology decision. It's more of a cultural decision. And so I asked the CIO of a big consumer company who came in to transform this big conglomerate. You'd know their name if I said it. He said, when he walked in, the biggest problem that they had is they outsourced everything in the 90s to the point where in the 2000s, they were so efficient. They had the storage admin, and they had all these roles, and they were holding the gear down. They had perimeter base security; they were perfect. But they had lost their competencies during software. So as the world shifts to software, a lot of CIOs are being asked essentially to build software teams. So the new changeover combined with the new efficiencies is they have to boot up development teams, infrastructure all the way to the top of the stacks. It's challenging, so I know you guys do a lot of work there, in this area, in helping companies transform. This is a huge challenge. How do you go from being lean and nimble, operationally, to having fewer core competency in software development, automation, machine learning? There's not enough people to hire, so this seems to be a core challenge. >> Yeah, I think if I look at the core challenge, in terms of areas to focus, clearly, people focus historically on infrastructure technologies. They need to focus on two additional areas. Let me elaborate what they are. One of them is absolutely the new move towards DevOps, containerization, those kinds of newer technologies that play not in the CIO's shop but in the development side of the house. And there's clearly a focus within Nutanix on the product side and on the people side to emphasize that, and we work with customers on that. The second thing is actually a little bit related to what Asvin was saying. What we find when we engage with customers is again and again if there's an issue, it turns out nine times out of 10 it's not because of a technology. It's either because there was an operational deficiency in their processes, or there was an organizational lack of proficiency or just something financial. So, when I put customer success managers onto accounts, the biggest thing that they do is they create a customer success plan that actually focuses number one on operational practices. Do you have run books? Do you have controls? Do you have automation? Do you have monitoring? Do you have callback information? Do you have all of that so that your processes are robust? It's entirely customer centric. It's independent of technology or only mildly related. That's one. Second, do you have the organizational skills, the capabilities that these people need to have? Can you get them sandboxes or training? Can you get them certified, et cetera, et cetera? Can you move them up? And then, of course, the last thing is financial which is, can you look at it in a larger context, not just of a technology decision but of a financial decision relative to total cost of ownership, return on the investment, cloud versus private, et cetera, et cetera. >> And software seems to be the theme in all of this. >> Software, absolutely-- >> Software rules. >> Software rules. (all laugh) Well, everyone's a software company now. >> Yes. >> That's right. Especially the Cube. (laughs) Inder, Asvin, thank you both so much for coming on the Cube. This was a pleasure. >> Absolutely, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's theCUBE covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. We are wrapping a two-day show. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We saved the best for last. We have Ben Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer and Monica Kumar, SVP Products and Solutions at Nutanix. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you for having us. >> Yeah. >> So congratulations on a great show. 6,500 attendees and 20,000 were live streaming. We had Mark Hamill, Jessica Abel is speaking next. Energy, a great vibe. Congratulations, you both get a well-deserved vacation after this. But I want you to, Ben, close out the event and tell us a little bit about what you hope the attendees is come away with. >> Yeah thanks, and thanks to theCUBE for joining us here-- >> You are welcome. >> It's a long marathon, right, over the last two days. And thank you for the great coverage you provide for this event. Yeah, we're thrilled with the event, and for us, it really starts with getting even deeper, more connected with our customers, right? And so we do great keynotes and there's a lot of new product announcements which I know have been covered in good detail throughout the last two days. But at the core of it, it's how do we make our customers better positioned for how they do their jobs. So it's training and certification and networking with their peers, and you hear that all over the place. And so as excited as I've been over the last three days with the event and the grandeur of it all, the thing that really gets me pumped up the most is when I see these ad-hoc groups that just come together in a hallway, and they sit down. I go over and say, what're you guys up to? and we're like, well, this is like our AHV mashup group, and we get here and we talk about key challenges we have, key opportunities, best practices tips, and so it's that network effect for me above anything else is what is at the heart of this show. >> One of the highlights we pointed out yesterday and today in our intro was the community vibe you have here. You have a great loyal customer base, Net Promoter Score of 90 which is a monster number, congratulations. But it's a small intimate event, you guys were able to not make it a trade show but a conference that was intimate, content driven, content value with nice tracks. Lots of comments on the tracks. So a lot of good highlights. So my question to you Ben and Monica, what's your highlight so far? >> You know, I'll take this one. As a newbie, I'm one of the newest members of the team at Nutanix and this is my first .NEXT. Even though you say it's a small event, it's still 6,500 plus people and about 20,000 attendees online right. So I think it's still sizable, but the beauty is that we're still able to maintain that community feeling. And so for me the most exciting part was not only meeting with customers like our SisAdmins, DevOps folks, developers, IT directors, CIOs, partners, our own employees, we're like bringing everybody together here to discuss how we can make things better for the customers, and what are things that are working and how can we improve. So I think to me that's one of the biggest thing I'm taking away as I go back, is what we can take as a feedback and how we can do things better in how we bring products to the market. >> Ben, highlights for you? >> Yeah for me, well first of all, I got to interview my boyhood idol, Mark Hamill. (laughter) >> Pretty cool. >> And that was a lot of fun, right. And we've just gone through in an hour and half of great content, our Nutanix Mine announcement, that was great, we announced AHV support on frame. So that was exciting to me and then, the cool thing about our show is we like to mix it up with something that's really fun. And in my case and I know with many people in the arena, and I saw the meet and great afterwards, to bring out Mark Hamill. I had to contain myself because I am a big Star Wars geek at my core, and we had a great conversation. And you know when you feel the room, I felt the room of 6,500 hanging on his every word, right? And he talked about persistence in his career, how he started out, all the rejection he got earlier on. We talked about his career journey, so on a really fun way, it kinda connects with a lot of journeys we have with the professionals in the room that are going through a lot of change and rejection or taking a risk or a chance on new disruptive technology. >> Yeahm it's really been a home run. First of all, the theme of having of Star Wars and Mark here was really great because the demographic, we all love Star Wars, so nice connection-- >> Who doesn't? >> Nice connection to the tech audience but your customers consistently say in theCUBE and off theCUBE, in the hallways and other conversations that they took a bet with Nutanix and it paid off. And that's the rebel kind of mindset inside these cultures of pre-existing legacy, vendors, and so you guys are breaking through. This is a big part of the marketing, is to enable those rebels to be now the mainstream. >> Yeah it's, you know you're right, it's rebellion, you know, that's spreading and growing, but as a marketer here, there's plenty of conversation about how we differentiate, right, and the outcomes we create for the customers but then when I see one of our early customers, and we opened the conference, he shared a picture where he was flying in a Cessna plane over the Grand Canyon, and he had his iPhone, he was managing his clusters with Prism on his iPhone. And what he said was the outcome for me, yeah there's total cost of ownership, yes, there's high performance levels, you can go through the traditional outcomes that IT folks look at. But at the end of the day he said, I'm able to spend more time with my family, and that sounds kinda cheesy, but it's real, and you sense that and you learn about that when you're here with customers. And with Monica coming on board, yeah, we've always been great, I think, at marketing and communicating our technology advantage but it's about more than that, right? >> Yeah. >> Talk about about your role, you have a stellar career, you're now new to Nutanix, you're not new to the industry. What's your focus? What you're gonna be working on? >> As with everything we do at Nutanix, it's all about the customer, so we are obsessed with making sure that the customer has the best experience, whether it's with product quality or how we take our products to market. How we message it to connect to what problem that they need to solve. So I think the biggest challenge we have as a company, the opportunity is, we know the customers are moving to the cloud. Customers are embarking on journeys to a modernized infrastructure. They are embarking on journeys to be able to use multiple different clouds. There is a lot of complexity out there, so our opportunity is to simplify that complexity for the customer. So that's what I am going to undertake with Ben here, is come up with right solutions, the right packaging, the right messaging, the right offers for our customers that can make it easy for them to get on their journey that they choose to get on to the cloud. >> Rebecca and I were talking about on the kickoff yesterday, 10 years old, CUBE's ten years old, so we've been following you guys for a long time as well. You're growing up. You're still a young company, you've said you're a billion dollar startup. >> Yeah. >> That's the culture. What's next for you guys? What's the goal? What's the objective? Because you've built a great community organically, your content is on the mark at the conferences, also digitally, there's nice organic kind of discovery for your customers, are learning about Nutanix. Word of mouth is big, network effect you mentioned, new cultural, younger generation. So you got a lot of things working for you. What's next? >> Well, thank you. I agree with those things, (laughter) but I tell you, here's one thing I've been thinking about towards the opportunity. So if you look at the past year, and I talked about this in our recent investor day, that if you look at the amount of IT Spin tied to traditional three-tier data center architecture, storage, network, compute, running in separate silos, hundred billion plus in annual spin. Hyper conversions, great new modernizing infrastructure play, the market spend on that this year is probably five billion. So if you think about that, I think about only 5% of the legacy world been modernized. And I am not claiming a 100%, but I am claiming well north of an opportunity, well north of 5% to get there. So fundamentally, the first thing what's next is there's a lot of green field left to take advantage of here and for customers to understand the value, human value, as well as financial and operational value, of what we're up to here with our customers. And so that's next, and then at a higher level, and I know it's something Dheeraj and Sunil talk a lot about, it's, we've hyper-converged infrastructure, made that essentially invisible, much grander ambition, how do you hyper-converge clouds, how do you take the complexity Monica was just talking about and provide a lot of simplicity for App Mobility and the like and take that to the next level. So to me, there's still the core mission. We're just getting started right. >> You know I asked Sunil that question, I said, how do you make that happen? And he had a great comment. We weren't on camera, I wish he had said that on theCUBE. We were off theCUBE before. He said, "Well, people tasted Amazon, they tasted cloud, "and now they are gonna bring that "mojo to the enterprise on the premises, "because they realize the benefits of cloud by itself. "But they can't get everything to the cloud. "So they gotta get modernized on premises "and operating model, not so much a refresh." >> To add to that, if you think about the role of technology right, the role is to make our lives easier, whether it's at work or in our personal lives, so I think the next big frontier is all around automation. I think this whole move to the cloud is because people want to automate a lot of the mundane tasks, we've talked about that in the past with data and such. I think the same applies to infrastructure, so you're gonna see us really focused a lot more on, how can we help IT automate? A lot of the, you know, keeping the lights on type of tasks which could actually be easily be done by the machine or in the cloud or by the software, human beings then can focus on more important things. >> Right whether it's being over the Grand Canyon with your children or meaty tasks of our jobs. >> Exactly so it's about making IT become a service provider rather than a cost center. I think that's what we're gonna enable with our softwares, we continue to go forward. >> I'd love you to comment on Ayanna Howard, Dr. Ayanna Howard's keynote this morning, where she talked about actually smart machines working together with smart humans, and how that's really the collaborative AI, and that's really where the future is heading. How do you think about that, and how do you message that, and how do you approach that within Nutanix? >> Yeah I totally agree, it's not human versus the machine. It really is human plus the machine. It's the combination which is gonna be most powerful in how we adopt technology to make things better for us. Like I said, whether in our personal lives or work lives. I know a lot of examples in my own personal life that I can see how machines or softwares changed the things I used to do before which I don't do anymore. There's lots of examples, I know when growing up in India, we washed our clothes by hand and now we have, when I moved to U.S., we have the laundry machine, right? I mean, there's lots of small, small things that are happening now, we talk to our Alexas and we can command people, to call people, to turn the music on, to turn the lights off and what not. And I actually have benefited from those, my parents, I'll give you an example, I have older parents who live at home, and now it's amazing, my mom can say, Alexa turn off the light, or turn on the light if they have to wake in the middle of the night, guess what it's not dark anymore, the light gets turned on, it's a real use case, you know. (laughter) They won't trip and fall. So I'm like thank you Alexa (laughs). So I do think that power of machine and human is the combination where we're going next, and I think Sunil touched on it somewhat in his keynote too. We're talking about autonomous data centers, right. That's exactly what it is. We are injecting more of machine learning, more of AI technology in how we are analyzing the operations, and then how we act on the predictive intelligence that we're getting from the operations to fix things before they break. >> Ben, I want to ask you a question on the marketing side because one of the things that came out of the top stories that we identified here at the show was the move to software. It's a big part of Nutanix next generation shift and growth is gonna come from just software, not hardware, just a software company. And also Dheeraj mentioned that he has a new customer, Wall Street, (laughter) and so he has to manage that. He had a great answer on how he's gonna balance the short term Wall Street-ers and the long game that you guys play at the Nutanix, so you got the software transition, the middle of it, different economics, software economics are much more stronger than process improvement, box changing, changing boxes in a data center. So software's going to be a nice impact across the long game, but Wall Street may not understand that software, and as you guys go to the next level, from hiring and marketing software, how are you guys thinking about that? I know it's about a year under your belt now with software, what's the orientation? What's your posture for to the marketplace with the software play? >> That's a good question. I'm sure, you know, Dheeraj likes to talk about Wall Street and Main Street, right, and how do you balance the two. And yeah we are disrupting along established market. We are moving from hardware to software now rapidly in subscription-based consumption models, and we're doing all that at the same time we're growing at the rates we're growing. And so it's a lot of juggling in the air, right? >> And I'll throw channel in there too, you gotta channel the merging, your partner strategy is looking really good. The HPE relationship is I think a great signal, potentially, in more local expansion, more breadth channel marketing on the table (laughs). New things. >> I mean, the way I think about it, as a marketer here, is, you know, and Monica touched on this, how do we create and provide offers to market that take advantage of the freedom of choice of consumption of Nutanix, right. And then how do you take those to market through your sale organization, how do you increasingly take new offering and capability to market through the product itself, which is a well-worn practice in the SaaS world. And then the channel partners is a key part of this because the partners that really, and I met with many here this week that really on top of this, they want to build that value-added practices that are about providing new services and offerings on top of that software, and then to be able to offer it in effective ways. The marketer has think about how do we incentivize, how do we package, how do we message to bring these to the market. It's candidly a transition for us, but it's an exciting one. At the end-- >> And you guys, and you were open about it too, you recognize that it's happening. >> Yeah, and I see it, you know, those moves can be challenging, but those are also moves I think that Wall Street likes. >> Evaluational increase. >> So we're nearly finished with this conference, but we're already think ahead to the next one in Copenhagen. So talk a little about that, and then Nutanix Americas in 2020. >> Well good, so we're looking forward to taking the show across the pond to Copenhagen. We had a great, our Europe event last year in London was amazing, right. We had record turnout. We had close to, for a user conference, 35% of attendees were not even customers of Nutanix yet. And often for these conferences you see more existing users and then maybe some, and we so expect that trend to continue. We have a lot of traction across Europe, Copenhagen is a beautiful city. There'll be plenty new to announce there, so I can't leak anything early on that front yet. But that's gonna be exciting show. >> Come on. (laughter) >> It's taste. >> We won't tell anyone. >> And I'm sure he's gonna be hobnobbing with yet another celebrity in Copenhagen. I've renamed his title. He is the Chief Celebrity Officer at Nutanix now. >> Well, he and Mark Hamill are-- >> That's right. >> But we're best friends now. (laughter) >> And he was with Magic Johnson earlier. I have a long list of people he's been-- >> You're killing us. >> No, he is. (laughter) >> Yeah, Freddie Jackson. >> Well you know, all joking aside, it's customer experience. And if it's all business, it's all product and all technology, right, then you know, that's a certain level of experience, but part of this is the community and the happiness that we see in our customers is we make them happy, both in the technology we deliver, the partnership we enjoy with them, but then also some fun experiences we deliver to them. And that's the spirit of this show. >> Yeah you guys do a great job. I want it like highlight and also get your thoughts, and I want you to share with folks watching 'cause you guys do a great job on the content programs at your events, the mix and match up of the core meat on the tech bone, the solutions, but balance of guest hosts, guest celebrities kind of blend in the theme. What's the secret sauce? What's the playbook? What's the thinking behind lot of the content and how's that gonna translate digitally because you guys mix it up, it's not just all Nutanix all the time. You got partners, you got people from outside the industry, seems to reinforce, the threads kinda connect together. What's the, how do you guys think about that? >> Yeah well, the secret sauce at the core of this, Julie O'Brien, a woman named Erin Alonso on my team. We have a strong, small but mighty, very creative events team that understands that at the end of the day this is about learning, but it's also about show business too, right. And people want to come to relax, to learn, and to have fun too, and I think it's balancing the two. But it's not just, okay it's Mark Hamill, because he was in Star Wars. It's because we knew Mark had such a tight, iconic connection with our core demographic, in terms of the core customers we have, and I saw our customers, some with tears in their eyes when they were able to meet him afterwards. And so, okay there's, and I was joking hyper-convergence, I was talking to Mr. Hamill, I said, hyper-convergence, hyper-space, right, there's ways to connect the two together. But there's technology at the heart of both of that. So it's just a new and unique and surprising way, and one thing, I close with, we endeavor in marketing here when we run our campaigns, when we do our events, surprise and delight. Surprise and delight. It's inherent in the product with one click, and everything we do there, and we'd like to think it's inherent in our marketing and also an event like this. Surprise and delight. >> So Monica who'd your hero be up there on the stage? Who do you want to see at the next-- you boss is right here, (laughter) this is your chance to influence-- >> Oh my god, okay. If you really wanna know (laughs), he'll have to fly in from Bombay India, the movie star Shah Rukh Khan. He's got known as SRK. But he is a world-famous icon. So there you go, next one SRK. Talk to Sunil about it, he knows about SRK. >> We hear you. >> Note, noted. >> Well then Monica, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT (techno music)

>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim, I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We are joined by Victoria Hurtado. She is the director I t operations at current Health Care System's Welcome, Victoria. I think >> you've having me >> So for our viewers that are not familiar with current to tell us a little bit about what you do and what you're all about. >> Sure. So we're a health payer provider. So we are managed care medical plan. We have a contract with the state of California to provide medical services. Teo, about two hundred fifty five thousand members, and Kern County, located in Bakersfield, California s. So if you really think no one to know more about this like a Kaiser without the provider network and so we pay, uh, the services, the bills that come in a swell is authorized the services that need to be rendered for members. >> So talk about your decision to move from traditional storage to H. C. I. >> So really, where decisions stemmed from was our road map. And over the last several years we have had a three tier traditional storage, Um, and the daily task of our system administrators have increased over time with integration and as technology increases, there's more integration. And so we really wanted to focus on how do we decrease that as well as increased efficiencies so that we can for her by the services that we need Teo, for our internal customers as well as our external customers are members and providers >> and and the efficiency. Suppose the project plan. How did you go? Proud. You approach it? >> Sure, So her strategy was really a three phase approach. So we wanted to implement VD I for our internal employees. So we started off with VD. I Once we have transition to that, we will be migrating or in the process of right now, our core claim system, which is that are our bread and butter really on DH? So we'll do a six plant a month plan on that, see how that goes and then once that is successful, which I feel will be successful, we will migrate our entire infrastructure over >> and you're happy with the new tactics so far? >> Yes. So the first deployment was nutanix with Citrix and VM Where that entire combination I've had a few consultants come in and they're like, Oh, you've got the Ferrari of Edie I. And I'm like, Yes, we absolutely dio s Oh, yes, >> when you're thinking about efficiencies. I mean, one of the things Before the cameras were rolling, you were talking a little bit about what it means for employees. Can you talk a little bit about how they then structure of their day? They structure how which projects they work on and how they are more productive given these different changes? >> Sure. So unorganised ation like us, we are always challenged with guidelines changing from the state. They have a tendency to want to change things very frequently. So we often have a lot of critical projects that were doing on an everyday basis, and that work really gets them consumed. And so what we're able to do with nutanix is alleviate those responsibility so that we can focus on the more critical, you know, impacting scenarios versus, you know, managing alone and moving a volume and making sure the system is up and running. We're really focused on providing care to our members because our members or what count, Um and, you know, it also allows for, you know, a member to get the services that they need while they're sitting in the doctor's office waiting for a response from our organization. >> How's the cops world these days? Because there's so much tech out there. When you look at the landscape because you got you got unique situation, you got care and you got payments were relying on this so you don't have a lot of room for mistakes. Crap. What do you guys see in that Operations suppliers out there, Other people you looked at, what was some of the solutions and why need nutanix? >> So it actually took us a while to make that decision. We made a collaborative decision with our engineers, uh, my CEO and some of our business units. We compared different technologies that were out in the landscape of both storage and hyper converged. What was the right path for us? We did a very thorough cost analysis of five year ten year what that road map looks like for us. And, um, like you said. Mistakes. We can't make mistakes. And with growing security risk and healthcare industry and more people wanting that data, it's really important for us to protect it and have it secure. Eso nutanix really offered us a lot of the key components that we were looking for in our grading system. When we you know, we're looking for a storage solution, >> how's the event here? What's what you would have you learned? Tell us your experience. Nutanix next. >> Sure. So coming to this event, I really thought that we would be looking into new technologies. What other integration? Like typical conferences, I think. Sitting in the initial Kino, I heard a lot of great positive things that are aligned with the industry. The buzz words right now in technology as well as our own road mount for technology going to the cloud convergence, using multiple technologies for integration so really kind of paved what this conference was going to be. In addition, I think the sessions having thie cheered approach of you can follow a pathway throughout the conference was a brilliant idea and planning. Um, so I think there's much to learn about how this conference was put on. So >> I want to ask you about your role as the as the director of operation. I mean, somewhere. So you're hearing so much that these roles air really being dramatically transformed that it's not just about keeping the lights on, it really is. You're taking a much more strategic role in the business. How would you say you approach your job differently? How would you say it is changed? Your leadership style And And how much? How much time do you spend thinking about being more visionary? More forward? Thinking versus this is what we're doing each day. >> Yeah, s o I think Historically traditional technology departments and and management within technology of really focused on technology on Lee. Um, over the last several years, I've made it a point to learn our business units so that we can apply good technology, Teo, a good process. I'm a true believer in an advocate for our technology department and our staff to really know the business so that we're not putting technology on a bad process and because that doesn't really help anyone to be successful. So I would say the shift in transition is being merged and converges ight hee in business entity a ce faras approach Getting the business to come uphill with us has been really important. I'm not on ly for technology for the the underlying infrastructure, but systems today systems there so much ability to customize it to your heart's content, which also leads to different issue. So using technology with business process to gain efficiencies is really the road that is ahead of us. >> One of the things that the senior execs that nutanix talk about it their value propositions about, you know, helping consolidate little bit. Here is one of the side benefits. But there's a new role in the kind of looking for spent the new kind of persona person with nutanix solution is a new kind of operator. Yes. What? What? What do you think he means by that? >> So I really think it means And I had this challenge internally, actually, a cz You know, we we have a lot of technical engineers that have grown up with the mentality that I have to know everything about this one silo topic. Right? I need to be the expert in this Andre. Really? Where we're going is you don't have to worry about that. I need you to know about the business. I need you to know about how you can make change, inefficiencies, to help us be successful. And that is a transition for a lot of technologist. And we will get there. I truly believe that because we have Tio. >> It's a cultural thing. >> It is definitely a culture >> of an old dog. New tricks? Kind of >> Yes, Absolutely. How do you hire? I mean, look, what's weirder that what air to you? An applicant comes into your office. What? What do you want to see? >> So technology has historically been the focus of what do you know? How well can you do it? To what experience? You have enterprise grade level experience and now that's really shifting. Teo, are you able to participate on our project? Can you build requirements? Do you understand what your customers asking for? A swell is asking the questions of Is this the right thing to Dio? I'm not just doing what our customer asked us to dio. Does it make sense? If we're going archive data Do we need to secure it when we're transferring that in and out of the organization. Uh, does that make sense? And so they were looking for people that are going to be out spoken a little bit and ask those hard questions. >> Now, we have always talk about Ransomware because healthcare's been targeted. You got your mission's security earlier. Thinking broadly. You got data? Yes. Got the crown jewels, bread in butter. As you said, the data are you Have you experience ransom? Where you guys ready for it? What's the strategy? >> So we've actually take a layered approach to security. Obviously, in health care, there is no single pane of glass for security. We've really stepped into the world of having our data encrypted at rest in transit. Uh, multi layers. We do audits every >> year >> to make sure that we're compliance. We pay people to try to hack us, you know, legally because we want to know where are our possibilities are s o wait. Do that purposefully with intent to make sure that we have the technologies and place that are going to provide us what we need for our data. >> Fascinating. Victoria, Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Farrier. You are watching the Cube

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next at NUTANIX. We're here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight were joined by Wendy M. Pfeiffer. She is the chief information officer at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Wendy, thank you for having me. And this is not your first time you this year. A Cube alum. >> I am a Cube alum. It's so much fun. It's kind of weird, though. We're inside of this Cuban outside of us is all the action in the Exposition Hall is kind of crazy and cool. >> It is that there's a lot of energy here. I want to start our conversation by taking you back in time to nineteen eighties. You growing up in Silicon Valley, you notice an advertisement in the newspaper that dead tree medium NASA wants ideas on how to organize its dashboard. Better for astronauts. Yeah, >> So they had a program called CD T I cockpit displays of traffic information and they were looking for innovative ideas to make what was really a very small display provide information for the shuttle astronauts as they were re entering the atmosphere. And so, if you can imagine coming back into the atmosphere, it very high speed. And there was concern that there would be a traffic in the area. Regular airplanes flying, you know, relatively much slower. And so how could the same air traffic displays that were used for aviators be sort of modified to give real time information? Teo the astronauts, I will tell you that I never contributed much to that project, but I discovered large scale computer systems. And I just love the idea of these things large networks, large computers on just the through the vast interconnectedness of things. And so that got me interested in technology, whereas before I thought I was interested in science and math. And it turns out, of course, there's some great synergy among those topics. >> So So the internship at NASA is what propelled your interest and really, what launched your career in technology? Yes. Now you are the CEO of Nutanix. This this amazing company thiss startup That's now billion dollars with the market cap in multiple billions of dollars. Yes. So talk a little bit about your experience as CEO and what and what in what you're hearing, particularly at this dot next show. Yeah, I think >> one of the things that's happening is we're all in the midst of a huge transformation in terms of how digital technology affects business and empowers and enables business and as CEOs were right in the middle of that Wei have. Many of us have tons of legacy equipment and things from vendors, but we also have this desire for leading digital transformation in our companies. And so companies like Nutanix and there aren't many companies like Nutanix, but technologies like ours bridge that gap. We can run the legacy workloads in on premise data centers on pick a vendor's hardware. But we can also run the same work loads on our operating system in public clouds. And so it's kind of the best of both worlds, and it bridges thes two worlds that CEOs have been struggling to bridge, and it does so in a way that doesn't require us to re train our people or find, you know, a small team of rocket scientists who are, you know, worth more than the GDP of small countries. So we're able Teo, actually execute. Still keep the lights on. Still do the the old school things that we need to do but also operate with excellence at that more modern end of the technology spectrum. That's huge. And I'm hearing that from so many folks all around the show, whether it's, you know, people who are responsible for infrastructure or Dev Ops kind of crosses all of those bridges. And and as Nutanix, the CEO, I get to represent how any company like ours a billion and a half dollars publicly traded company, can use technology to enable itself, because I use our technology to do all the things we need to do as a company. >> But that's exactly just what you're talking about. That balance that these companies need to strike with thinking about the maintenance, thinking about the storage, thinking about the protection, but then also thinking in a much more visionary in strategic way about how we really transform our business and get our and get the work done that we need to get done. Can you talk a little bit about the fact that these consumer technologies have really leapfrog the thie enterprise vendors and sort of embarrassing it, frankly, should be for these big technology behemoth that they haven't done more to make cooler, sleeker technologies? >> Absolutely. Oh, my gosh, this is my favorite topic. And it's why I have my smart here. So on this smartphone, this is a is an apple phone on this smartphone. I have a ton of applications and a ton of functionality, and you know, so I have Facebook on my smartphone, right? And I love Facebook. >> But when I >> downloaded and I started using Facebook, I didn't say, you know Oh my gosh, fall. Now I have my social media application. So there's no way I could use Twitter or Instagram or anything else because my standard is Facebook. And that's the only thing I'm going to use. No, no, no. I have a multitude of APS and I used them as I choose when I want to, in the way that I want Teo, those abs inherit things from this platform. They have access to my contact data. They understand my location if I allow them tio etcetera. So all of those things are unconsciously in what is actually a phone. Now try to get your desk phone to do that right? It doesn't. And yet in the enterprise space, we have vendors who are selling us for millions of dollars, desk phones, and those were supposed to be as performance delightful, interesting as this device. And then we have laptop computers and we have desktop computers. None of those things is even a third as interesting, engaging, useful and easy to use as this consumer attack, which, by the way, is a lot less expensive. I spend millions of dollars on a V audio visual room systems of conferencing technology, whereas when I go home I can se teoh Amazon or Google. Hey, you know Amazon. Show me my my shows. You know I can I can I can ask for any show I want to watch on TV. When I downloaded Pokey Mongo, I love playing video games and games. When I downloaded Pokemon go on my phone. I >> didn't have to >> watch, you know, five five minute video snippets to teach me how to install the application. Within minutes, I was, you know, catching all the Pokemon I could what in what is really a very complex application that also includes augmented reality. And so I think it's time that first of all the vendors who sell to us, who are so used to that every three years, the enterprise license agreement is renewed. Or, you know, Hey, we're a pick something, you know, a one hardware vendors shop. So we that's what we standardize on that is doing two things. One, they're killing their own industry, and they're also killing. They're they're ruining. It is ability to deliver and to be useful and transformative. Two companies way and it way also have to demand better way. Have to stop buying that Dunc. And we have to start finding ways whether we have to build it ourselves or using machine learning tools to train the machine on how to do these things that that enterprise it cos don't deliver to us. And we also need to look for vendors like Nutanix that build that bridge that allow us to stop worrying about Oh my gosh, You know, we've got to make this legacy thing work with this new thing. We don't have to worry about that so much anymore. And now we can focus on this user experience The interaction design what we might do within an ecosystem That is our own unique companies and our own unique set of systems and also ultimately allowing our people, which is what companies are made up of allowing our people to to have the experience that they want tohave, just like we do with our own devices. I can choose how I want to interact with this thing, and I can turn it off if I don't want to use it. >> So so much of what you're talking about is really about getting companies and then the leaders of these companies to think differently. And that is the biggest managerial challenge. And it's a challenge when you're in sales. And so how do you How do you approach that problem? Because it because you've really laid it out so clearly we are used, Teo, so much intuitiveness and ease and beauty in the technology that we use in our personal lives. And then we come to work way put up with a lot of junk. >> We do, right? I mean, like, I know you're not saying anything out loud, but I know you. You're agree without you here with your laptop on the table there. You know, first of >> all, our work forces are changing. Generally, we keep talking, at least in circles that I sit in about, you know, the millennials are entering the work force. No. You know, the Millennials and Jen Zy are already make up almost half of our workforce today and will be at that somewhere around. I think it's seventy percent by twenty, twenty five of the workforce, so >> they're already here. Those >> folks already have a different relationship with technology than my generation did my generation. And I'm a Magen axe, I think. Yeah. Um so my my hub to Exactly So the big >> hair A my generation. >> I >> watched the birth of some of these consumer technologies, but this next couple of generations grew up with him already in place. And so they don't even think about the fact that this is technology. This is dependent, just is just part of them. And so I think we need Thio, Throw off the old filters and get out of the way. It's a lot more about choice and self service and freedom and flexibility and a mixed portfolio. And there are so many ways to educate ourselves about those things if if we don't naturally have that instinct. But it starts with diverse thinking, diverse tools. I believe that whatever you know, PC Mac laptop tablet mobile device that you're comfortable with your company should enable you to use. And you should use the applications that that makes the most sense to that make you the most productive. And then it's his job or it's leaderships job to create that that really rich ecosystem, where those applications and tools have the nutrients that they need and the capabilities that they need to work together well, understanding how to create and maintain that ecosystem mean what is an ecosystem? It's this sort of happy accident of all sorts of creatures at various levels in the in the pyramid coming together and figuring out a way to cohabit and to survive and then, hopefully to thrive. And so no one can get too important. No one voice no one species. No one layer can be outsized compared to the others because of So what do you have? Well, you have a species collapse. They run out of the fuel that helps them to thrive. And so I think, of course, our planet at a macro level is an example of that. But our company's our families, our neighborhoods. All of those things are micro examples that that matched the macro and are dependant on the same laws of physics and science and so on in order to thrive in to function. >> Well, you're talking you You just highlighted the importance of diversity. And and you made this comment about No one person can get two important or no one part of the species. In fact, if you look at the tech landscape Ueno, who's too important and it's the pros who are who are running the show in a lot of ways. Still, I want to hear from you as a senior leader, a female senior leader in technology you noticed, >> and Theo the manicure. Yeah, >> but how? What? What do you see? What? Tell us what it's like. I mean, is it as bad as we hear? And, um, and and And how have you in your career overcome a lot of these challenges? And then how What do you see as your responsibility to the next generation who's coming up? >> Absolutely. So it is as bad as we hear. It's sometimes worse than we here. And I think that especially there are certain sectors of society and tech society where the bro culture that we've heard about is fully in play. What mitigates that is the human beings who make up the bro culture so often. These guys don't understand the the effect of all of them and mass, and so often they're just being natural. Many, especially start ups. The start of fuel. Silicon Valley, You know, they started with some great ideas and with some dreamers and often those those people with the great ideas and dreamers you know they are males, and what do you do? You get your buddies together. You know, when you get a little extra money, you get the next round of bodies. You invite people, you know, so >> there's a little >> bit of that syndrome that's happening. There are also wonderful incubators and fields where women are also in that start up mode, and I'm a member of the Board of Girls and Tech. We have a number of things like Way have an amplified competition that supports women, tech the entrepreneurs, so there's certainly more than just men. But the history has been that however, a lot of people talk about that For me, that's not the emphasis for me. The emphasis is on how we change our jobs and our definition of work in general. And this is so fascinating to me. >> I think we've been working for years >> and years on, you know, how do we get more women and stem and encourage girls to go through this path in school? You know, it turns out women and men are both equally interested in science and math and all those things. But the starting jobs and tech are are horrendous when it comes to matching women's interests in skills and this isthe stereo, I'm going to start stereotype here. I hate doing this, but in general terms, men tend to be able to work on things serially. They tend to have a singular focus and to appreciate the singular focus and so you can lay out a path first, your socks and your shoes and the guy will follow that, and we'LL master each step along the way. And that's that's a way that you know, it's stereotypically a lot of male brain brains. Progress for women, for female brains were multifaceted way sort of have this ability. I don't know if it's evolutionary or environment or whatever. I'm not like an expert, thank God. >> But we have this >> ability to multi task all the time. I could be, you know, holding my kid and, um, talking on the phone and, you know, making sure dinners cooking, okay. And, you know, maybe it's a business call, and I might be hiring someone or firing someone, and I'm giving equal focused attention to each very important task. And so we sort of have that that ability because we have that ability. That's the kind of job that you know. Okay, you enter college and you're taking a software development computer science, of course. And you take all computer science courses until you get that degree. And now you get your first software developer job and you sit in this little cubicle and all day long you write code. Well, you know, fine. If I've sort of have that single threaded mentality, I'm ready. All right. I guess I'm going to do this. I'm gonna Masters are >> gonna get through the layers >> of writing code as fast as I can and someday I'll rule the world or start my own company over on the female side, we say this is going to kill me. I don't want to do that. What a boring jobs. Because Because also, I'm interested in I'm interested in the Japanese language and I'm interested in design. And, you know, I love to cook. And also, you know, I'm just been working through, you know, theories of space and time and in my physics study, and to just have to focus my mind all by myself all day long in this cubicle on writing, you know, some part of a bigger program. It's not attractive. And so what we find is that women are dropping out of thes focus degree programs and they're dropping out of the early stages of technology careers. Which means that by the time you get to my stage, there is not a very few of us right, >> So you said we needed we need to change the definition of work. Yes, What does that mean? >> Well, the Millennials and Gen Z and countries that are that are very young, like some of the Eastern European countries that air, that air, just reinventing themselves. They've already done that. It's the gig economy. It's the idea that as an individual, I can choose the things I want to work on. We've tried Teo, sort of emulate that in in the agile methodologies right? I get to choose my tasks, but it's this sort of. It was taken the soul out of it. But this is really that independent contractors might be doing. You know a few things that once I might be designing shoes like one of my friends is she's she's created her own shoe company, and at the same time I might be writing code Azaz a gig for some other company. And you know what? I might also be involved in, you know, a charitable work. Or I might be volunteering at my kid's school and doing all of those things together at the same time in parallel is interesting to us. It's engaging to us. We put more. >> So how'd you do that? At your team at NUTANIX? How do you help your employees, uh, do all the things that they want to do in addition to obviously getting their work done? Yeah, well, It's always a >> balance right. One of the really important things is to create an environment of tools and technologies and processes that allow people to choose the things they want to choose. It's not always well understood. Some people say thank you. I get to use the tools I like. Other people say there's too many tools what we d'Oh. And so we try to find something down the middle for those guys. Exactly. Secondly, I hire and mentor leaders who are very diverse and open, and they're thinking so that we can constantly kind of reinvent ourselves as an I T organization. But ultimately it gets down to enabling culturally people to think differently, to raise their hand and say, You know, I am a network engineer, but I would like Tio automate this thing over here or, you know, I Yes, I'm a systems engineer, but I'd like to deploy the network, just allowing them to get out of their comfort zone and to experiment. It's also really important to understand the balance of it. People who choose it love engineering and love technology, but we'LL also love process and interaction, and so we're already this mash up of personality types. And, you know, I would say more multifaceted you are, the more you're able to play multiple sports or or have multiple skills or play offense and defense, then the more able you are to thrive in the new World in the new economy. And sometimes it's just finding those mavericks Or, you know, I like to say I'm a little civil, like, you know, I've >> got a little personalities and you know it. Sometimes you got >> to bring one of those personalities to the table. Sometimes you have to bring many of those personalities to the table, and it's gonna be okay for folks to do that. >> I love it. I love it. Great. Well, Wendy, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always fun talking to you. Thank you. Appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight. You are watching the Cube. They'LL be much more to come

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen Brought to you by nutanix. >> Hello, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are live at nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Michael Bushong. He is the vice president Enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks. Thank you so much for returning to the Cube, Your Cuba Lem. >> So thank you for this is this is awesome and you can't see it on the cameras. But this is a, like, just amazing. >> It's very We are in the clouds up here. It's a very high stage. Everything's coming full circle. >> Jim Cramer. Ask a little bit >> serious. Okay. >> Of course. I'm going to ask the tough questions >> going on. He's going to start slamming everything very soon, >> But we've known each other for a long time, Jennifer Going back ten years ago. So look, a tangle started. We're in our tenth year. You know, if you've seen the journey, I am a juniper. You left juniper startup brocade, then back to juniper. So you've seen that circle? You've seen the couple waves? I mean one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera was saw. Network fabrics to Dover had Juno's and then be anywhere. But you know, So this arrow, which became the ESPN Wave, are now suffer to find data center. So you've been in that journey is a product person. And now marking juniper, it's actually goes back about a decade. This whole esti n stuff networking. So what's What's the role now that you're doing? What's juniper doing? Why Nutanix? What's your story year? >> Sure. So I run enterprise marketing at Juniper, so my goal is effectively toe to make some of the hype makes sense, right? It goes back a decade. Actually, the early days of the only ESPN movement we didn't call it s tiene right. Juniper started with open flow and PC and alto and all these acronyms, and we actually, we're a great engineering company. Maybe not so great marketing company. And we actually call it network program ability. That didn't take off. But the technology's kind of endured. And I think what we saw was this lengthy incubation period to the point that now, as we sit here dot next in twenty nineteen. We're starting to see now some of the attraction of the last couple of years. That's a junipers general position. So we wantto dr Adoption. Certainly there's products and technology that underpins that, but But fundamentally, we're looking at a huge operational shift. And if that operational shift doesn't happen, then that's to the detriment of everyone in the industry. >> What's the relationship with NUTANIX? Can you talk about how you guys work together? What's the connection? >> Sure. So nutanix obviously does the whole hyper converge space. We provide the networking components to that. So whether that's the top Iraq connectivity, how do you get your traffic into the rest of the network? We've done some security stuff which we can talk more about. And then, if you look at the overall management piece, we've got integrations at the management policy layer as well. >> So your relationship you both got a very similar world view. How you see technology, you're both taken on VM. Where to? Can you talk a little bit about the relationships there and and why it works? >> Sure, fundamentally, if you look at what Nutanix is trying to do, it's this whole idea of one click. It ties ing everything right. They talk a lot in their keynote sessions. You hear the executives talk, You look at their collateral, the messages they take, the customers. It's about making things simple. Junipers Strategy is this idea of engineering simplicity. So just a top level? What's our purpose? What's our role in this industry at large? I think we have a very common worldview. Of course, driving simplicity is going to happen in the context of real architectural change on the change That's kind of everywhere is cloud and increasingly multi cloud. And so both Nutanix and Juniper about really driving simplicity in the context of Cloud multi cloud, giving customers the opportunity, toe run workloads wherever they need Teo without taking on additional operational burden. That's kind of cesarean unwanted in enterprises networking. >> So the Big Tran, this multi cloud you guys. That's a key part of the strategy. Dave along tonight and Stew Minutemen were arguing on the cute couple events ago. There are not one of our sessions about the hype around multi cloud. The reality of it. The reality is, is that everyone kind of has multiple clouds. It's not like that the clouds aren't talking to each other, and then we're just kind of riffing on the cloud is just big. One big distributed network, different computing, distributed networks. These air knew these aren't new paradigms. These are existing things that have computer science behind them. Engineering behind it. So juniper, you have been around for a long time. Connecting networks. The cloud is like some of the same concert on premise Hybrid Cloud and multiplied it basically a distributed network. It's all cloud operations. We get that, but the technology issue is not that hard, but I won't say that that hard, but it's similar to what you guys have done in the past. Just differently. How are you guys looking at that? Because multiple clouds, just like Internet working the switches routers, you move from packet that point A and point B get storage. His store stuff So concepts are all the same. How do you guys seeing the multi cloud opportunity within juniper? >> So I would make the distinction between multiple clouds and multi cloud? I agree with you. If you look at most enterprises, they have a workload in Amazon. They're using sales force, and so you know, they're multi cloud, right? They have multiple clouds, multi clouds, more of an operational condition. It's about taking disparate pools of resource is and managing. That is one thing. So think of it more about how you do stuff and less about where you host an application. If you look it even like describing Amazon, some people say, Well, Amazon is just, you know, Cloud is just using other people servers. It's not. You're not renting their servers. What you're leveraging is their operations. That's the transformation. That's this kind of underfoot. And so while some of the technology bits are common, the ability to do abstracted control moving to declare it over intent based management, right, these air right technology building blocks. What you're seeing now is the operational models are coming along, and that's really that's the change we have to drive on. I'll just kind of close with when you change technology. If it's just about deploying a piece of software, if it's just about deploying a piece of hardware like candidly, that challenge isn't that it's not that hard, right? We know how to deploy stuff when you start talking about changing how people fundamentally do their jobs. When you started talking about changing, you know how businesses operate. That's that's the piece that takes some time and I would venture. That's why you know, you look a decade ago why we're where we started. If you look at what's taking a decade, it's the operational change, not the technology piece >> and the cultural jobs movement. Certainly forcing function on that, which is awesome. And that's the tale when I think. And then again, Gene Came was on yesterday Who wrote The Devil's Handbook and also does that death. The Devil Enterprise. Someone said, We're three percent in. I would agree with him. I think it's so early, but But the challenge. I want to get your thoughts, Michael. And this is that Connecting multiple on disparity environments is great, but late in C kills now. So now late and see these air old school concepts, you know, get a time can't change the laws of physics. Right? So Leighton sees matters s l A's matter. So these air network challenges these air software challenges. What's your view on that piece of the puzzle? >> We leave when we say cloud, you know a lot of people probably think, um, you know, G C P Azure. They might think a WSB probably picture in your head, you know, some logically central cloud. First, we need to disavow people of the notion that cloud is this thing that somehow sits at the center of everything. It's not. There are centralized clouds. If you're optimizing for economics, that makes perfect sense. Tow To do that. There's distributed clouds. The whole rise of multi axis edge computing is about changing the paradigm from moving data to the application. Right. If your applications in Amazon and you're going to send your data there, that's one model Teo. Sometimes you might want to move the application to the data. If you have a lot of data like an i o t. Use case as an example, I was used oil platforms is a really good example. I don't know if you know, but you know how they get all their. They have all these mining and manufacturing bits. They've got lots of data. How did they get that data off the oil platforms? Snowball. So what they do is the helicopters come in, they take the drives off and they they they leave right. The reason they do that because if your reliance on satellite links just too much data, you can't statue >> is going to get a helicopter to ransom helicopter to come in, >> we'LL know when they're swapping the crew out every fourteen days, that's what happens. So here's the thing, right? If in that kind of model than the cloud, the data center exists on premises. And if that's the case, then when we think about you know kind of what the cloud is, cloud is, it's It's a lot. It's a lot more than what we most of us probably think about. Certainly, we see it with Outpost as a WS is starting to move on premises versions, and there's a lot of reasons you might wanna have a distributed cloud. Certainly it could be, you know, your comfort and security and control. There's real privacy implications, country of origin, so subpoenas can access your information depending on where it resides. >> What you're saying is, basically, it's all cloud. It's operational is the new definition. So you figured from an operational standpoint, Ops and Dev's That's it. The rest is just all connected somehow through the text, >> and then you need to have it. Yes. So we we understand the connectivity, bitch, you've gotta have the right, you know, elements. But if it's operational, it's about how do you do policy management? So part of the whole nutanix thing and kind of what drove us together was this idea that if I want a one click everything. If you could do that within the hyper converge space, you still have to do that over the connected environment, which means managing policy from a single location, regardless of where it is. And of course, using that policy to Dr Security >> and their strategy is to take what that worked for. The CIA and the data center move that into this new operator operating model, which spans multiple quote, disparity, environments or clouds or edges. It's similar similar concept, but different environmental. Yeah, >> that's exactly right. And so then what Nutanix needs that is a strong networking partner because they have tto do the bits that they do. They need other people to do the bits that that you know that we can do. We pull those things together and then you can provide essentially a secure environment for hybrid workload. >> So you guys embed it into their product? You guys joined cell together. Is it more of a partnership? How deep is the partnership with you With Nutanix >> s all just They'LL say yes, we get along s o and it kind of the most surface level you know, you need to have top Iraq switches. You gotta connect to the network and so we do qualification there. So if you deploy nutanix, you can deploy juniper alongside and that looks more like a kind of a co selling meat in the channel type model. Beyond that, if you look at how we provide security over like a workload environment, the question is, then you know what's the security element? So we've taken our virtual firewall. We cut our V s are axe, which essentially runs in the V M. And we can run it on a V, and so that gives them a segmentation strategies. So if you look it workloads that air distributed across the cluster by having a firewall element that we can enforce policy. Of course, that firewall element is then integrated with prism. So if I want to deploy these things when I spin up a new V M. What I want to do is spin up the security with it, and so you see management integration. Then if we continue this too, it's kind of full conclusion. We have, ah, product suite We call contrail in the enterprise version Contra Enterprise Multi Cloud, which is all about policy management and underlay management. And so, as we extend the partnership, it gives us additional opportunity to take um to provide routed elements which provide policy enforcement points and then to give us a way of managing policy over a diverse environment. >> And you guys can bring in that platform element for nutanix. Is there now a platform? They have a full stack of software on Lee. So you guys, you cannot take their stuff, put it there and vice versa. >> That's exactly right. So whether the workload resides in a ws on two or whether it resides kind of on premises in a jiffy, weaken one, we're kind of co managed and then to it gives us the security elements toe play across that >> one of the things that we're talking a lot about at this rinse it and at a lot of other events like it, it's sort of or the dark side of technology. We're at a time where major presidential candidates are talking about breaking up. Big tech were becoming much more aware of the privacy concerns. The biases that are built into algorithms. Exactly. I want to hear your thoughts as a technology veteran. Do you? Are you still a technology optimist or do you did? Does this stuff keep you up at night? I mean, how where do you fit your personal views? I was >> somewhat of a technology optimists, but I'm a skeptic when it comes to the people. I think if the technology existed in a vacuum, I think some of the problems go away. I think privacy is a major concern. I think it's going to shape regulatory action, especially in Europe. Well, so I think we'LL see similar actions in the US I don't have quite a strong connection to what's happening in Asia. Um, I think that the regulatory, the challenge I have from a technology perspective is that if the regulations come in the absence of understanding how the technology works, then you end up with some really terrifying outcomes on DSO I'm Sam. I'm a fan of the technology. I'm nervous of the people on that in terms of like, our overall Ruelas is cos here, I think, you know, we need to do a candidate a better job of, of making sure things land before we move on to the next big thing on DH. You know, we're talking cloud. We're ten years into cloud and people were always talking about the next frontier. To some extent, I think the world doesn't move as fast as we like to think it does. I don't think that the even like the mark, I'm in a marketing role. I don't think that the marketing hype necessary. I don't think it serves us by moving too far ahead because I will tell you when the gap between the promise and the reality becomes insurmountable e wide. I think it's Ah, I think I think everyone loses Andi. You run the risk of stranding an entire generation of people who who gets stuck behind it, and I don't you know, I'm nervous about about what that means, and I think it's you asked the question that you're the dark side. I think it's Certainly it plays out in our industry. I think it plays out. You know, there's a digital divide that's growing in the U. S. Based on broadband access. By the way, that's gonna widen with five G. I think it plays out between different nation states. So I Yeah, I don't know. I'm an optimist. Maybe I'm a pragmatist. >> Realist. >> Yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm a little scared. >> Little cloud definitely happened, and that's a good point. And we took a lot of heat at looking ankle. Keep on the cube. Was too many Men in the team put out the first private cloud report People like this is nonsense. Well, well. And our thesis was clouds grade if you want. If you're in the cloud as a cloud native or, you know, new startup, why wouldn't you go on Amazon? Everyone, we did that. But if once you taste cloud operations, you go Wow. This is so much awesome. Right? Then go into a modern and enterprise. It's not going to be overnight. Change over. I mean, we might say it's going to take about a decade. We fell from the beginning that cloud operations once you taste cloud you realize this is a new operating model. There's a lot of benefits to that, but to change it over in the enterprise, and that turned out to be what everyone's now do it. But that was three years ago. >> Well, there's implications. So if its operations then operations is inherently an end end proposition, you can't have operations in a silo. Things like you're monitoring tools. How do you do cloud monitoring it on premises monitoring. How do you do workflow Execution? How do you do? You know, automation, whether that's event driven or even just scripted. If you have wildly different environments that require you to buy for Kate, your investment, then there's a very real There's a complexity that comes with that your people have tto do more than one thing that's that's hard. There's a cost that comes with that because you have different teams for different things. There's a lack of coordination. I don't think you unlock the value of cloud in that in that environment. And I think that operational pieces really around converging on >> Michael your point about people in technology. It's so right on. We see that all the time where I'm a technology Optimus. I love technology, but I totally agree that people can really destroy it looked fake news. It's just, you know, it's infrastructure network effect with bad content policy because Facebook's immediate company not a platform >> well, technology's only is good on our end are >> gonna run. The government don't even have the Internet work. So you know when you when you go to the cloud, same >> knowledge just also want the government to come away with that we do it >> where the government just doesn't know how the Internet works. Some people that do but like the good hearings, it's ridiculous. But you know, there's a real D o. D project going on future military Jet I contract. We've been reporting on where modern data driven application workloads. I could use a soul, cloud or multi class so that the dogma of what multi vendor was in the old days is changing. >> I don't I actually don't know if you look at multi cloud. If it's an end end proposition, then by definition it's also going to be multi vendor like there's no future where it's like end in all one vendor. I think we have to come to grips with that is an industry. But I think if you're clinging to your you know, kind of I want my single procurement vehicle. I want my single certification. By the way, I think if you believe fundamentally that incumbency is going to be that your path forward, I think it's a dangerous place to be. That's not to say that. I think the incumbents all go away. I don't There's a there's a heavy rule to play but certainly were going to open things up. And >> you see procurement modernized. I mean, I mean, government goes back to nineteen ninety five procurement standards, but either the enterprise procurement moving So the text moves so fast. Procurement still has rules from >> so no, I don't think all >> of the second right. >> Then there's a whole A procurement in our industry is driven by our peace. Our peace tend to be derivative. I take my last r p. I had some new lines. If you want Esti n so you take the cup copy and paste five hundred seventy four lines at the five hundred seventy fifth line. S T n. You're gonna end up in the same solution because the first five seventy four of the same I do think we should learn a little bit from what the big public cloud cos they're doing, which is, you know, tightening refreshed cycles, retiring things with as much passion as they introduced new things tightening up. Ultimately, what gets deployed? Maintaining diversity of underlying components so you could maintain economic leverage when you're doing procurement. But then solidifying on operationally streamlined model, That's I think that's the future. That's certainly what we've been on as a company. I think that's what we're betting on with Nutanix From a partnership point of view, I think we'LL be on the right side of change on that, and I think it's going to, you know, it may take some time to play out. That's where I think things go >> well. Michael Bushong. Always a pleasure having you on the Cube. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Ferrier. We have two guests for this segment. We have PJ Farmer, she is the Director, Cloud Product Management at TierPoint. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, I'm very excited. >> Rebecca: And we have David Hines, VP, Architecture and Engineering at TierPoint. Thanks, David. >> Yes, thank you. >> So, for our viewers that maybe unfamiliar with TierPoint, can you tell us all about this St. Louis based company, what you do, give us an introduction. >> Oh, absolutely. So, TierPoint is a managed services, data services, and colocation provider. We have a broad footprint. We have over 40 data centers in the United States, and we have a broad portfolio of services we offer because we're really interested in meeting customers where they are in their digital transfortation, or transformation, excuse me. So everything from colo to cloud and beyond, we offer because customers come to us for a consultative approach. They have a problem, they needed solutions, and we can offer them those solutions, right. So we manage all of that. >> So you're helping them with their digital transformations and everything. >> Absolutely. >> And where does Nutanix come into play here? >> So, Nutanix is a part of that cloud services really that we're offering our customers, but also giving them a dedicated environment really that they can manage their workloads, but also have some more control, security, compliance, so that overall, the customers end up with a solution that helps them drive their business forward. And of course, TierPoint, our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of all that underlying infrastructure and systems and components, so again, the customer can focus on driving their business forward, and taking that burden off of IT and Nutanix is a great platform that really helps enable us and enable our customers, at the end of the day. >> Talk about the technical challenges you guys had before Nutanix, after Nutanix. What changed, what was the journey like, how did the door open up for them? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So, I think overall, we as technologists, work very hard to piece together solutions, varied solutions, to provide a platform for our customers that they can consume, but that is challenging, right, as a company, technology changes quickly. There are a lot of different vendors in the marketplace offering a lot of different technologies, and I think one of the things that we see as a huge value for Nutanix, is they've got a very complete platform, across the spectrum. It's not just a box with compute and storage. It is so much more than that, and so for us, that's very exciting, it's very intriguing, and something that really helps us be efficient, and also our customers, be efficient. >> So, digital transformation is something that we're talking about so much, on theCUBE in general, here at this show. What are you hearing from customers and what is sort of their bugaboos and their pain points? >> So, we recently had a customer who, their hypervisor of choice is something they're super familiar with, right. They have a great amount of comfort, but over time they can see, there could be some cost savings in Nutanix, with going with the Acropolis hypervisor that's included. So our customer came to us and said, hey, can you help us with this? Said, absolutely. So they are in our data center, we're taking care of them, we are consulting through their transformation and they are starting out with what they're comfortable with and as time changes and as they mature and transition, we're gonna help them get there, right. We're gonna help them change, if it's a hypervisor, if it's a different service, if it's a different way to set it up and present it out to their innovative IT developers, right. We're gonna help them do that. >> Talk about, can you guys share your insight into how you're operating the business? I mean obviously, you've got customers, a lot of customers. What's it like, operating this? 'Cause you got developers out there who want applications to be supported. I'm sure you got latency challenges around. We went to the cloud, a lot of multi-cloud conversations. People still gotta store stuff in their data centers or colos. So the edge, the network change, all these things are evolving. What's going on inside your company, in terms of how you operate? >> So, that's a great question. So, it is challenging to keep up with that landscape as it evolves but we are investing heavily in that. So the great thing about TierPoint, is we are in these edge markets. That is one of our real value adds, and so we're investing very heavily in our network. We also have some really strong partnerships with carriers that give us that on-ramp into the hyperscale. So it really helps complete that multi-cloud story that customers need. So yeah, they can come to us, colocate that equipment that they really have to hold on to, mainframes, mid-range servers, other legacy systems, while gaining that connectivity to those hyperscale environments. And then there's the middle, the middle where we provide a layer, like Nutanix, that gives them that enterprise type cloud. But again, it's dedicated to them, it's in our data center, it's local to their other systems, while also getting that reach to the hyperscale. So it's a really, really powerful story for us. >> On the hypervisor challenge question, this is interesting, we hear people saying, I got Hyper-Vi, I got Hyper-V, I got VMware, I wanna just use, Nutanix' got their own hypervisor. AVH has been an interesting product for Nutanix. The full stack is compelling for a lot of customers, but you guys probably have a lot of customers who wanna parole their own, or bring their own hypervisor. How do you deal with that, does that fit in to the value proposition? >> Well, I think there is some talk about the hypervisor, maybe being irrelevant, like it's obsolete, it's not something to be concerned about, and I think Dave said it earlier, best today, he said that-- >> John: You could be nice when you say that, by the way. >> I'm sorry, what? >> John: A lot of people are saying that. >> Well, yeah, a lot of people are saying that. I just think it's less of a focus, right, because TierPoint helps people focus on what is innovative, what is your business outcome, what are you really doing for your business? So I feel like the hypervisor is just less of a focus, right, than it is necessarily, not important. >> It's more commodity now. >> Yeah. >> It is, and we don't want the customers to have to focus on that, because again, IT really needs to drive business, not be a drag on business and so the less that they have to focus, as an IT organization, on the maintenance and management of infrastructure, and even up the stack towards operating systems, where we can take that burden off of them, then again, they can be a leader for their business and driving the business as a whole, not be held back. >> Okay, what's the playbook for doing that, not being a drag on the business? Because that's what everyone wants to do but they might have legacy stuff. What's the playbook? >> The playbook, is being a part of that business discussion and when the business itself is making decisions about how to drive forward, IT has that seat at the table, and again, is thinking about, how can we drive savings or cost cutting, how can we enable transactions, how can we enable the customer base? And not thinking about, oh, do I have my storage system updated, am I dealing with the old boxes that I have to replace, and do I have power and cooling problems in a data center. They don't need to be dealing with that. They need to be up front with the business, making business decisions. >> What you're talking about, really represents a complete shift in the role of the technologist. Do they have the skills to be thinking about, they obviously, can think about more than just the maintenance, and do I have the storage, and things like that. But does there need to be much more education around these business strategy questions that they should be thinking about? As you said, this is their role, to really help the business transform. >> David: Yeah. >> So, I think that often times I see people feel like they are just technology, oh, I'm just hands on keyboard, I'm doing this, but what their exposure and their natural interests, lead them to have a broad picture of how things can work, what is expected, and how do these things operate, what have I had experience with, and when they have a seat at the table and they're making, with the business decisions, they have value to add there. Right. That value is in that perspective, what they've seen, because that may not be forefront for some of the other business leaders at the table, right? And it is a collaborative discussion, that generates quality output, that generates innovation, that generates thinking outside of the box, and unique solutions that really lead the market. >> But I do think it really does, to your point, mean new education, new skills for these IT technologists and so that's part of, we've gone through this at TierPoint, transforming the engineers and the technologists that we have working on our staff and really teaching them new ways to work, new ways to think, new ways to collaborate, so that they're helping us move the business forward and not sitting behind a keyboard, isolated from the business itself. >> I was gonna ask you about the skill gap 'cause one of the things that comes up as the shift at DevOps is happening, with more development going on to make the infrastructure programmable so it's not a drag on the business, changing roles are a huge thing 'cause Nutanix essentially, the values, they enable new things to happen, the result is consolidation, so it's not consolidation as the primary. You get consolidation as a benefit of what they do. So people be like, whoa, what do I do now? But the benefit is people shift. So the IT Ops role has changed, it's best probably to get it before the operations. Where do you guys see that trend evolving? Because if this continues with AI and automation, you can almost imagine it's completely programmable infrastructure. >> Yeah, we do see a consolidation of Siloed Technologists, right, so this idea of I'm only a network engineer, I'm only a storage engineer, I'm only a cloud engineer, that is definitely going away and again, we've done this at TierPoint. We've kind of mixed those roles, right, educate the staff, but from additional education programmability, somebody'd be able to do the automation and the development in an engineering role verses having a separate development team working on that. It's gonna be really important as companies evolve their groups. >> I think you've had a lot of infrastructure engineers that 20 years ago, 15 years ago, knew Pearl, they knew scripting, they knew these things, and as time has gone on, now they know APIs, now they know RESTful APIs, now they're interacting, but we all know, in IT, it's always change and it's always learning, I mean, you got into this, right. So I think a lot of the infrastructure engineers, over time, are finding they were already automating things in some ways and they're becoming more mature in the ways that they automate things, right? I think it's a great transition as they go on, yeah. >> So, talk about the relationship with Nutanix. What's it like, partnering with them? They got a lot of momentum in enabling a partner strategy. We saw news with Hewlett Packard enterprise, potential channel opportunity there. They're a partner centric, they're partner friendly. What's it like, working with them? >> Fantastic, I mean absolutely fantastic, from go, see our customers were coming to us wanting to, they brought Nutanix to us, honestly, they came up. A lot of people that use Nutanix are like fans of Nutanix, right, you've seen some of those, and so our customers brought Nutanix to us, and as we began to see this trend, and we decided to make a private cloud product out of it, we engage with Nutanix. They've provided so many resources, they've been there for us, been very responsive. It's really been a natural and easy collaboration with them. And like you said, they do everything through partners so that has made it easy. We are another partner, right? They enable us, they know that part of their success is our success and vice versa, so it's almost like an extension of the team, which is fantastic. >> So what do you say to the new Nutanix customer that comes in, 'cause I agree with you, they're very hardcore loyal fans because they took a chance and they see benefits, so they took a chance and it paid off. It's like gambling, you put a number on the roulette wheel and it comes up black or red, whatever. They've had great success there and their promoter score is 90. But what about new people, are like, hey, I heard this Nutanix thing is out there, or software. How are you guys looking at these new opportunities, when is Nutanix a good fit? 'Cause you gotta balance it all for all your customers. >> Yeah. >> Depending on what they wanna do. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Honestly, for us it's really about enabling the higher order applications and workloads for our customers, so I don't know, unless the customer themselves is really bringing Nutanix to us, that we're having that conversation. It's really like, look, this is a solution that's gonna provide you the capabilities, and again, trying to not have the customer really worry too much about that and let us own that relationship, and as PJ mentioned, Nutanix has invested very heavily, not only in the partnership but also developing this platform and solution for us so it's been-- >> So you guys could provide it, if no one asks, just provide the best solution. >> Absolutely. >> Right. >> And that's the key, right? >> I want to ask you a question about geographics. So, I'm based in Boston, John's based in the Valley, you're a technology company based in St. Louis. I'm interested, we may just come to this with our east coast, west coast biases and I'm just, what's it like to be a technology company in St. Louis, in the heartland, do you feel part of the community? >> Oh absolutely, in fact, St. Louis really has been, you see several articles about all the startup tech in St. Louis because it is an affordable place to live. You have access to all the cities, usually direct flights, right, so from a community perspective, there's a lot more technology startups than you might think in St. Louis, but they do have access to-- >> Rebecca: And great barbecue too. >> Great barbecue, absolutely. And it really is a beautiful place. You also have lots of parks, lots of rivers, lots of outdoor, I mean, it's kinda surprising, honestly. We have a main technology center also, in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we are split between the two. >> David: Yeah. >> We do a lot of flights back and forth. >> WWT is out there too. >> RTP, yeah, the research truck will park in North Carolina, as a very big tech hub, so that split really provides a balance. There's a very big business hub in St. Louis and a lot of collaborational partnerships there from the business side, but also that Raleigh Tech Hub on the east coast is really a huge benefit to us. And a lot of our partners are there, >> PJ: And like a lot of-- >> Nutanix actually, is right there, down the street. >> We'll have to come down and visit you in North Carolina. My daughter's going to UNC >> Oh, okay. >> So I gotta find some excuses to get down there. >> That'd be great. >> Anytime. >> Maybe see your business. >> Some TierPoint shows. >> Oh, that's right. >> Exactly. >> And do a little, couple interviews. >> Anytime. >> Anytime. >> Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great talking to you. >> Yeah, we really enjoyed it. >> Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Ferrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Cameraman: You're on camera. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier, we are joined by Chris Kaddaras. He is the Senior Vice President Americas at Nutanix, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Well, thanks for having me. >> Rebecca: Returning to theCUBE I should say. >> Yes, good to be back. >> So you are relatively new to the Americas business. I wanna hear how you're adjusting and sort of observations that you've made about the enterprise customer and what's on their mind. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting journey 'cause I did spend the early part of my career in the Americas business with different companies so I started here in the Americas. You can tell by my accent, and I spent the last nine years in the AMEA business and getting reintroduced is really an interesting thing. Our customers have a much higher adoption rate of technology in the Americas than they do in some other parts of the world. So they're willing to take on new transformational technologies much earlier and deal with that risk seeing that they're gonna get those benefits so it's been a really exciting journey in the last month, month and a half to talk to customers who really embrace our technology because it's so transformational to what they've done in the past, and they're really seeing a lot of the benefits of that so it's been fun. >> What accounts for this difference in mindset, you say? >> You know, I think it has to do first off with in the Americas business, there's a lot of competition in the marketplace and when you get competition you get pressures that come with that competition. You have to evolve, you have to evolve how you deliver IT, how you deliver applications, and the business needs to evolve that supports that, so that pressure in the business environment creates a lot of new things and a lot of risk taking, a lot of transformation. A lot of things that have to happen for customers to deliver services to their end-user business sooner. >> That was a theme we were just talking about before you came on about your culture inside Nutanix and also your customer culture. They're risk takers, they're rebels. Like the Jedi Knight we saw on stage Mark Hamill. The Star Wars scene, which by the way was perfect. Great demographic to target there. Everyone loves Star Wars, in fact. But I gotta ask you, this show here is very intimate, not massive numbers. Not like the other big shows, your customers like coming here from what we've been hearing. You have a chance to sit down with them while they're here, what's the conversations that you're having with them? What's some of the new things that's emerging from their needs that you're hearing? >> Yeah, that's evolving, it's an interesting thing. I compare our customers to almost like a religious following, I know it's sometimes difficult to use religion in these conversations but it's really like that, these customers bought in, they're insurgents in what they're doing. They're really trying to evolve their organization because it's transformational, now what we're seeing at this show, because the numbers have gotten a lot bigger, last year we were like five thousand, the year before that we were another two thousand less than that so it's gotten a lot bigger, and our customers are coming back and saying we want you to be a bit more intimate, okay so we've had that in the past, we've had smaller teams, we've been really close to your engineering, we've been really close to you development roadmap. As you start to evolve into multiple products as you start to get bigger, you need to keep that intimacy with us, the customer because that's gonna give you the true north as to where you need to go, so we're getting that feedback, some of it's hard. Some of it's you're getting too big. You're getting too dispersed, you need to make sure you take care of us and what we need to do in our journey. But that's part of growing up as a company and that's the reason why we're here. To hear customer feedback. >> And you guys have that true north. Essentials, the enterprise opportunity. Multi-cloud right around the corner on top of your core business which is doing great by the way, got a great customer base. Getting beyond that core is critical. Building on that core, and this product risk potential, we talked with Sunil too, the next waves are coming so customers kind of want that assurance. So I gotta ask you, when you go out there and you're selling the customers and you tell them that Nutanix is the bridge to the future, what's the value proposition, I mean obviously we touched on the enablement side. Obviously consolidation's a side effect of the benefits of the technology you have. People love that, but what's the value proposition as the customers want the bridge to the future? Not just today's speeds and feeds and the greatest of today, what's the pitch with the enterprise and the multi-cloud? >> I think the biggest thing for our value proposition to a customer is to allow them to actually decide on a platform to build on. So instead of actually doing all the plumbing getting together and building these three tier architectures and figuring out how to build SaaS and compute farms and how they're gonna deal with multiple hypervisors, so let's get them out of that business, let's make it really simple. Develop a platform that they can launch off of. Now, that platform needs to think about new applications on those platforms so let's take it up a notch in regards to what we're looking at, let's forget about infrastructure, let's make it invisible as we've talked about in this conference. Let's look at how do we actually start to add services onto that platform that gives the customer choice, not locks the customer in. Which is the key thing that we have to do for our customers. Most of our competition today, it's a lock-in strategy, you pick the platform, you're locked in to the entire application set, locked in to the compute set, you're locked in to the storage set, you have no decision on hypervisor, and you don't have a lot of options around platforms and applications, so the good thing about Nutanix is we don't have the innovator's dilemma problem. We're not trying to protect a base. We're trying to help our customers and come from that optic of how do we allow our customers to have the most choice possible in building that platform for their new application so that's the discussion with our customers. It's invigorating for our customers. It's actually freeing for them to understand how we can do this versus what their options are in the marketplace today. >> So when they're at this conference and they're getting all this news about new products, lots of new announcements. How do you recommend that they wrap their brains around this and digest it and then execute on it? >> Yeah, it's hard, we're not doing a good job there today, just we're not. Now this is a journey of all of these companies like us, it's how do you go through that, I have the needle and going from a single product company to a multi-product platform company. Not many companies can do this. It's very difficult, so I understand what we're doing, what you do is come up with a lot of different products. A lot of different solutions for our customers and then you rationalize, right? We're right in the middle of that rationalization period where some products are features. We have to fold them together, right? Some products need to stand on their own. Some products need to be integrated into the core. All of those things are happening and the nice thing is you have to start with, let's just roll everything out. Let's get customers to tell us what we need to do, let's get our partners to inform us a little bit more. And then they'll educate us on the direction. It's not always our answer, right? When you're inside a company, if you think you have all the answers for the way the products need to be delivered, the way they need to be marketed to our customers, you're fooling yourself. So that's our direction today. >> Well Chris you guys have a good business to build on that's still relevant and cool for your customers and the enterprise which is great, you don't have to worry about product leadership. You got it there, as you guys, for you in particular and your customers you're also transitioning to software. You got the full stack, that's an advantage. You don't have to rely on other hypervisors, you mentioned that. We know who that is, Microsoft and VMware. Now you have a software business. So now the sales shifts to software which by the way is great from economics, the economics and valuations on software business are super high. >> Sure. >> So on the consumption side for customers this is gonna be something that you're gonna be involved in, you gotta bring Nutanix out to the field. You gotta roll it out for the customers. They're gonna consume Nutanix with software. How's that going, can you share some insight into the customer's orientation to the software model, what are some of the things that you're doing around kind of balancing that greatness of the leadership to the transitional software? >> That's a transition we started about a year ago, and some of the things that you may be bored with but we need to talk about is there's some real plumbing and structural work that we need to do internally so the first thing we did is we decided to make it pretty much open to our sales teams to be only compensated on software and they really don't have any discussion or care of what the underlying compute infrastructure needs to be so they need to be open to that. And that's one thing that's a little bit boring but once we actually did that, then the whole optics changed to how we actually go to market. So when we go to customers, we have discussions that are very open and when we're partnering in the marketplace with all of our OEM partners and all of our resale partners and all of our GSI partners it's a discussion around what's right for the customer here, what platform do you wanna consume, so that's the first move. The second thing is changing our licensing model to make it more inclusive for customers and what they want to achieve so moving our customers to a term based licensing model was really important. We've done that in the last year and then allowing our customers that consume very easily when you move to those terms so how do I consume a node of software? How does that work, how do I consume multiple products on top of that node? Let's make it simple, you know. Our previous go to market was relatively simple. It was just you buy X amount of Nutanix nodes. It came with hardware and software and customers really loved it. But as we transition to a software model it becomes a little more complex because you have multiple titles. Also, how do we allow our customers to do things like ELAs, what they may wanna consume have more agility around their software licensing mechanism. Get a lot more licenses up front. They don't have to buy every time. They can project what they're looking to do from a budget spend perspective and consume in a very frictionless way. So we're in the middle of really evolving our kind of enterprise type purchase agreement society, I wouldn't call it ELAs because ELAs in the marketplace have kind of got a bad name, right? There's a lot of things about that our other competitors do around true-ups that we don't plan on doing and we don't want to so we wanna work with our customers and partners as to how do you wanna buy those new enterprise price purchase agreements moving forward. >> I wanna ask you about Nutanix's brand awareness and brand identity because as you said earlier in this conversation you're hearing feedback from customers you're getting too big, and I think that so much of the beauty of the brand of Nutanix is this sort of renegade rebel kind of idea that this is who we are as a company. So when you hear that feedback you're getting too big, guys, you're becoming the man. How do you respond and what's the internal strategy there? >> Yeah, so the first response is I agree with them, right, because I see it as well, I've only been here for two and a half years and we're losing a little bit of connection. Now , I'm really comfortable to admit that. It's important that you actually admit that so that you can change, so the things that we're gonna do are a few things. We do have a customer advisory board that meets, right now it only meets once a year in certain markets and we need to actually increase the frequency of that, get more customer voices back into what we're doing, we got some really great feedback, constructive criticism from our customers this week, big customers that said you need to think about this and it was really refreshing to hear that. Sometimes difficult, we also have the voice of our customers which is our field organization, right, so our sales reps, our Ses, our services people, our customer success people, they're in front of customers every day. Out support people, providing that vehicle of feedback back through our executive teams, our engineering teams is really important, so we're formalizing that internally. We have some informal teams today but we're not getting the message through. They're not being heard well enough. Their voice isn't resounding as much as it should be. So we're gonna start to create and develop that within the company. >> So, growing pains, you have to fix those things. Software model, looking good, so things are clicking right now, net promoter score in the 90s which is pretty much unheard of. You have a great, loyal customer base. Good news there? >> Yeah, I mean great news, we're talking about first world problems here, right? We have a huge market, the market's growing at an incredible rate. It's all about how we take our fair share and more of that marketplace so these are the discussion that we're having. I'd rather be here than anywhere else in the world. Any other country >> Well, you're Chris, you're in sales, you're running all the fields. Sales and you guys got a humble culture with a heart, as Dheeraj talked about. You gotta be aggressive, you gotta be competitive, and you gotta go win those deals. You gotta win those competitive deals. This is a big opportunity for you guys. >> Yeah, and it's really from our perspective it's turned a bit into a two horse race at this point in time, we think we have the best choice solution for the marketplace for customers who want flexibility and choice. I can't imagine why you wouldn't at this point in time. Our competitors are strong, and they're good. They're good people, they work hard, they have great people and great technologies. Our entire value proposition around how to provide customers flexibility on what they're trying to achieve in their future and I think if we do that then we'll be in a good place. >> Well, my analysis on the opening yesterday was knowing, following you guys for 10 years knowing the competition, who could out-muscle you if you were head to head. You guys are faster and nimbler. You guys can be moving quicker, just be faster and innovate. >> Yeah, I think we're doing that on technology. We're doing that on our support structure with our NPS scores, we're clearly doing that on engineering new product. I mean coming out with an amazing product. Moving forward, I think we need to do a better job of how we align to our customers. As we've grown from a mid market company to an enterprise company to a global account company. These things come with complexities, right? You have to hire different people that have different skills, it's a scaling problem and those are things that we can easily do. I'm happy to do those and those are things that we are hiring new people that help us through that journey and it's really a fun thing to do and we're seeing a lot of positive results for our customers. >> Exciting times, well Chris Kaddaras thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Anaheim, California. It's theCUBE, covering Nutanix.NEXT, 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back the theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here in Anaheim California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Along with my co-host John Furrier. Here we are, we're at day two, John, this conference, I gotta say it's pretty cool. 6500 people, we're steps away from Disneyland, and, you go to a lot of these things every year. I also do about a dozen or so for theCUBE. So in other words, we're veterans of this kind of thing. This does seem to have a different vibe and I think it really gets to the kind of company Nutanix is, and where it is in its journey. >> Nutanix is still a small company even though they're 10 years old, as Dheeraj talks about. The numbers aren't massive, I mean, we go to a lot of other shows where it's 15,000, Amazon Web Services just had an event in London, Dave Vellante was out there covering, Stu was covering Red Hat summit in Boston this week, tons of events going on. Amazon Web Services' summit in comparison was 12,500 people, 22,000 registered, that's a summit in London. It's not the re:Invent main conferences like 30,000 people. And that's always sold out, so they got a lot, in terms of attendees numbers they're still in the entry level, mid range growth. But I think that's okay, they like that culture and I think the story here at this show is intimacy, they would rather err on the side of better content and more intimate opportunities for their customers to really get the straight scoop. And I think it's less of a conference slash trade show, more of an intimate relationships where they can provide feedback, for customers to give feedback, and for Nutanix to figure out with the customers how to connect to them. So, I think the story here is, Nutanix is growing up as a company, they're 10 years old and they gotta go the next level and the management team has technical chops, and they have a long term view. They have that 20 mile stare, they can see out and they're trying to figure it out. I still think that the numbers are light on their forecast I still think that there's some sandbagging going on there, I'm not saying they're sandbagging, but I mean, I think, you look at Essentials, which is the enterprise and then multi-cloud, the numbers that we're seeing at Wikibon are much bigger, and Amazon reflects that. So I think they're being cautious but smart about how they execute off their success they've had in the first 10 years to go the next 10 to 20 years and I think that's clear in the management team, that they wanna build a durable company. >> Well exactly, and I think that that's what's really coming through, is that this is, as you said, they're growing up. This is a real coming of age moment for them, they've celebrated the 10 years. Okay, so what kind of company are we? Who do we want to be? And what's coming through is that from the technology side, they get it. They say, I'm sort of reminded of the Henry David Thoreau quote, our life is frittered away by detail, simplify simplify simplify, that's what customers want. They want this one click data recovery, they want their credentials to be assumed. You know who I am, I'm safe to be in here. Fixing things, dealing with that. So I think that they get that, that simplicity is key. They also get customer service. I mean their Net Promoter scores, as we've noted, are in the 90s, that's just unheard of. >> It's monster, monster numbers. >> It really is and so they get it. We need to be responsive to customers, we need to have a personal relationship with these, because it's not just organizations, it's people at the other end of these transactions. >> I mean, I think Nutanix, one of the stories that's popping out in the hallways as I walk around and talk to customers and people and the company and partners, is that Nutanix has a lot of headroom in their growth. I think Wall Street is interesting and you heard Dheeraj talk about that yesterday, about having a new customer, you asked him about his management style and he said quote, I have a new customer called Wall Street. And I have to balance that against mainstream enterprise which is his core business. And so he as a CEO and the company are dealing with this new stakeholder called public company customer retail stock buyers. That's a short term cycle and I think, if you look at their stock, they had a big knife edge drop in the past quarter. And I think the shorts are circling, it's a whole nother dynamic, it's a whole nother theater for Nutanix to deal with, and I think that's something that they gotta get used to. And he was clear, he said I'm addressing it, we're gonna balance it, but they gotta be thinking long term because this company has a lot more to do and their customer base are risk takers. Because everyone we talk to has this different style or persona. They're smart, they're usually engineering oriented, they love engineered solutions. And they're taking chances. And everyone who's taken the chance with Nutanix, has paid off. That seems to be the theme. And as we were talking before we came on camera, Mark Hamill, Jedi knight, you know, Star Wars, was on stage giving the keynote, their customer base, is a lot like the Jedi order, right? I mean they see themselves as, elite, technically, they're not afraid to take organizational risks and push that DevOps culture. And we heard that from Sunil, the chief product officer that they're really looking at, this new way to do things, like they did with hyperconvergence, they pioneered that, set the table on that and foundationally built that. They wanna take that same playbook of HCI, hyperconverged infrastructure, and apply it to the cloud. And provide an abstraction layer advantage and I think that is clearly their strategy and that's, to me, the top story here. >> I couldn't agree more and I also think that, what is also coming through is this idea of we don't wanna be safe. What's clear is that, consumer technologies have leapfrogged IT enterprise vendors. The things that we hold in our pockets are so much more sophisticated than what businesses and organizations, multi-billion dollar businesses and organizations, are using, what their employees are using on a day to day basis. So we expect a certain kind of design and ease of use, in our personal lives and they're bringing it to enterprises and think that that is really what's exciting and interesting about this company. >> What's interesting about their story is that, the consistent theme about the customers is that it's kind of a consolidation story but that's not the real story because back in the old days of IT, consolidation was the strategy. Consolidate vendors, consolidate footprint to reduce cost, clearly a cost reduction. With Nutanix what they get is they get consolidation, and they enable advantages so the real value of Nutanix is to be positioned for those new kinds of app developers, so. This is like, you get consolidation as a side benefit for enabling the value, and that's the theme that's coming out of all the customer testimonials and interviews is, we gotta do more, we gotta create more enablement for the app developers and we gotta provide more performant storage servers and software for the customers. And that's their main focus and they consolidation as a benefit. That's gonna scare a lot of people and customers that I've talked to said, hey I got all the stuff but I can't just throw it away tomorrow, I gotta move it out over time, so, this is the Nutanix sales challenge, how do you move faster with all that incumbent, legacy stuff in these datacenters, while enabling the multi-cloud capability? >> And we're gonna be talking about that more today with Chris Kaddaras on the show. We have a lot of great guests, we have the CIO, Wendy Pfeiffer, I was reading an article about her today, she answered an ad as a teenager to work for NASA. She had an idea for NASA and so we're gonna hear much more about her story, we've got a lot of great guests. >> Well what's your take? I mean, you've been here, you're getting immersed in. What's your take of the show, what's your analysis? >> Well, what's really interesting to me is that we're having this conversation against this backdrop where, the technology industry is really under fire. I mean, we heard Ayanna Howard here on the show yesterday and then she was up on the main stage today, talking about the good, the bad, and then the really scary elements of AI and how it really has these powers that can do a lot of wonderful things and help children with special needs and help workers be more productive and engaged and collaborate. But yet, there's also this much darker side that AI's really only as good as its creators. And then the other difficulty is that, because we have become so trusting of these machines, we disregard our own intuition. And that is a really scary element, so. What I think is exciting, and it goes back to this risk taking mentality, that Nutanix has, is, we're gonna talk about these things. We're just going to forget about them or they're gonna be a sideshow, this is really on the main stage, let's talk about our values, let's talk about the humanity of technology and this is really an important part of the conversation. >> It's interesting, the culture, we talked about the culture a lot yesterday. And you can see from the mix of the guests we've had here and how they're putting their content together across the show portfolio, it's not just speeds and feeds. There's a lot of tech for good angle but they're not tech for good stories like hey, look, here's a tech for good story. Look how good we are because we promote it. They're authentic people that have a great story that has a tech involvement. But it's not a pure Nutanix messaging kind of thing. >> Right, and it goes to back to their values, the humble, hungry, honest, and have a lot of heart. I mean I think that that is, you really see how important culture is, when it is top down. When Dheeraj embodies certain characteristics and traits, you see that employees then look up and they say okay, this is what we're about, this is who we are. >> You know, we also talked yesterday about our analysis in the keynote, what's interesting about culture is, there's also a culture shift going on inside their customer base. And again, it's back to this kind of Star Wars theme, Jedi knights and the revolution continuing for Nutanix, their opportunity is to continue to stay on the course, and this is gonna be a big bet for them, they gotta make some big bets on the technology side, which they're making, but also they have an opportunity because a lot of their installed base are rebels, right? So you have this rebellion IT guy, generational shift where you have DevOps coming in and Gene Kim who wrote the book on DevOps, runs the biggest DevOps event in the world, series of events, DevOps Enterprise Summit, he's even saying it's about 3% changeover. So I think there's a big tailwind coming for Nutanix. Around DevOps, operating models, in the enterprise and cloud where, the convergence of those two worlds coming together, and it's gonna be a younger generation, it's gonna be a different world. If that happens, I think that's gonna be something that Wall Street might not see. I think that's kind of an area. And that's gonna be a good tailwind for Nutanix. The other notable thing that I would point out from this show is, the presence of VMware visibly in the conversation. And I think Dheeraj was talking about, hey we don't mind talking about VMware because they validate the marketplace, they're the big 800 pound gorilla. And we're gonna continue to innovate around them. We don't need their Hypervisor, customers don't need to pay their vTax, that's his messaging, so that was a key notable. The other one was the challenge that Nutanix has, this is, again, might be a Wall Street insight for some of the Wall Street folks out there is that, their challenge has been getting new logos. Their cost to sales is a little bit high because they require POCs and once they get in there they usually win. And then their cost per sales, cost per order dollar on the sales side once they have a customer, is very low, they get more renewals and they have more net contract value so they have great customer economics on that side. The Hewlett Packard Enterprise deal for them, could bring them a tsunami of new logos. That could give them a lot of leverage and bring their customer base well above their 12,000 number now. And bring them up into a whole nother level. So I think the HPE deal will be a tell sign on the numbers, and if they can get more new logos in there, the big accounts that HP has through their channel, that's a big story. So VMware, HPE, culture, all the main story here. >> And of course we had HPE on the show yesterday, talking about that very development, so. We have lots more great content, great guests to come today, this has been just a ball hosting with you, so I'm really for another day. >> Very intimate show, I mean, Nutanix are a very intimate show they don't really care about the big numbers, they want the right numbers and that speaks to their culture. >> And they know their people. Because as we talked about many times, Mark Hamill, up on the stage yesterday, so, they know their community. Please stay tuned for more of the coverage from theCUBE of .NEXT here in Anaheim. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, stay tuned. (electronic music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen Brought to you by nutanix. I'm >> just going to hear you. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next here at the Anaheim Convention Center in California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We are welcoming to the Cube. George Canuck. He is the vice president. Worldwide sales and channels absent us. Thank you so much for coming on the Q. >> Thanks for having me excited to be here. >> So here we are on the convention floor. Sixty five hundred attendees. You actually have a booth here? Yes, you do, actually. Right over >> there. Take a look. Orange logo. >> Very handsome logo. So tell it for our viewers who are not familiar with your company. Tell your Austin, Texas based tell tell our viewers a little bit about what you do. What's what sentences about? >> Sure. So we help professionals do something really important, ultimately solving a big problem for them, which is keeping customers happy. So we're looking at we provide a suffer platform that looks at all of the underlying infrastructure that's actually supporting the application itself. So they're trying to deliver APS and services their customers a happy customers. Somebody clicks their phone or their laptop and just gets to that service. We make sure that that app is available and healthy, but looking at everything underneath it. Whether that's Ah hybrid cloud, it's a private hcea type cloud as well. Or it's micro services or its legacy infrastructure. It doesn't matter. We talk to it and we help make sure that everything's working properly. >> But it works the way it's supposed to >> exactly way had the chief product officer on scene eel from New Chantix talking about hyper convergence. The benefits of that Yeah, it's also thought the hyper converge clouds, I guess, with the lack of a better description that that rules going there, too, When you start to get into this resetting of the infrastructure elements on premises and also in hybrid multi cloud Yeah, a lot of problems arise. They did a huge issue. So can you give us some color commentary on your thoughts on where customers are here summer summer like, Well, we're not there yet. Summer stuck running out of gas or stuck in the mud, and some just saying, you know, we're all in on the cloud, So different profile makeups of sure Wow, adoption. >> Yeah, let me talk about a little bit. So I heard a stat recently that the current adoption of enterprises for clouds about ten percent. So ten per cent of workloads today in the cloud doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of growth and a lot of people aren't trying it, but only ten percent are there. And in a lot of cases, the more progressive organizations actually did move workload with cloud they got there. They found out that maybe things were more expensive than they thought or didn't quite perform well and they took a step back and retooled it. It really was for Nutanix, I think personally Ah, very good time for them to step in with this notion of a private cloud. It's sort of that step in between for some of them. However, when you look at it from our perspective, we you know, we've been around since two thousand five. We started his open source and moved into a commercialized product. We've worked with some of the biggest banks. Insurance companies tell echoes and even MSP is in the world. We've seen that the certain workloads have moved to the cloud pretty quickly or too hyper converged. But yet there's still a lot that hasn't and there's a lot of unknowns that air there. In some cases, it's a function of Is the team ready to make the move and other cases? Is the culture of the organization ready to make the move? For us? It doesn't matter because we can look at all of it. But we can make it easier for them because we actually help them. Look at the various workloads in the performance of those abs and how how they would perform. And they make a move to the >> T. Want to get your thoughts on the psychology of the the environment, the buyer or the abuser. Whenever is a changeover to new technology or new desktop or, you know, cloud, the expectation is better run better, so coming around faster and better, better user experience. Yes, so this kind of puts you guys on the pressure cooker because you guys have toe monitoring starts working worse than it was before. Yeah, so table stakes now is be better. Be faster whether it's a VD, I roll out or cloud implementation. How do you guys hate a lead? >> We know there's there's a piece that actually happens before that. So the first step that we see that happens for organizations making the move is actually rationalizing the views of the truth. That makes sense. And so, in a lot of organizations, there are different silos. I've been in meetings where the Dev Ops team, the same team running service now, for example, and the cops are meeting each other, shaking hands and saying, Hi, Jane. Hi, Bob. Great to meet you for the first time. And that is being Those meetings are being held by what I'LL say are more progressive leaders, the CEOs and GPS. But the first thing that happens is every group says we'LL have this basket of tools that I'm using to make sure that my customers are happy and they have to rationalize all that one of our customers. Huntington Bank had thirty seven tools in place to look at every single part of the business and get that one view and he could match. It's pretty difficult we helped to make that transition. If they're culturally going to make the switch than having a grip on what's working. Now we'LL help them replicate that when they make the move Teo Private cloud or Public cloud. That makes sense. >> Yeah, totally does. And they also mentioned the status quo. A lot of companies don't want to rock the boat. Yes, when they bring in new technologies. How do you see that playing out? Because one of nutanix is advantages that they get in. They change agents? Yes, and cause some benefits there for the customer, and then they grow from there. But yes, the people still gonna buy the old old stuff. >> Yeah, well, so you know what's interesting? So we have a change agent who's a friend of ours that nutanix a customer. So Wendy, fight for the CEO of NUTANIX is actually a customer of ours. They call themselves customer zero. If you've read her interviews, she they drink their own Champaign. And she recently we interviewed her and she talked about that change. And I believe it does need to come from the top town. So progressive leaders will introduce that change of the business and honestly make it comfortable for their team to take risks because it is a risk making a move any of these technologies. I think when you when we look at the I guess the simplest migration for a customer to HCR Private Cloud, it is going to be maintaining that visibility across the legacy into the new world that's going to be critical for them. That view, by the way, is one that that even the CEO wants and the CEO. >> I want to talk about the changing role of the CEO because because it is it is a very big theme and trend in this industry. And you keep talking about this idea of a progressive CEO, and this is someone who is willing to take risks. Willing Teo, tear down silos, make sure people are collaborating. Can you talk a little bit more about what you see as the people who are best at their jobs? Yes, best CEOs out there and what they're doing, what they're doing differently, >> right? Well, so I mentioned these groups meet for the first time the cops, the Dev, Ops and Sam, and probably other groups that come into those rooms as well. The profile today of a lot of the CEOs and the Final one is someone who came up through the operations organization more than likely, and they understand how that world works. They've had to. For some of them, it's been unease e transition to bring the Dev ops folks into the room. I think about this, right Cops roll is in the past. Bring me an apple. Make sure runs flawlessly on this amazing gear that I have. The Dev Ops role is I'm going to take a nap. I'm going to run it on this gear and I'm gonna optimize the app. So it's a different view to get to the same problem in the other end. And so I would tell you that it is about being progressive and that role has shifted. It's very possible the next batch of CEOs will come out of the developer organization one more quick common on that. So there's a pretty provocative Forrester wave that came out a few weeks ago that we're in who for the first time didn't look at the type of tech they actually looked at. The problem being solved and the problem, as they categorize it, is intelligent application and service monitoring. So it is about services and APS running well on DH. There are more than one technology to solve that problem. We're pleased Tio have been recognized for our thought leadership. That's >> how do you guys handle the potential blind spots in the observation space that you guys have to look under the covers and look at everything? How do you guys identify potential blind spots? What's what's you guys filtering out? Take us through an example? >> Sure, we'LL sue a couple things that'LL help you get to the blinds. So there are a lot of blind spots, especially have multiple tools. There's blind spots. The second part of that that's pretty relevant, is getting complete visibility to all the right folks in the organization. So one of the first things we do is look at that entire surface, if you will, the entire landscape lay it all out and started the top with the service and show all the dependencies of everything underneath it. We call that the model, so when the models in place, then we can show the impact of change on the model that could be a bad piece of gear. It could be a bad piece of code. It doesn't really matter to us. We're looking at it that way. That's that's probably the first step in it. The second piece that goes along with this is something we did intentionally, which is we brought a I into the mix. So we partner with Google. We actually pivoted much like Nutanix did a number of years ago last year really seen as cloud and brought in the A, A A and M L capabilities of Google, primarily because the amount of information coming out of all these complex infrastructures is more than a human could handle. So we're using that ay, ay to help look at each anomalies problem as it happens each potential blind spot and uncover that using the technology to determine. Is it a real problem for me, or is it just noise? >> It's interesting you bring up the I T Ops and Dev ops thing. You know one thing that Google proved out. I've been saying this on the Q as you know, for years and recently highlighted at the recent next conference, they nailed the whole s sorry thing it's light reliable with the engineer, and they didn't do it as a strategy to try to get market share. They didn't because they had their own problem. Yeah, that was massive scale, lot of automation, A lot of software. But they had a development environment of debs and ops. Was about one human. Too many machines? Yeah, relationship. That's essentially what you're getting at. Here it >> is. Actually, it's It's interesting. You know Mike Nickerson from Google, who published some of the interesting initial charts, kind of like a Maslow's hierarchy of Sorry, the foundational level actually is monitoring. It's sort of like a RH or water or safety on DH. Having that visibility is the first piece, The one thing all city though you touched on automation, the all that information, the world and all that, eh? Eyes kind of worthless if you can't actually automate the back end of it. So we spent a lot of time working with either cloud optimization, you know, a DBS Lambda or Google of Claude Function. Or we're looking at things like pup in Chef just to automate all of that other end of it. We have a term we use. We called software defined. It stops when you get to the point where the inputs more than a human can handle. They won't deal to react fast enough. A lot of our tools, the human's air used This sounds like I'm talking about the sky net, but a lot of the tools the humans use our eyes. Actually, in forensic analysis, when a problem happens, the remediation and the and the pro activities happening through the machine, you >> know where it's kinda went. Dog starts sniffing out Bala where I want to get the machines, actually, on the stack related question. You know, one of the things we heard from so Neil, the chief product officer, was the multi cloud battles will be fought on the top of the stack or up to stack. So the question is, what line or what? What? What's the line for under the hood now? So as you look at micro services and Deb, ops continues to go with Cooper Netease and service meshes. Yeah, you're gonna have a serious of service is being turned on terror. Tauron down all the times, right? So that challenges on the B on the monitor monitoring and observation. So where do you guys go? How high up do you go? Is there a line where the hood is? What's under the hood? What's about you? Do you think that's >> a fantastic question? I couldn't have asked for a better one. So the one side of it is house. Yeah, performing that sort of above the hood if you will write. And we are looking at that and we're looking at all the way to the level of down to the experience of that application and how it runs on the infrastructure. But we go all way down to the bare metal is well, because we think there's a value in doing it. There's a couple of concepts out there around server. Listen, by the way, Xena's cloud is a survivalist deployment. So, actually, you know, eat her own dog for you. Drink our own Champaign when it comes to this tack. But that notion of below the hood for us is all the way down to the bare metal, and that visibility, if you want to look at it in another way, is actually the great high quality data and raw material to drive the II and the output. It if you have to make sense of the other end of it. Yup. >> I want to ask you about the show. So at how many? How many of these have you been to? And what What's your experience? What are you? What do you What do you hoping to bring back with you to Austin today myself. >> But for Nutanix, we've been We've been a partner with Satanic since since we started working there as a customer, which would have been probably late. Twenty sixteen, twenty, sixteen. We started doing the shows last year. We did we actually attend as a partner. We attend some of their meetings and the partner part's important to come back to in a second, but a zeo as a technology partner initially. Now we're moving into a point we were trying to sell with the team and help them bring our visibility to their customers. The last thing we did was was next Europe, which is a fantastic show in London last fall. And we've also done a lot of the road shows in the cities. The thing we love about it is we both talked to the same customer. Both have the same people were talking to the one thing we're trying to do. And I know that Nutanix is as well as we want to bring more of the developers and Dev ops crew into it. We believe they need to be a part of the discussion. So something we're trying to help facilitate. But but this show has been fantastic for us. Yeah, >> and to your point about the developers, we're seeing that in the infrastructure worlds, not just operation work. There's Debs in there now. Yes. Automating away these mundane, repetitive tasks. Yeah, I think I think it's >> more friendly than it was for sure. >> All right, >> we'LL take your word for it. Thank you so much, George. For coming on. The Cuba was a pleasure having you on. >> Thank you. Pleasure meeting about. Thank you so much. Take care. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more from nutanix dot Next coming up in just a little bit

(uptempo music) >> Narrator: Live from Anaheim, California it's The Cube! Covering Nutanix dot Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back everyone to The Cube's live coverage of Nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my cohost John Furrier. We are joined by Dr. Ayanna Howard, she's the professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Welcome Dr. Howard to The Cube! Thank you, thank you. I'm excited about this conversation. >> Yeah so you, you're a fascinating person, when you were a little girl, watching Bionic Woman you said "I wanna be a scientist," you started your career at NASA. >> Ayanna: Correct. >> You are an entrepreneur, a researcher. Tell us what you're doing today. >> So what I'm doing today, and what I'm really excited about is bringing robots into the home of children with special needs. So one of the things about kids and those that may have a developmental disability is that there's not enough contact hours with human clinicians. And so, how do you augment that in the home environment? How do you bring technology into the home to do therapy with them, to do even education? And so that's what I focus on. >> So, we want to hear so much more about that, but what are you gonna be talking about at this conference? It's the future of AI, and robots. >> Yes, I'm gonna talk about the things that make my robots work. And so, the future of AI and robotics and where it leads, it's a combination of things like wearables. So if you think about all the data around us, we have wearables with our phones, and our smart watches, all that data that's being collected about us, allows our machines to do very interesting personalized things with us and for us. The other thing is that if you think about collaborative AI, collaborative machines, we're going to the place where the workforce and how you do your work, you're going to have an AI as a companion, a robot as an assistant, so you might not be sitting next to a human, you might be sitting next to a robot. And so, what does that look like? And then, of course, emotional AI, and so, yes, machines do have emotions, which is, counts kind of weird, but in order for us to work with others, we typically have a bond, so why not have a bond with our machines? >> What's the software look like? I'm rifting in my mind here, I'm just thinking about, I'm gonna write some software that might be dynamic, a neural network, these kinds of words have been kicked around in the industry. How do you make software have emotion in AI? Because it has to be random, but yet not, it has to be programmable. >> It does. But think about it. Emotions are not necessarily random. Emotions are pretty repetitive, i.e., if you're hurt, what do you do? If you're young you cry, if you're older you hide the cry, right? I mean, it's very repetitive, if you're happy there's a certain emotion, what makes you happy? There are certain things that we can all say if I suddenly woke up and I won a prize, I'd be happy. Emotions are actually very predictable, they're not that hard to model. >> And the data sources could be coming off my Fit Bit, facial recognition, you know the morning... >> Well facial recognition, you can see it in the face, in fact your pulse, and you sweat a little bit when your emotions change. Remember the mood rings back in the day? (laughter) >> Sure! >> OK those were fake, but still, their concept about them was that your body gives a response based on the emotions inside. >> Yeah, that's so cool. So what's the state of the art, you look at bleeding edge and state of the art kind of mainstream, where are people with software, machine learning, AI, what's some of the things that are notable to you that are important to highlight? >> Yes, so I think that the two areas that are the furthest ahead, one is facial recognition and emotion detection, and it's because the application are out there. As an example, airports are putting in these systems, and so imagine, I mean, the positive is, is that you don't have to book or print out your ticket, right? You just walk into the airport, you walk though security, you don't get padded down, and you walk to your gate and get on the plane. I mean, just imagine that. You're like How would you do that? Well, if I know who you look like, and I can model you, and I grab your wearable, and your data, I know who you are! So, I don't have to make sure that you are who you are, I know. I mean, so that's kind of a benefit. Of course, there's some negatives, which we won't talk about, but that's one area, this facial recognition aspect. The other I think it's in healthcare, I think it's in the fact that our data, and about us, about our health, it's so much there, and as we mine it we just get better. There's, for example, some research that shows stress can be detected and I can then have a, think about it, I can have an AI that if I know you're stressed like, I'm not going to send you that email, I'm going to halt a little bit, until I realize that your stress level is a little bit better, and then I will give you the bad news. Right? Like, because we don't want to be stressed. >> I need that, I need that app. >> Rebeca: But that's a manager with really good intentions, I mean, you can really see the perils of this going... >> No, that's, that's the negative. That's the aspect of, all these things are, really have good return on investment, good quality, but the negatives are is that if you have nefarious manager or an organization like I just wanna make money, money, money, you can sway that, and I think, though, that most organizations are thinking about this. I think there's this push now to do things like regulations, to basically protect us, but still insure that we have a positive relationship with AI and robotics. >> What's the coolest thing you've seen or built recently that could tie into the robotics? >> So, I will personally say it's one of our machines, that has, it emotionally responds to you based on what you're doing, and so what does this mean? It means I have robots that are just looking so cute, right? You look at them, and anyone looks at them, and it's just , it's like, it's real, it's intelligent, it like understands me. Of course, it's programmed based on modeling but it's just as fascinating, and I watch people interact with robots, and it's like oh, my gosh, this person, this individual, is really engaged with my robotic creation. >> And you mean, in conversation or just in feeling the comradery? >> In conversation, in interaction, and the robots, they have a limited script, but people will adapt to that, right? And they will, it's just like when you talk to your phone, have you noticed that when your phone doesn't understand you, what do you do? You speak a little slower. You might choose different words, right? I see that with the robots, you change your behavior based on the limitations. >> Speaking with someone who doesn't speak lour language natively. >> Correct. Same thing with robots. >> So describe what you see... Returning to the beginning of our conversation talking in particularly with kids with special needs. >> Ayanna: Yes. >> Describe what you see, the changes in the child, who is developing a relationship, a bond with a robot. >> Yes, so what we've actually shown, not just seen and observed, is that when we have a child interacting with a robot their, and what we call, whatever milestone we're doing, so maybe it's movement therapy, which means I want them to say, move a little faster than their normal space of moving, what I see is with the robot there is a partner encouraging, guiding, providing them input on how well they're doing, or in terms of correcting, the child improves their behavior, and so between day zero and day n, the child has gotten better. We see that. We have the data that shows that. >> Incredible. I wanna also ask about women in technology, and this is, this is really a theme at every single tech conference you go to because it's such a problem, it's such an issue that is finally getting the attention it deserves. We know about the dearth of women leaders, the dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in management leadership positions, what do you see as you role in tackling this problem, as the head of an important department in technology and also as a woman of color? >> Yeah, so I think there's always been kind of two dilemmas, one is what they call the pipeline, which is now the pathway, like how do you get women to come into stem? And the data has shown that is not that girls are not interested in stem, it's that they lose interest because of their society, right? So that's one thing. It's like make sure that where they are in the society is encouraging. The other is that when you get older, you look up, you're like, okay there's no one there. Obviously, I'm not supposed to be here, or when things get tough, it's like, okay, I need to move out. And so the other is, how do you do mentorship and sponsorship, so that women are pushed forward as managers and supervisors. So those are kind of the two things. And so, as a, and I consider myself a leader in this space, I actually feel it's my duty to be up front, and be a mentor, and be a lead, and actually be vocal, and make others realize like, if I'm in a room, and we're deciding on, you know, a student or a candidate, and there's no representation, you know, I'm comfortable enough to say, hey, I should not be the one that says this, right? And eventually what you see is that people start looking and thinking about this, at every instance of time. >> Do you feel like it's getting better? >> I do. It's getting better. And it's not perfect but it's getting better. Like, if I look in the classrooms, I look in the computer science curriculums, I see more female students coming in, and lasting, and then going into corporate America and continue on to grad school. I see it being better, of course it's not on parity, but is is better. >> That's awesome. And the technology has shifted the definition. It's not programming, or electrical engineering, the surface area for tech is gaming to analytics, data science, it's huge. >> Human-centered interaction. >> There's new artistry around us, so I think it's a great surface area. >> It is, and I think one of the reasons why it's so important is that the world is diverse, I mean, in terms of all the different aspects. An so, if you're gonna create products for a diverse world, you should have individuals that are also diverse, creating them for everyone so that there's some equality in the process. >> As the analog world connects with the digital world, fascinating we talked before we came on camera around the technology in digital. So the human experience for me, whether having robots, detecting emotions, and having some sort of new notifications, like hey, you know, cheer up, or do something clever... >> Right >> Is that you can now immerse, so augmented reality has been the first killer app before virtual reality, but gaming is an indicator of what's happening onscreen, so, the onscreen digital realm is intersecting with our lives. >> Ayanna: It is. >> What's your view on this? Because this is an area that's new, it's cutting edge, it's a first generation problem, an opportunity. >> Opportunity. I think this, this blending of the, I would say, even, I would say the blending of the digital and physical and the gamefication aspects, is really gonna enhance two areas. One is education, and the retraining, and so what does that mean? It means that, instead of me having to, not to say go to college for four years, but instead of me trying to study everything in this one-semester course, it's like, I just need some basic knowledge and I can then work in the field, and I have my augment reality and so I see things and there's some scaffolding, there's some indication of here's step one, here's step two, ahh, you did that step two a little bit wrong, let's revise it. So you learn with real-time training and that's with doctors, well except for live patients, but you know, with doctors or residents, factory workers, or even teachers, teachers who are teaching say, calculus, that may have an English background. That's where it is. >> The progressions are not linear like they used to be. >> Ayanna: No! >> They are different, and now you have dated instrumentation with on-demand digital robots... >> Robots, agents... >> John: Agents, assistants... >> Adaptation, taking things from other places, so if I, for example, learn the best way to provide information to this human and this factory, well guess what, I can take that information, connect to the cloud, connect to the data centers, and apply that information to another worker in a different factory, but very similar characteristics, and so you have this transfer of knowledge as well. >> So education was one. What's the other one? Healthcare? >> Of course it's healthcare! (laughter) Of course. >> As someone who is immersed in it and a believer in technology, what do you do to disconnect? Well, first of all, do you disconnect? Do you worry about our over reliance on these little devices in our pockets, and what do you do to sort of leave the digital world behind for a while? >> Yeah, so I do worry about our over reliance because we've shown, and other researchers have shown, that there's actually an over trust factor. We will use devices, and of course these devices they have errors, right, even if it's you know 1% of the time, and that 1% of the time when they have errors we find that a lot of individuals will trust those errors, because they're over relying, they kind of go in zone mode, they're like, it worked all this time, so that 1%, they just don't question it. >> It must be real news! (laughter) >> But it's scary! >> Yeah, it is. >> It's scary. I do worry about that. And we're thinking about ways to try to mitigate that, 'cause that does worry me. How do I disconnect? I think that with anything mind, body and soul, so I love listening to music, although that's not disconnecting from technology 'cause I'm using technology to listen, but it's this zone period. Exercise, I think most of us think about exercise I'm fairly religious, even when I'm traveling, like okay, I'm going to find the gym and at least walk on the treadmill because we do have to have that combination, in order to be healthy ourselves. >> Finally, for that little girl, the little girl you, who's watching Bionic Woman I think that's the thing, we need more shows like that, to get, to get >> Click us interested >> Well exactly, what would be your advice to the smaller you, who says I want to be a scientist someday? >> So I would, and this is like some advice that people told me as I was growing up, and I didn't realize I had really good mentors, is one is, don't listen to the naysayers, i.e., believe in yourself, right? And I think that's the one thing we sometimes forget to do, like believe in that dream, even if others say that it's not possible, and it's like, no, everything is possible if you believe in yourself. >> Words to live by. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> Rebeca: This was great conversation. >> Awesome! >> I'm Rebeca Knight for John Furrier. We will be back here tomorrow with more from Nutanix dot Next. We hope to see you then. (electronic music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot Next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We have two guests for the segment. We have Ken Ringle. He is the vice president Global Alliance Architecture at Wien. Thanks so much for coming on. The your Cube alum Returning to the >> great to be here again >> And we have Mark Ni Mire. He is the director of product management for data protection Nutanix Thank you for coming on the Cube. So we're one of the big thing when the big announcements today is nutanix mine. I want to talk to you and ask you Ken. What brings nutanix and team together to create Nutanix? Mine? >> Yeah, sure where you know we're super excited. You know, we've been partners for many years. We actually brought a product to market together last year, called the availability for nutanix, which added support for primary workloads. But we hadn't been working together on the secondary side, right where we land are backups And it became very clear, you know, from our customers that they were, You know, we really want to provide that seamless experience, a turnkey experience for our customers. So we started talking together and really, this is over a year in the making, right? We came together and we started brainstorming and it became very clear in a lot of synergies between the companies and and what we could deliver to our customers. So it became obvious. Hey, let's let's bring this together. It was more about the high. Not not not when they're you know, it was It was it was how how do we do it? >> And what were the problems you were trying to solve here? What were the issues that you were hearing from customers? >> So when we talk to customers, a lot of complaints that there are customers are voicing its around the complexity in their backup infrastructure, Right? Nutanix is known for providing simplicity for the primary infrastructure, right, reducing complexity that you typically having your free chair our protection. New tenants mind will provides the same amount ofthe simplicity for your for your lack of infrastructure, a type of converts solution that includes the Wien sell fair to provide data protection services for any workload running in your data center >> Integrations A big part of the modernized in hybrid on cloud with, you know, on premises Private Cloud. As you guys know, integrating it is not always that easy. This's pretty important. You guys been very successful with your partnering. Your product has been successful. Revenues actually show that as the cloud comes into the picture, a lot of people have been tweaking the game there game a little bit on the product side because of the unique differences with Cloud. So with multi cloud, private cloud and hybrid, what changes what's changing in the customer mind right now? Because they got their own premises thing pretty solid, but operationally it feels like cloud. But how does it affect the d Rp? Because this is going to be one of the big conversations. >> Yeah, no question. I mean, when we when we talked to our customers on how they're protecting their data, you know, we hear from a lot of customers is hey, we want to leverage the cloud for for a number of things. And I think the cloud has gone through an evolution right, You know, it's just like anything there's, you know, the great great hey could do all these things. And then people come back to reality. And what we see a lot of our customers doing is is using the cloud for long term data retention, using it as a secondary d our site. You know, you go back five years, you know, customer, especially large customers, all have two physical data centers. So now what? We're seeing a lot of our customers. They have that one physical primary data center, but they're leveraging the cloud. Is there as there d our site, right? So they're they're moving their data there with our recovery capabilities, you know, you can actually get a cloud workload recovered in a disaster scenario quite rapidly. And that's that's been a major change over the especially over the last couple years. >> And then, if you really look at integration, right, the the new Tenants Mind solution to Platform provides integration in six different areas. Integration is sizing, making it very easy to size, or we've identified some form. Factors were building it into new. He's an ex isar, very easy to, uh, to buy single skew that basically provides the hardware hardware support suffer for from from nutanix and suffer from being easy to deploy. Very automated installer that turns the nutanix appliance into a into a mine appliance in a matter of minutes and an easy to manage integrated dashboards Easy to scale right Horse entering is tailing out for capacity, but also for increased performance and then integrated support, where we have a joint support model between the two companies to really help our customers in case there are issues. >> So why why did you choose each other? What was the courtship like and and how how did they have the relationship evolve? >> So if you look at vino and new tenants, we really focus on quality and providing simplicity for our customers. That if that is something that really it was very apparent from the beginning that we have the same view points in the same Mantorras, basically around simplicity, providing quality both off our MPs scores are definitely the highest in the industry, something that is that is practically unheard of. So it was a very natural. I think this company's coming together and providing value together. >> Yeah, I mean, we're maniacal about customer success and customer support and customer satisfaction. That was that was very clear early on. You know, Venus as a peer software company in a way, and we need a partner in order to deliver a full stack solution. Nutanix is there's just a lot of synergies that culture, the companies, the size of the companies, the age of the cos it just It's just a great partnership in a great fit where, you know, there's just we're both moving in the same direction in in concert >> both hard charging cultures to, you know, entrepreneurial high quality was focus on the customer but hard charging. You guys move fast, so well, I got the two experts here on data protection. I gotta ask you about my favorite topic, ransomware, because people are fun and get rid of that tape. I got to get stuff back faster on recoveries. But ransomware really highlights the data protection scenario because they target like departments that maybe understaffed or might be vulnerable or just don't fix their problem. They go back to the well every time that it's everything you want to make some cash and go back. This >> is where >> software. Khun solved a lot of problem. What's your what's your guy's view of the whole ransomware thing? Because it becomes huge. >> Yeah, no question. Way Hear this from a lot of our customers And of course, we can't talk about it when we have customers come to us. But, you know, we've had many customers come to us, and unfortunately, it's after the fact A I you know, I had a ransomware attack and, you know, I lost all this, but now you know I can't let it happen again, but it's really from a backup strategy perspective. It's still important to keep air gap. You know, these ransom where these folks that are building these, these ransomware attacks, they're very intelligent. They've gotten extremely intelligent and how they move from one system to another and they even hide out. So you, you you eliminate a ransomware attack and that thing can come right back. You restore a backup that was a month old that has that sitting and waiting. So, you know, having a solution that can actually test your backups before you put him in production. Haven't air gap, you know, have a mutability on some of your backup date of those. These are all things we talk to our coast. >> You'd be a point about the bridges up because it was just going to a customer about this. They fixed the ransomware paid but didn't fix the problem. Yeah, so it's, like, end of the month and eat some cash right around the end of the month. But, you know, saying they shake him down again. Yes. The wells there, they keep on coming back. So there's, like, community of data perfection. I mean, professionals getting together to kind of get ahead of this problem >> on DH, then the other aspect ofthe basically being able to recover quickly his performance, right? Nutanix platform provides have informed the throughput. So you can very quickly restore your work clothes as well. >> Yeah, that would be a great problem of simplifying. Yeah, exactly. >> So what are the next steps for this alliance? Where where where do we go from here? >> So from from basically we've just finished a round of vested beta testing right way are going to be maniacally focused on the first hundred customers really understanding how they're going to put mine in their data centers. How they were going to use it as in their data sent to protect their Derek. There their workloads and their applications from their own. We have a lot of plans, very interesting plans around Rome Emperor. We can build even tighter integration from a management perspective, but also from a data fabric perspective. Weather that's on prime a weather gets goes into desire clouded nutanix icloud There's a lot of interesting areas that brain and I have been brainstorming on white boarding and so on that you'LL see coming out in the next two versions of the products. >> What's the big customer request? What's the big feature request? What's the big ask from customers for you guys together? >> At the end of the day, you know, our customers are really asking for simplicity. They they want, they want to simplify their environment. I mean, it is moving from specialists generalists, and they and they want a system that works well together. That's going to lower their costs and they want peace of mind. So they want. They want to know their backups are protected, They want to know they can restore. And that's really what we're focused on is providing that to our customers >> and reliable. Have making sure their works hundred percent any new things emerging out the multi cloud thing that you guys see coming down around the quarter that you're getting ready for to help customers simplified any any signals from this multi cloud equation. >> So one of the things I look at is really the lines between on Graham and primary and secondary and tertiary. They're really blurring. Also, the lines between Young Prem and Cloud are blurring as well, but you can replicate data and replicate backups really, really efficiently to wherever it needs to be. So I really see that as a zoo core strength to enable value that plays into the military >> true operational model across whatever environment, and still do the tearing and things you need to do. >> Yeah, no doubt flexibility and being able to support, you know, multiple environments. You know, that's that's that's absolutely what we're after. It's It's what we what we leverage is part of the nutanix ecosystem is is that breath of coverage, but but also given customer choice. >> Just talking to Rebecca, which we love data project. Should I leave lights? Ideo delegate always whimsy will you guys be on next week? This is a huge conversation that used to be a bolt on conversation in the old days of now. Data protection, backup in recovery, disaster planning. All part of a operating model. Holistic picture. Yeah. How is that? We're one hundred percent there yet. And all customers where they still use. This stuff's still kind of like, not forgetting to design in. >> Yeah, I mean, protection. You know where you know, lots of our customers are coming to us because their struggle with legacy solutions and they're looking to modernize their whole infrastructure right there, modernizing where they land. The backups are modernizing the platform that that lands those backups on the infrastructure. And so, you know, that's it's a major problem for our customers and really, you know, you you mentioned, you know, availability and you know, you you go back five years, maybe five, seven, eight years. You know, availability was measured in three nines. Four, ninety five, ninety availability. You know, everyone in the world of of everything cloud and everything sas, you know, availability is one hundred percent or nothing. You know, it's there is no there. There really is no sort of anything but a one hundred percent availability, >> and its security highlights all the problems. So another customer about this ransom, one other ransomware customer they were doing all the backups on tape. Can you imagine? Of course, they're talking for ransom where it's just good on the director. He was still using tape because they can't turn around fast enough. It was a big problem. >> Yeah, you know, it's funny, you know, you you know, we're focused on innovation and next things. But when you you know, you you then have some of those customer conversations. And some of them are still, you know, because of their compliance and processing procedures, There's still, you know, five years behind may be where we are. You know, you've got a you gotto sort of bring them along for the journey to knowing that they're gonna they're gonna trail behind. But for the for the early adopters and the innovators way also have to serve them as well. >> And they got there. They gotta level up themselves to it, son. Them too. They had they had the level of >> So speaking of innovation, you are two different companies. You already talked about this, its energies and the similarities in culture. But you are two companies coming together to build a product. How does that work? I mean, do you do get in the same room? Do you watch the same movies? Do you have a happy you? >> So >> get one brain working on this >> female. Vamos a distributed company. We are distributed company. So it's it's It's a lot of calls and so on. But it's it's really fun to really see it. She had come together and becoming really right. Yes, there's a lot of hard engineering problems that we have to solve in some very deep discussions around layout and things like that. But then doubling it up, working on the joint value prop and working on the joint marketing it really is a very nice wide set of off capabilities and skills that we've been working >> on. And when I went out, I mean, it is hard. It is hard to bring to two things together and work on them jointly. And we've, you know, so far been fairly successful. What I would tell you is it it brings some some advantages to us as well Because we have a best of breed platform. We have a best to breed data protection platform. You know, bringing those together bring some advantages that maybe someone that does all that together on their own don't have because it's not a focus area for them. Right? So, you know, it's our job to make sure we take advantage of that and provide some additional things for our customers that maybe they won't get out of some of those other platforms. >> Well, Mark and Ken, thank you both. So much for coming on the Cube. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have Ah, we'Ll have more from nutanix dot Next coming up just a little bit. Stay with us.

>> Voiceover: Live! From Anahiem, California, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.next 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.next, here in Anaheim California, I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We're joined by Sunil Potti, he is the chief product and development officer here at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Glad to be here. >> So we are talking about the era of invisible infrastructure and this morning on the main stage there was many many different announcements, new products and adjustments, augmentations to products. Can you walk our viewers a little bit, walk our viewers through a little bit what you were talking about today? >> Yeah, I mean (inaudible) so in fact, our vision really hasn't materially changed over the last few years. In fact, my team always teases me that all I do is essentially change the timeline but the same slideshow is up. But you know, something about vision being consistent and we sort of have broken that up into two major phases, the first phase is essentially to move cloud from being a destination to being an experience. What do I mean by that? Essentially, everyone knows about cloud as being something served by Amazon, or Google, or (inaudible) and ultimately, our belief has been that if we do an honest job of what Amazon or Google provided natively But bring cloud to the customers rather than having the customers go to a destination, Then they can essentially get maybe 60 or 70 percent of that experience but maybe at a tenth of the price or a tenth of the time. And most human beings as you guys know, is that once you get 60 or 70 percent, You're happy and you move on other things. And that's really the first act of this company is to sort of bring cloud to the customers. And in doing so, in my opinion solves one of clouds biggest, you know, perennial issues, which is migration. Because that's essentially what lift and shift, gets in the way, that I've gotta change something that I've invested 20 years in and I've gotta lift and shift it. And if something comes to you, that gap is dramatically reduced, right? And sure, we don't do everything that public clouds do but, like I said, if you can do an honest job of that 60 % then it turns out that most customers now adopt Nutanix looking at public cloud as more of a tailwind instead of a headwind because the more they taste amazon outside the more they want amazon inside. And so, so, that's really the first act of the company. A series of products that allow us to build out a full blown IA stack but also a bunch of services such as desktops, databases, all the usual services. So it's all about increasing the layers of abstraction to the user so they can do one take operations. So, that's the first act. And the second act which is much more a longer term bet for the next decade or so is that if the first act was about bringing cloud to you to replatform the data center, customers are also going to redesign their apps and when they redesign their apps Do you want to do it on an operating system that locks you only into one public cloud? Or do you want to do it in something that can moves across clouds? And that's our second act of the company. And there's a lot of details there. >> John Furrier: So hyper-convergence was a great concept and proved it out, great customer base, core business is humming along, solid, but the growth is gonna come from essentials which is the enterprise in multiple clouds. So I get that. As you guys look and build those products and you're the chief product officer, you have the keys to the kingdom, it's all on you. >> It's in my guide to work out. >> So you're a team. But this is a big pressure, this is the opportunity. As you think about a software company as you guys are shifting from being hardware to software things start to be different so as you start thinking about the act two the convergence of clouds. That really is a key part of it, what you did for the data center, HCI, >> Yeah, totally. >> You're doing HCI for the cloud. >> Yeah, like what does that actually mean? >> So explain that concept. >> No, it's a great question. So, and some of this, obviously, we are struggling through ourselves. But we are not afraid of making mistakes in this transition as you've seen other the last year, we've gone from being in the plans company to a software that runs on third party to being a subscription company, to now running on clouds. All within a span of 12 months, while building a business, right? And sometimes it works, sometimes we pick up ourselves and learn from mistakes and go but to your point I think, we're not afraid to become an app on somebody else's operating system. Just like Microsoft said "Look I'm gonna release office, "on Mac or Ipad before I even do it on Windows," that kind of thinking has to permeate and pretty much, in my opinion, every technology will end up going forward. A good example of that is look, if somebody wants to consume their applications that they built on Nutanix on premise but their idea was look they don't wanna be in the data center business tomorrow without changing the apps they should be able to take that entire infrastructure and applications and consume it inside Amazon's fabric because they provide a bunch of other services as well as data centers. So, a recent announcement of Nutanix in AWS not on AWS for a reason is an example of us becoming an app on somebody else's operating system. That's an example of us transforming further away from being an infrastructure only or an appliance only company. >> What does this mean for your customers and your partners because you guys have taken an open strategy with partnering, the HPE announcements, very successfully off the tee, in the middle of the fair way as we say, looking good. That seems to be the trend, others taking a different approach, you know that is, owning it all. >> Yeah yeah, in fact I would say that look, in some way, internally we joke about ourselves, as we have to prove the... You know, we always used to think about ourselves as a smart phone for the enterprise, consumerizing the data center. But we had to prove that model by owning the full stack like Apple did, but over a period of time, to democratization happens, by distribution. And so in some ways, we have to become more of an android like company while retaining the best practices of the delight and the security of an apple device. So that's the easiest analogy where, We're trying to work with partners like Dell, Lenovo, and now increasingly, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Inspur, Intel, everybody is signed up, just because everybody now knows that the customers want an experience. And now the lastest relationship with HP takes it to the next level now where we want to bring essentailly super micro like appliance goodness one click from away upgrades, support, everything. But with a HPE backed platform, that both companies can benefit from. >> You know, one of the big complaints from customers, I hear, on theCUBE, and also privately is there's so many tools, and management software, I've got management plane for this, I got this over here, >> For sure... >> So there's kinda this toolshed mentality of, you know, a new hire, learn this tool for that software, people don't want another tool, they don't want another platform. So, how do you see that, how do you address that with going forward, this act two, as you continue to build the products what's the strategy and what's the value proposition for customers? >> I mean, think it's no different than I think how we sort of launched the company in the first place which is there's no way you can say we'll simplify your life without removing parts. That was the original Steve Jobs thing, right? The true way to simplify is to remove parts, right? And essentially that's what hyper-convergence has done, it just we're doing this not just for infrastructure but for clouds because when you use Nutanix you throw away old computer, you throw away old storage, you throw away old (inaudible) I mean, that's the only way to converge your experience down to one tool. You can't stitch together ten tools into this magical fabric, I mean it doesn't work that way. But that's hard, because not every customer is ready to do that, every partner is ready to do that they've got their own little incumbencies. But that's the journey we're on, it's a right of passage for us, we have to earn it the old fashioned way and we've done reasonably well so far. >> So you mentioned Steve Jobs, he also said, when he was alive, in an interview, on the lost interviews on Netflix, I watched that recently. He said, also software gives you the opportunity to move the needle on efficiencies, and change the game, much more significantly then managing a process improvement which can give you maybe 30% yield. He's saying you can go 60s, 80% changeover with software. This is part of your strategy, how do you guys see Nutanix in the future, with the software lead or approach, changing the game for IT? >> I think clearly, software is fundamental, I mean the whole point of us, our product was I think, we have some folks on the platform group that help make sure that the software runs because software has to run somewhere, by the way. It doesn't run in air, it runs on hardware. So let's not under emphasize hardware for that reason, but, most of our IP has been in software. But I would say that the real thing for us that has kept us going is design of software which is essentially also, when you go back to the Apple thing, because a lot of software renders out that too. It's how you design it, starting with why, rather than just going to the how, is how we see ourselves differentiating what we deliver to our customers over the next 5 years. >> Rebecca Knight: I want to ask you about innovation and your process because here you are, you're the Chief product officer at this very creative company, I wanna know, what sparks you're creativity, where do you get your ideas? Of course you're gonna say, "I talk to customers, "and I find out their problems", but where do you go for inspiration? >> Yeah, I think it's an age old problem I'll give you my personal answer, I don't think it's representative of everyone in the company obviously. And that's one of the good things with Nutanix each of us have their own point of view and things, right? We have this term of "let chaos reign and then reign in chaos". Right? To some extent. That has been done well at other companies like Google, and so forth. So, I've always believed in a couple of vectors for inspiration. The most obvious one is to listen to others. More than talk. Whether it's listening to customers, listening to partners, listening to other employees with other ideas and have a curated way to do that because if you only listen to customers you build faster horses not carts, as Henry Ford said, okay? So that's the what I would call a generic theme and you'd think that it's easy to do so, but it's very hard to truly listen from signal from the noise by the way. So there's an art there that one has to get better at. But the DNA has to be there to listen that's the first thing I would say. The second thing which I think is maybe deeper, and that's probably more in the... The first one applies to maybe 1% The second one, probably applies to .001% which is having intuition of what's right. And this ability, people call it, I don't know, big words like vision and so forth the ability to see around corners and anticipate, you know, my old manager, a guy that I respect a lot, Mark Templeton who was the CEO for Citrix, used to always ask this question "Do you know why Michelin has three stars? "The first star is for food, obviously, "there has to be good food. "The second star is for service. "The third star, not many people know why it's for" According to him, and I haven't really checked it yet, I haven't really eaten in too many Michelin three star restaurants, is anticipation. And product strategy is a little bit like that, right? So to me, that's where Nutanix really trumps the competition. Is that second dimension of intuition. More so than even, listening to customers. >> It's seeing around those corners, and knowing which way the winds are blowing. >> Totally. >> One of the other things that we're talking about a lot about, here on theCUBE, particularly at this conference, is the importance of culture. Nutanix...we had Dheeraj on this morning talking about the sort of playful nature that he tries to bring to the company, and that really has filtered down, how would you describe the Nutanix culture and how do you maintain the culture? >> So I think, we... I'll tell you personally, the journey that I was on, that there were a couple of things that I brought to the table, a couple things that I learned myself, as well as what I could see, a couple things that you'll see in a company that has been built by founders, in my opinion, I'm not a founder, or entrepreneur myself, but I've seen them in action now, is they bring one dimension that I've not seen in big company leaders, which is continuous learning. Because that's the only way they can stay in the company when it goes from 0 to ninety, right? And the folks that continuously learn, stay. If they don't, they leave and we get professional leaders. So, continuous learning, if it can be applied, to the generic company becomes an amplifying effect now. People can learn how to grow, look around the corners, they can learn things, that otherwise they aren't born with, in my opinion. So I think that's one unique dimension that Nutanix I think, inculcates in a lot of people, is this continuous learning. The other dimension, which I think, everybody knows about Nutanix being this humble, hungry, honest, with heart, you know those four words sort of capture the, a sense of, the playful, authenticity. But I think we're not afraid to be wrong. And, we're not afraid to make fun of ourselves. We're not afraid to be, I guess, ourselves, right? And that, I think is easy to say, but very hard to do. >> John Furrier: You learn through your mistakes as they say, learn through failure. So, you mention intuition. What does your intuition tell you about the current ecosystem as the market starts to really accelerate with multi cloud on premise private cloud, which by the way, good intuition, of course we keep on, at the first private cloud reports dominion and team, they got that right. The waves are coming and they look different. There's gonna be more integration we think. What does your intuition tell you about these next couple waves that are gonna come in to the landscape of the tech industry? >> Yeah, I mean I think, since I do want to come back on theCUBE again and again, and have something left over, I will say one thing though, is I think the gain in multi cloud is going to move up the stack, okay? That's where the next set of cloud wars are going to be fought. Is whose going to provide not just a great database as a service, but a great database itself. Because, Oracle's time's up, as far as I'm concerned, right? And you're going to see that with many traditional software stacks, some of them are Sass stacks that have been around for 20 years, by the way. Some of the largest Sass companies have been around for 20 years. It's time for a reboot for most of those companies. >> How about the Edge? What does the intuition tell you on the Edge? Certainly very relevant, you've got power, you've got connectivity expanding, Wifi 6 around the corner, we've seen that. 5g, okay, I buy it. But as it really starts to figure itself out, it's just another note on the network. What's your intuition tell you? >> Yeah, I mean, this is one area that I'm not too deep in, I've got other guys in my team who know a lot more, but, my intuition tells me, the more things change, the more they'll remain the same, in that area, right? So don't be surprised if they just end up being another smart phone. You know, its got an operating system, it runs apps, it's centrally controlled, talks to services in the back end, I see no reason why the Edge should be any different, if that make sense. >> John Furrier: Yeah, exactly. Then data, big part of it. Big part of your strategy, the data piece, >> Of course, of course, yeah. I mean I think data being a core competency of any company is going to stand out, I think in the next 5, 10 years. >> John Furrier: Awesome. What's going on at the show? What's been your hottest conversation in the hallways, talking to customers, partners, employees, what's some of the trending conversation? >> I don't know, this conversations pretty interesting! (laughs) >> Of course! >> Rebecca Knight: We agree! (Laughs) >> My intuition is telling me this is a good conversation! Hope it comes out good! >> Keep using that word man. >> I love it! >> Anyway, always great to be with you guys. >> Sunil, thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Anytime. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from Nutanix.next coming up in just a little bit. Stay with us. (upbeat music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We have two guests for this next segment. We have Stephanie Scare Aldi. She is the director of operations and support for Electra. Thank you so much for coming on the cues. And we have James Ellery, director innovation and governance at Electra. Thank you, James. >> Thanks for having us. >> So I want to start with you, James. Tell our viewers a little bit about electorates. Ontario, based for our viewers who are not familiar. What do what do you do? What do you about? >> So we are a energy solutions provider in Ontario, Canada. Basically, we are an ldc a local distribution company, but we're trying to transition from the poles and wires into really energy solutions provider. We We're about a million customers are approaching a million customers right now and wear actually four utility companies that came together to form Electra. And we just recently emerged with a fifth now, so We're rapidly growing in the in Ontario, and we have very much more growth to come. >> It's all those mergers. How does I t all fit together? Different systems, all kind of legacy. Mishmash. What's what's What's the environment like? >> So the environment Right now there is a tremendous amount of data center Stephanie's actually leading our data center consolidation project. There are tremendous amount of data centers across a fast geographical location, and we're using NUTANIX actually to consolidate everything onto a single platform right now. So there's a lot of work to be done. Definitely a lot of integration to be done, but we're confident that we'LL get it all done and we want to move to new tanks by phone. >> So right now we have about, I think, eleven data centers and we've been mandated to get down to two. So we're use up utilizing technology like nutanix too kind of, you know, get down and scale ability. So wait >> here for a lot of customs from nutanix around, how it's been a great system for manageability and also getting rid of some older gear, whether it's old GMC Cem Dale stuff. So we're seeing a lot of, you know, go from twenty four racks to six. This is kind of the ratios pushing stuff from eight weeks. Tow two hours, new operational benefits. How close are you guys up to that now? Because you get all this stuff you consolidating down the merger's makes a lot of sense. What's some of the operational benefits you seeing with nutanix That you could share, >> I think, is a per example that you just gave. We're working on a front office consolidation project and we're moving. We're doubling our VD i environment, and we actually just got three new nodes in a few weeks ago and it took a matter of two hours to get everything spun up and ready. So traditionally, it would take us weeks of planning and getting someone in and specialized technicians and now make a phone call a few hours and it's done. So you see, like already the benefits of you know growing are our infrastructure, and it's enabling us to merge faster with different utilities. >> I want to actually back up now and talk about the journey to Nutanix and talk about life before nutanix and now life after it. What was that what were sort of the problems that you were trying to solve? And why was Nutanix the answer >> So I could speak to that way back in twenty fifteen? We're looking at video, and we're implementing it across organization. And we're running its issues on three tier architecture where whenever there was a performance issue, we would talk to the sand guy and we'LL talk to the server guy and we talked to the networking guy. And although everyone's trying to help everyone sort of looking at each other, saying, Okay, where is this problem? Really, really land? And the issue with that is, as you guys know what VD I I mean, user performance and user experience is key, right? That's King. So you know, when you're trying to take away someone's physical desktop and give him a virtual desktop, they want the same or better performance. And anytime we had an issue, we had to resolve it rapidly. So when we look at everything we said, Okay, this is okay, but it's not sustainable for the scale, ability in the growth that we had, especially because with, you know, ah media environment, its scales very rapidly and If the application scares wrapped scales rapidly, you need the infrastructure to scale as rapidly as your application and perform just as good. So what happened was we looked at nutanix. We said, You know what? If we can look at a single pane of glass to figure out where any performance issues lie, that makes operations much more operations, that management administration much easier for us. And that's really where we started our journey with nutanix. We went from a three note cluster to start and we're up to fourteen nodes now, just in our VD I cluster alone. >> And what about about the future? What? What is the future hold in terms of this partnership, >> I think for us were really hoping to go to fully H V in the next six or twelve months. Uh, I know, James. We're really pushing it and trying to get that in because, you know, way want to simplify our technologies. And I think by moving to a Chevy, I think, you know, we'LL save some money. >> So what we're looking to do with Nutanix isn't you know, there's been a lot of wins for us moving to NUTANIX, especially with regards to support Support's been fantastic. I mean, you know, although we don't like to call support because I mean something's probably wrong way love calling you guys because every time we call support, it's, you know, everyone's always there to help. And I'm not only the support from the support team, but also through our venders or a vendor are counts, you know, I've or who we love way love the whole team because they're there for you to help me. We run into some pretty significant issues. One of the things that happened to us was we had some changing workloads in our media environment. Through no fault of nutanix is you know when when we introduce some additional workloads, we didn't anticipate some of the challenges that would come along with introducing those workloads. And what happened was we filled up our hot storage rather rapidly. Nutanix came in right away because we call them up and said, You know, we're having big performance issues. We need some help and they brought in P E O. C notes to help us get over the hump. They were there for us. I mean, within a week, they got us right back up and running and fully operational and even better performance than we had before. So until we could get our own notes procured and in house, which was fantastic, I've never seen that levels from another organization. So we love the support from Nutanix on DH. Since then, we've grown. So we've actually looked at nutanix for General server computer platform as well. And we're doing Christ Cross hyper visor Support across high provides a replication Sorry from production to D. R. So we're actually running Acropolis. Indy are running GM. Where in production. But has Stephanie alluded to? We're trying to get off of'Em were completely, you know, everyone talks about the attacks. We don't like the V attacks with Phil on a baby anywhere for something that's commodity. And we're looking to repurpose that money so we can look at other things such as you ten exciting way very much. Want to move to the cloud for D R. And that's sort of our direction. >> OK, so you guys have the m we're now, not you Not yet off the anywhere, but you plan to be >> playing to be Yes. >> Okay, So what's it going to look like How long is that gonna take or what is that? We're >> really hoping at the next six to twelve months. So I think we're really gonna push hard at. We've been talking to some people and it seems like it's gonna be a pretty smooth transition, So looking forward to it. And I think our team is really looking for true as well. That's >> one of the challenges right. That the team is really is one of the challenges because we've merged and there's a lot of change going on organization. It's difficult to throw more change at people, right? There's a whole human component, Teo everything that we do. So you know Well, that's why we moved GHB into d. R. To start because we said, You know what, give the operations folks time to look at it, timeto play with it, time to get familiar with it. And then we'LL make the change in production. But like we said, you know, moving over age, he's going to save us a ton of money like a ton of money that we can repurpose elsewhere to really start moving the business forward >> about operations for second. Because one of the things you told earlier is that consolidation? You're leading the project at the VD. I think we're new workloads. There's always gonna be problems. Always speed bumps and hot spots, as they say. But what has changed with the advent of software and Dev ops and automation starts to come into it. How do you see that playing out? Because you tell this is a software company. So you guys knew them when they were five years ago Now, But this is the trend in I t. Operations have clean program ability for the infrastructure. What's your view on that? What's your reaction to that? And you guys getting theirs at the goal >> that is >> like part of our road map. And we're gonna be working with our NUTANIX partners t build a roll map, actually, the next coming few weeks. So because we are emerging all these utilities, we'd love to get automation and orchestration, and we actually have another budget in three years. So it is on our road map. We want to get there right, because we want to have her staff work on business strategy. We don't want their fingers to keyboards. We want them actually working with the business and solution ing and not, you know, changing tapes or working on supporting a system when we don't have to do that anymore. Because now there's so it's so much simpler running any tennis environment. I know James is saying a lot of change for employees. There used to be M where Nutanix is new to a lot of them. I think they're quickly seeing the benefit of managing it because now they get to do things that are a little bit more fun than just managing an environment. >> And this is point cost to repurpose what you're paying for a commodity for free. And if you can repurpose and automata way the manual labor that's boring and repetitive, moving people to a higher value activity. >> Exactly. And we love the message we heard today about being invisible. >> Yeah, I love that >> way, Lovett. I mean, that's essentially we wanted. The business doesn't really care what you're doing behind the scenes, right? They just want their applications to work. They want everything to work seamlessly. So that's what we want to get, too. We want to get to that invisibility where we're moving the business, Ford. We're enabling them through technology, but they don't need to worry about the back end of what's actually going on. >> Stephanie, I want to ask you about both a personal and professional passion of yours, and that is about bringing more women into technology. You are a senior woman in technology, and we know we know the numbers. There is a dearth of female leaders. There is a dearth of underrepresented minorities, particularly in in high level management roles. So I want to hear from you both from a personal standpoint in terms of what your thoughts are on this problem and why, why we have this problem and then also what you, an elector are doing to remedy it. >> Yeah, I think you know, I'm really lucky to work at Electra because we actually have a diversion inclusion committee that I'm part of with a lot of stem organizations. But I think you know, there's all these great programs going on, and but I still don't see enough women in this in this industry, and I think a lot of it stems from you walk into a room, and if you're the only one of you it's really intimidating. So I think we really need to work on making people feel more welcome. You know, getting more women in cedar senior leadership positions and kind of bring them to events like this, gaming them on the Internet. Going to the university is going to the schools and talking to education and talking to, you know, CEOs and seals that don't have sea level women executives and saying, You know, there's a business benefit toe having diversity of all kinds in an organization, you know, you know, strength lies in differences, not in similarities. And I think we can really grow businesses and have that value if we have different types of opinions. And I think there's, you know, statistic shows when you have more diversity, your business is more successful. So I think senior leaders should pay attention and, you know, purposely try to hire more a more diverse workforce >> and what do you have anything to add to that? I mean, I know that it that it's maybe tougher for a man to weigh in on this issue, but at the same time it is one that affects all of us. >> Absolutely. And I think seventy, said it best right when you bring in, you know, multiple bill from different ethnicities from different genders. I mean, it's it's that wealth of knowledge and everyone brings from the different experiences they have in life, and I think that's what you need. You don't want to know the collective all thinking the same way you want the collective that bring the diversity into your organization. And I think you know, when I was in school, we had one woman in my entire computer engineering class, and you know that you wanted to see that change, right? I love to see more of that disease. More women being in the work force, especially within technology. >> I >> think that's Ah, it's fantastic for technology. >> Stephanie, What's your advice for young girls out there? Maybe in high school college, who are having gravitating towards either it's computer science or some sort of stem related field that might be intimidated? >> I think the one important thing you can do is like really rely on your family and friends for encouragement, cause I think sometimes it is gonna be intimidating, you know, For me I'd walk into a course and I was the only female my computer networking class. But I had, like my father, always encouraged me to push me to say, like, Don't ever be intimately. Don't ever be scared and you need a little bit of a fix. Came because for a little bit it is going to be just you in a room. But I think the more you speak up and the more you just kind of push yourself, I think it is going to get better. And I think it's almost kind of cool when you're the only female. Because you feel that pride. I want to do better. I want to do better for all of us to say like we can be. Not just a good, even better. >> Great. So great advice. Yeah. Stephanie James. Thank you both. So much for coming on. Thanks for having us. Pleasure talking, Teo. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have so much more of nutanix dot Next coming up in just a little bit

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot Next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix Stott next here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Jean Kim. He is an author, researcher, entrepreneur and founder of Revolution. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube, Gene. >> Oh, thanks so much for Becca and always great seeing you and John. >> So you are a prolific author. You've written many books, including the Phoenix Project, The Deb Ops Handbook, given new one coming out. But this is this is the latest one we have here the Dev Ops Handbook >> twenty sixteen. And then we came up with a little bit cool accelerate based on the state of Davis report. And yeah, it's been a fun ride. Just what a great space to be writing about >> Dev ops has been. I'LL see that covered going back years. Now it's mainstream, and you started to see the impact of people who have taken the devil's mentality put promise and the place we see all the you know, Web scales from Facebook, you name. But now the enterprises is now really looking at agility scenario. You've been working a lot on you Host the Devil Devil Enterprise Summit. What's that been like? I mean, it seems to be well taken longer than some of the hard core cloud guys. So what's the State of the Union, if you will, for the enterprise from a devil standpoint? >> Yeah, What a great question. I mean, I think there's no doubt that the devil's principles and practices were pioneered in the tech giant's Facebook's Amazon necklace and Google's, but I've long believed with a certain level certainty that a CZ much economic values they've created, uh, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The real value will be created when you know the largest, most complex organization, the planet adopting same principles of patterns. And when you have Ah yeah, I think I. D. C said there's eighteen million developers on the planet of which, at maximum, no half million at the tech trying and the rest are in, you know, the largest brands across every industry vertical. And if we could get those seventeen and a half million developers as productive as if there were at Facebook Amazon, that for school I'm not, generates trillions of dollars of economic value per year. And when you know what, that much, um, economically being created. I mean, we'LL have undoubtedly, you know, incredible societal improving outcomes as well. So it has been such a treat to help chronicle that journey. >> One of the things I want to ask you. Genes that doesn't impressive numbers, but also UV factor and net new developers, younger generation, re skilled workers used to be a network. I now I'm a developer. You seeing developers really at the infrastructure level now. But show like this where Nutanix is a heart was a hardware company there now a software company. So they're ato heart of Jeb ops. In terms of their target audience, they're implementing this stuff, So this is a refreshing change. So I gotta ask you when you walk into an enterprise, what is the current temperature of our I Q of Dev ops are they are their percentage. That's you know, they're some are learning. Take us through kind of the progress. >> If I would guess right? This has much as I love statistics and you know, comprehensive benchmarking. Yeah, I think we're three percent of the way there. Alright, I percent Yeah, you know, we're in the earliest stages of it, Which means the best is yet to come. I think develops is an aspiration for many on DH. No, but having to change the I think Dave is often a rebellious group rebelling against agent powerful order right now, uh, forces far beyond their control. Conservative groups protecting their turf. I think that's kind of the, uh, probably a typical situation. And so, you know, we're a long way away from Devil's being the dominant orthodoxy. >> So if that's the case, just probably some people who have adopted it had success we're seeing in these new, innovative shifts. The early adopters have massive value extraction from that. So and that's an advantage. Committed advantage. Can you give us some examples of people who did that took the rebellion that went to Dev Ops were successful and then doubled down on it? >> Yeah, I think the one that come to mind immediately are like Capital one. Yeah, they went from eighty percent outsourcing to now. Almost hundred cent Insourced. Same with target, where they're really started off as a uh ah bottom up movement and then gain the support of the highest levels of leadership. And it has been so exciting to see the story's not just told by technology leaders, but increasingly shared and being told by both the technology leader and a business counterpart were the business leader is saying, I am wholly reliant upon my technology, Pierre, to achieve all the goals, dreams and aspirations of our organization. And that's what a treat, to be able to see that kind of recognition and appreciation. >> It's an operational shift to They have to buy into changing how they operate as a company. Yes, and believe me, they're like clutching on to the old ways. And that's just the way it is. A >> wonderful phrase from the NUTANIX CEO that Loved is that way often characterized that developers as the builders, but operation infrastructure, they are builders, too. In fact, you know, developers cannot be productive if they are mired in infrastructure, right? And so, uh, you know, uh, you know, you get a peek. Productivity focus flown joy when you don't have to deal with concerns outside of the business feature and the visibility. One solved. And I know that from personal experience where the frustration you have when you just want to do one thing and you just carved out a door ten things that you just can't do because you have two. Puzzle is a puzzle. They have solved >> it. Love to get your reaction, tio some of the trends that I'm seeing because Kev Ops has been such an important movement, at least from my standpoint, because people could get lost in the what the word means at the end of the day program ability, making infrastructures code, which is the original ethos. Making the officer programmable and invisible, which is one of the themes of nutanix was the dream. That kind of is the objective, right? I mean, to make it programmable. So you don't that stand up all these services and prep and provisions Hard infrastructure stuff? >> Yeah. Yeah. In November, the Unicorn project is coming out. So it's the follow into the Phoenix project, and I'm really trying to capture how great it feels when you could be productive and all of infrastructures taken care of for you by your friends and infrastructure. Right then allows youto you know, have your best energy focusing on solving a business problem, not on how to connect a to B. And we need to expect to see in the yamma files and configuring. You know, all these things that you don't really care about, but you're forced to write, and I think that allows ah, level of productivity and joy. But also, >> uh, >> of, uh, >> is that the idea working relationship between development and infrastructure, where developers are costly thanking their infrastructure, appears for making their life easy >> way. We're joking. Rebecca and I were joking about how we use Siri ate Siri. What's the weather in Palo Alto? This should be an app for the enterprises says Hey, Cube or whatever at NUTANIX or whatever. Give me some more storage. Why isn't it happening? But that's that's that's That's kind of a joke, but it's kind of goal. Oh, increasing the right >> that's just available on demand right on. You certainly don't have to open up thirty tickets these days. Like was so typical ten years ago that that's a modern miracle. >> My question for you is why books? I mean, so here here we have were in this very fast changing technological environment and landscape. And as you said, the Dev Ops is still relatively new. There's it's not. It's a three percent really who understand it. Why use a bunch of dead tree just to get your message across? I was like writing, in fact and an ideal >> month, and I get to spend half the time writing and half the time hanging out with the best in the game, studying now that the greatest in the field. And I think even in this day and age, there's still no Maur effective and viral mechanism spread ideas and books. You know, when people someone says, Hey, I love the finished project I'd loved reading it. It says a couple things right. They probably spent eight hours reading it on. You know, that's a serious commitment. And so I think, Imagine how many impression minutes, you know it takes a purchase. Eight minutes, eight hours of someone's time. And so for things like this, I really do think that you know, the written form is still won most effective ways. Tio communicate ideas. >> Your dream job. You're writing out the best people. What did you What have you learned from the these people. >> Oh, my goodness, >> you could write a book. Yeah, >> but for twenty years, I self identified as an operations person. Even that well, I was formally trained to develop Our got my graduate degree in compiler design in nineteen ninety five. And so for twenty years, I just loved operations. This because that's where the action was. That's what saves happened. But something changed. About four years ago. I learned at programming language called Closure. It's a functional programming languages, a list so very alien to me, the hardest thing I've ever learned. I mean, I must have read and watched eighty hours of video before I wrote one line of code, but it has been the most rewarding thing. And it's just that, uh, exactly brought the joy of development and encoding back into my daily life. So So I guess I should amend my answer. I would say it's half the time writing half the time hand with the best of game and twenty percent coding just because I love to solve problems, right? Yeah, my own problems. So So I have I would thank people I get I you know, I've been able to hang out with and had the privilege to watch because, um, if it weren't for that, I think I would been happy. No, just saying that coding was a thing of the past. Right? S o for that. I'm so grateful. >> How do you use what you learn about in terms of your writing and in your coding and vice a versa. I mean, So how are they different in how are they the same? >> Uh, that's a great question. You >> know, I think >> what's really nice about coding is that it's, uh that's very formal. I mean, in fact, the most extreme. It's all mathematics, right? The books are just a pile of words that may or may not have order and structure. And so, in the worst days, I felt like with the Unicorn Project, I wrote one hundred fifty thousand words. Target work count is one hundred thousand, and I was telling friends I wrote one hundred fifty thousand words that say nothing of significance, right? What have I done The best days and that's I think that's because you have to impose upon it a structure and a point right on the best days is very much like coding. Everything has a spot, right? Uh uh, And you know what to get rid of. So, uh, yeah, I think the fact that coding has structure, I think makes it in some ways an easier for me to work >> with. And what brings you to new tenants next this week? What's the story? Which >> I gotta say I had the privilege and was delighted to take part in what they called deaf days. So if they were gathering developers to learn about educate everyone on how to use, uh, the new Tanis capabilities through AP eyes just like he said, right to help enable automation, and, uh, I just find it very rewarding and fulfilling. I just because even though I think nutanix er as a community is known for being the, uh, the innovators and the, uh so the rebellion a cz productive as you know, that technology's made them to turn into an automated platform. And I think that's another order of magnitude gain in terms of value they could create for their organization. So that was a >> tree. And they've transformed from an operations oriented box company years ago and now officially subscription based software. They're going all software. They're flipping their model upside down, too. >> And it was just a delight to see the developers who are attracted to that one day thing I would recommend to anyone who's interested in development on just being on the cutting edge of what could be done with it. For example, if you have cameras in every store is their way to automate the analysis that you compute dwell times and, you know, Q abandonment rates. I mean, it's like a crash course in modern business practices that I thought was absolutely amazing. >> Well, Jean, you do great work. I've been following you for years. I know you're very humbles. Well, but give a plug. Take a minute to explain the things you're working on. You got a great event. You run, you gotta books. What other things you got going on? Shared the audience. >> Just those two things that were just Everything is about the book right now. The Unicorn project is coming in November. Uh, and so accepts Will be available at the Devil sent five summit in London s O. That's a conference for technology leaders from large, complex organizations and over the years, we've now chronicle of over two hundred case studies by technology leaders from almost every brand across every industry vertical. And it has been such a privilege toe. See, hear the stories and to see how they're being rewarded for their achievements. I mean there being promoted on being given more responsibility. So that is, Ah, treat beyond words >> and it's a revolution. It's a shift that's definitely happening. You're in the bin and doing it for years, and we're documenting it so and you are a CZ. Well, >> I'm looking forward to see you there. >> I just have one final question and this is about something you were saying about how Nutanix is the insurgent and the rebel the rebel in office. How does it How do you recommend it? As a researcher, as an entrepreneur yourself and as someone who's really in this mindset, how do you recommend it? Stay feisty and scrappy and with that mentality at it, especially as it grows and becomes more and more of a behemoth itself? >> Um, there was some statements made about, like how, ten years ago, virtual ization was the one key certification that was guaranteed. You relevant stuff forever in the future. And, yeah, I think there's some basis to say that, you know, that alone is not enough to guarantee lifetime employment. And I think the big lesson is you know, we all have to be continual learners and, you know, every year that goes by, you know, they're Mohr miracles being >> ah ah, >> being created for us to be able to use to solve problems. And if that doesn't think the lesson is if we're not, uh, always focused on being a continual Lerner, Yeah, there's great joy that comes with it and a great peril, You know, if we choose to forego it. >> Well, that's a great note to end. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube. Gene. >> Thank you so much. And not great CD. Both. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more from dot next, just after this