(cheerful music) >> Hello. Welcome to this special nutanix.next coverage, theCUBE. We are in our remote studios in Napa today, with some two great guests talking about hybrid multicloud what that costs them. Tanu Sood, who's the senior director of product marketing, attending. Great to see you, and Saveen Pakala, VP of product management for platform at Nutanix. Great to have you on. A lot of cool things happening with hybrid cloud architectures. When people want to have more cloud and want it more invisible, they want it faster, they want it on multiple clouds, AWS, Azure, GCP, and others. So welcome to theCUBE coverage. >> Thanks so much, John. Thanks for having us here. >> Tanu if I start with you first on the, on the, what is driving the hybrid multicloud architecture? Is it just the fact there's clouds out there or are specific things that you're seeing that customers really want that's a need for their business? >> So you're right, John, over the past few years, we've seen cloud investments really taking off. In fact, last year in the midst of the pandemic, when the economy was showing a downturn, cloud spending was up by 30%. So organizations are looking to cloud for speed, for scale, for elasticity and for app modernization. However, the same organizations would also tell you that there are some workloads that will continue to stay on-prem either in the near term or permanently. So what they're really talking about is this hot notion of hybrid cloud, which is interoperability between their on-prem investments, their existing investments, and their public cloud investments. In fact, I would say Gardner in 2020, they did a survey and 75% of organizations actually talked about hybrid cloud being the preferred ID operating model and an overwhelming majority of those 80% who had public cloud in their infrastructure, They had two or more public cloud providers in their space. So that's the multicloud aspect of it. So whether it's happening as a happenstance audit to deliberate ID strategy, what we are seeing organizations take on, is this hybrid multicloud infrastructure. >> It's interesting. It's so funny to see the dynamics of the evolution, cause it's like, oh yeah, we got some thought, I want more cloud. I want more cloud. I want more cloud. Wait a minute. I want to give up the on premises piece. We've got Amazon, we've got- okay, we've got multiple things happening. How do you pull it all together? So Saveen, I got to ask you the blockers. What it is holding back? Because I mean, it's kind of like it happened, right? People replatforming with cloud, they're not giving up their data centers and or the on-premise component. >> Yeah. What's the blocker. Is it inertia? >> Yeah. Is it time? Is it evolution? Is it skills? What's that, what's holding everyone back? >> Yeah, you know, John, over the last several months quarters, what we have seen is that there are four typical issues that sort of come up. When customers start to look at their hybrid multicloud journey, the first one is, how do I move my on-prem applications, workloads to public cloud? Do I need to refactor the applications as I do that? How do I move that application from one cloud to the other and potentially move it back to the data center? And because the other link platform are disparate between these different destinations, it's usually very challenging. The next question then you come up with is Hey, after I move the application to the public cloud, what about management? Right? It, it is going to be different. It has its own island of infrastructure. The management tooling is different, the skillsets required are different, processes are different. So that becomes another challenge. Then comes the service levels. I'm still responsible for all the service levels, from a backup perspective. DR, security, performance that, you know, I was responsible for on-prem. I'm still responsible for those in the public cloud. And then lastly, I would say, you know, customers want to know that their investment is protected, right? As they move the workloads all around, they want to know that the licenses would follow them. They can actually take advantage of the licenses. they've already procured and not have to procure something new just to run the same workload. So those are some of the challenges that we've seen come up. >> I mean, it's always good to chat with you guys because I remember covering Nutanix back in 2010, there was kind of a new thing and everyone got on the same bandwidth and copied the hyperconvergence. And it was very similar on a whole nother level. It seems now there's another inflection point. I want to get your reaction, Tanu. You can, you can weigh in. That'd be great too. And get your reactions. Well, this whole shift from design thinking, which has been great for, for a decade or so to there's a whole other kind of conversation around system thinking and systems thinking is about platforms and it's about outcomes. But now with what you guys are discussing and launching this year, that next, is it's a systems concept. It's distributed computing. This is kind of a new kind of mindset. How do you guys see that evolving in the customer base? And how do you talk about that? Because this is something that is coming up, kind of like that design thinking mantra. It's like systems thinking, think about the impacts. Can you guys weigh in on your reactions to that? >> Oh yeah. So, you know, when you look at the systems level problem, right, it's really that of having the same platform, you know, be available at that multiple locations, wherever you want to run your workloads. That's not the underpin Penang or the foundation, if you will, of your system. And we've done, done just that with clusters, we have basically taken our hyper-converged infrastructure stack plus the hypervisor, plus the management stack, you know, that was running on-prem and we have essentially made it available on the public cloud. Right. So, so that's really the special thing about that is that it's a single infrastructure and single management plane across your private cloud and a public cloud, which really helps organizations to accelerate the hybrid cloud journey. >> And it was the impact for customers could be next, if you have that single layer, it's unify. >> Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, you know, the problems and the challenges that I mentioned earlier, customers will be able to address all of them with, by leveraging something like flustered, sorry, customers will be able to deploy their workloads on private cloud or public cloud without having to, you know, have disparate management models, right. They can have a single, simple and consistent management model between private cloud and public cloud. They are, they will be able to meet the same service levels that they've been able to on-premise, whether it's VR, whether it's backup, whether it's security, whether it's performance and all along knowing that their investment is protected with Nutanix. As you know, we have licensed for affordability of owners, software licenses between private and public cloud. So these are all the benefits that are, that are very real. And, you know, customers really value when they think about overall problem statement, they have a can. >> And what's your reaction to systems mindset, system thinking in terms of customers and other, A list, if you're looking at hybrid cloud. >> Yeah. So John, as you talked about, right, we started from a place of making infrastructure invisible. You just taking a read that complexity of infrastructure. And now we have evolved it to the next level where we are really making clouds invisible. This whole idea of you could be sitting on any cloud, it could be private cloud, it could be any public kind of, multiple public clouds. You don't have to worry about the complexity. There's the software layer, layer that's sitting on top of that. That's really making that underlying layer invisible to you so that you can just get about doing your job. It's all about business outcome at the end of the day. >> By the way, I love the invisible mindset because that's also like, that's what DevOps infrastructure's code was supposed to be; make things invisible, make them programmable. And we got to see serverless and functions coming out. People are really getting excited by the ease of ability to just provision resources. This is a major wave, that's going to have a major impact to enterprises. How has this specifically impacting this hybrid cloud architecture? What do you guys do to make that invisible? Because customers are all like, no, one's deny- denying it's happening. They know like, okay, we know what's happening, like, but they don't know what to do. They're like, how do I start? Who do I hire? What do I change? What do I automate? These are questions. How do you guys see that? >> Yeah, look, I think customers repeatedly tell us that, Hey, ultimately I invest a lot in really making my enterprise IT repeatable, reliable and predictable, right? So after they're invested in the process, the tooling, the people, they want to be able to leverage that regardless of, you know, where the IT direction takes them. When it comes to public cloud, they won't be able to take the same investment that they've made and be able to leverage them and capitalize that on the public cloud. And that's really, you know, the problem statement that we're really focused on. Just making sure that your point to making the infrastructure invisible has to do with, you know, having a platform that hides all the complexity underneath and provides a simple, consistent, you know, framework, if you will, for the applications and the management, the people and the tooling. >> Saveen, tell me about Nutanix clusters. What's that about? What's the value? What's the pitch there, what's it- What's it all about? >> Yeah. In a, in a, in a nutshell, you know, clusters is simply Nutanix software stack delivered on public cloud. Really it's a, it's, it includes our ECI or the POS hyperconverged infrastructure, AHV hypervisor, and prison management plan. And it's the same stack that we have been, that we actually introduced 10 years ago, run by thousands of customers. And they've taken the exact same reliable, big stack. And we had available on the public cloud. And with that, you know, customers get some of those benefits that we talked about earlier. >> And it, talk about the use cases because everyone's talking about day one, day two operations, shift left for security. If I bring that stack into the cloud, what is the use cases that emerge just for the customer? >> Yeah, so John, that definitely some patterns that have emerged with customers you will have with cloud. And in fact, our viewers, won't be surprised to hear that disaster recovery is foremost. A lot of organizations are starting with disaster recovery on public cloud with mechanics clusters. This helps them avoid maintenance and investments in a secondary data center, just purely for disaster recovery, but it also gives some geographical separation and it gives them the regional cloud options so that they can still meet the data residency requirement, which as you know, is very key for especially companies that based in MIA Interestingly, most of these organizations that are looking at disaster recovery in public cloud using Nutanix clusters are also leveraging their investments in clusters and their cloud instances to drive capacity bursting. So using it when Dev desk or seasonal on-demand bursting. So when you're not using it for fail-over, for disaster recovery, the same cloud investments are being optimized for cloud capacity bursting. And then finally this workload migration, right? So either it's for data center consolidation or migration, or for app modernization. Our customers are looking to migrate some of their workloads to the cloud, but they want to do that quickly or in a timely fashion. So the idea is that you migrate them as is without any app refactoring right away with clusters, and then once you're on the cloud, then you can refactor at your own pace. You can modernize some components of your applications on an as needed basis. So those are the three use cases that we are seeing disaster recovery, capacity bursting, workload migration, but then to your point about day one and day two, operations. Day two operations that are really, really key. When you have public cloud investments, private cloud investments, and multiple public clouds in the mix, it could be really complex to have your IT operations in play, right? So this notion that Saveen alluded to earlier of a unified infrastructure and management plane that oversees your public cloud, multiple public cloud and private cloud in infrastructure, as well as provide operations, not just for your VMs, but also for your containers and storage is key for our customers. So, so this whole notion of easing up on day zero and day one operations, but also day two and day end operations is top of mind for our customers. >> That's really well put, I think that, that'll tying that layer, that horizontally scalable control plane, whatever you want to call it, it really creates a lot of value from the blocking and tackling meat and potatoes disaster recovery, to enabling the migration and replatforming, and then refactoring of those apps. I mean, this is the modernization trend. This is what people are talking about. So this is what people want. This, this is hard to do. And seems hard. Maybe it's easier with you guys. What, what's, what's holding it all back? Because these...I'm sold. I mean, I've been preaching this for years. Like this is finally coming at scale, and then, is it, is it multi-cloud that's the bottleneck or is that not yet fleshed out? Is it more, architectures are not ready? The containerization or the state stateful data apps? Aren't the tools aren't there? Can you guys give me a sense of why it's not going faster? Or is it going faster? >> Yeah. So maybe I'll chime in and let Tanu as well. So we, we introduced clusters late last year and we have seen a lot of momentum and a ton of interest from our customer base. And, you know, for the use cases that Tanu just talked about, that's already happening with many customers that are already well on their hybrid multicloud journey. And, you know, ultimately it comes down to just, you know, where the organization is in their journey. And, you know, especially if you're a Nutanix customer, very familiar with the stack, you know, for them taking the next step, taking, you know, with clusters in AWS, it's actually not that big of a jump, right. And, but if you're not on the platform, then you know, you, you know, some of the challenges we discussed earlier are the things that get in the way. >> It's almost like day one operations tend to is like innovation and day, day two operations is rain it in, you know, get the value. >> Yeah. >> Day one, get going and do some experimentation and day two, make it all operate cleanly. >> Exactly. >> You know, oftentimes, you know, we have conversations even in the forest. So second conversation, the topic gravitates towards app refactoring. When you know that there's a much more heavyweight and complex time consuming project. You can actually get to cloud without pre-factoring and do it at your own pace. And, you know, on your own terms, really. >> I think the migration thing is a huge thing. I mean, at that, I see a lot of that. And then once they get to the cloud, they go, Wow, I could do a lot more here. >> Yeah. >> And that just spawns more. It's a step function value there. And then as open source continues to grow, oh my, it's just, it's just a successful and we don't overthink it, just get to the cloud, understand the distributed nature of the on-premise piece. And boom, then go from there, you see that, that accelerated value distraction. >> And as Tanu said earlier, I mean, we are taking a much, much more of a holistic and uplevel view of management in this hybrid multicloud environment, including non Nutanix environments, right? So we're not stopping at just a Nutanix environment. So just to be answer, you're talking about containers, you're talking multicloud, but also talking about non Nutanix environments that you may have and, you know, give you that one sort of, you know, one single plain of glass, if you will. >> It's DevOps happening at the Dev is I've always been there, now, the OS is getting stronger and stronger. Now it's changing too the intelligent edge is around the corner. That's just another edge. That's just another premise in my mind. So again, this flexes with what you guys are thinking about. So I think the edge brings up a lot of action too. Big time. Exciting news. Let's extend this into the news. So you guys have some exciting news. Talk about what's new, what's the big stories what's breaking. What's exciting. What's the top stories coming this year? >> Sure, sure. So since we launched clusters late, late last year on AWS, we have focused on a couple of things. One is expanding the availability, right? So we have added multiple regions. Now the total number of regions, AWS regions that we support is 23. We also recently added support for AWS gov cloud for a US federal customers. And we have FedRAMP moderate authorization. So that's, which is very key for that customer base. We also added some really new and exciting capabilities such as elastic VR. Some of that Tana already mentioned. Hibernate and resumed, which is a very unique capability from clusters where you can hibernate and our clusters and, you know, give up all the betterment in order to compute, but still have your data intact in as three, just so you can resume it very quickly whenever the need arises again. And you know, last but not the least, we are super excited about bringing clusters to Microsoft Azure. This has been a long and strong partnership with Microsoft. And as you heard in the keynote, we are actually starting the preview at this event, and, you know, opening up to the customer so that they can get that firsthand feeling for the product and work with us in bringing the product to GA. >> And John- >> Multicloud world. Oh, sorry. Tanu, go ahead. >> No, so this is exactly what I was going to say. This is multicloud coming to pair, right? So we talked about hybrid cloud and now here we are with multicloud options for you. >> What's interesting is that everyone always, you know, as the trends change, you know, this is changing, that company's shifting and you guys have evolved beautifully. And I think the way people are leveraging cloud really shows their strengths and run the cloud actually highlights the strengths. If you play it properly, you can survive. I mean, look at snowflake. They don't even have a cloud. There are data cloud now. So, you know, if you bring, if customers can bring their, their architecture to the cloud, they can actually do a lot of re, rearchitecting and rechanging to modernizing their business. This is something that's kind of only in the past few years, that's come up. This is quite a big trend. Do you guys see the same thing happening faster or is it just we're inside the ropes? And we love it so much. (laughs) >> Yeah. Like I said, earlier, organizations that are at different levels of the journey, but we're seeing happening all around us. And we're embracing that. We're actually embracing that trend, Enabling that trend because we truly believe hybrid cloud is the more practical reality. And we want customers to have the cloud on their own terms and not feel like they have to, you know do something just because they're forced to, or they're not able to, cost-effectively or even technically for that matter. >> Oh John >> Okay, well- Go ahead, Tanu, sorry. >> I was just going to say that our CEO, Rajiv Ramaswami, puts it really well. The cloud is brilliant operating model, right. So it really should not be about variable workloads. It should just be an easy operational model for you to engage with. >> Yeah. I think you guys have a great strategy. And I think the invisible really rings true with me as well as that horizontally scalable control plane, because the innovation is happening, but the operations have to be reigned in and support the expansion as well. Which means you have to kind of focus on the fact that you've got to reign in the data and you've got to make it invisible. If you look at Lambda functions, and you've got serverless trend booming with the edge, it's got to be invisible and programmable. It just has to be. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> Great stuff. All right. Final question for you both, if you don't mind. Tanu we'll start with you. >> Okay. >> What's the big story this year at .next? If you had to summarize it and tell your friend that you're driving in the elevator up to the top floor, what's the big story that should be talked about? That's being talked about this year at .next? >> Taking unified infrastructure and management and having Azure in preview is really the big news here. So go to nutanix.com/azure, to learn more, show us your interest there, sign up for a test drive. It really is a very easy way for you to experience a product in action. And you'll just see how simple it is to deploy a hybrid cloud with clusters on Azure and under an hour. >> Saveen, final word for you. What's the big news? What's the takeaway? >> Yeah, look, I, I would say that, you know, your cloud on your terms is really the big news. That's driving everything they're doing back in the office billing products and ultimately, you know, delivering or making that whole hybrid cloud journey a reality for our customers. >> Tanu and Saveen, thank you for coming on, sharing that commentary on theCUBE coverage at .next. Thanks for coming up. >> Thanks so much John. Thanks for all. >> It was our pleasure. >> Thanks for watching. More coverage, stay tuned. (cheerful music)

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

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019. Brought to you by, Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the cube's live coverage of Nutanix.NEXT here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, alongside of my co-host Stu Miniman, Analyst. We have two guests for this segment. We have Angie Cusworth, she is the COO of Hardy Fisher Services. >> Hi. >> Thank you so much for coming on Angie. >> Hi. >> And we have David Cusworth SVP sales at Hardy Fisher Services. Thank you so much! >> Thank you. >> And husband and wife. >> And a husband and wife team! >> I believe we have done it before, I know we've had twins on the program. >> Right, yes. >> Uh, but uh, yeah. >> Couples who work, I like it! We'll get into how you make it all work. But David, I want to start with you. Describe Hardy Fisher Services for our viewers who may be unfamiliar with your company. >> Yeah, so we own and operate a large data center based in Leeds, so it's a 400 watt capacity data center previously built for BT house NHS patient records in the UK. And we operate that as a reseller base data center, so we are a very clear go-to market. We have our co-location, we have money services and then obviously cloud which is based on Nutanix. >> So, wait Angie what are the biggest business challenges that you face in your world. >> So I think it's trying to convince customers to move to the cloud. Obviously, you know, we've been doing cloud for some time now. I don't know how to-- >> Yeah, so David, we're talking about that move to cloud. It help it put where, you know, your services built both now Nutanix fit in the customers overall picture. Cause you know, you've SAS, you've got public cloud people are building private clouds off Nutanix or other type of hardware, so you know how do you play with some of those other components and position yourself? >> I think a lot of the challenges that we've seen is people are comfortable with Azure so a lot of resellers that we deal with. Azure is a safe bet. Nutanix is still quite a new name in the marketplace. There's people who don't want to move to the cloud because they don't understand it. So, a lot of the time, we show them the cloud platform in our data centers, and can touch and feel it they can actually see it. Which gives them a bit more confidence. And then, from our side it's the service wrap, so it's holding them the hands on the journey to the cloud. So it's given our technical ability to say, you know, we'll do it for you, we'll hold your hands, we'll get you working. And at the end of the day, the cloud is people's businesses. So if the cloud doesn't work, it affects their business and we're trying to put our hats on as a customer. >> Yeah, it's funny. It reminds me, we used to have the joke, there is no cloud, there is just you know, your computer somewhere else. Angie, bring us inside, a little bit? Your customers, it sounds like they're still a little bit of trepidation about them making changes there? >> Yeah, I think one of the reasons that we've been so successful, is that we follow IT Service Management very well. So we help our customers through the whole journey. So people that are new to cloud, we have excellent technical people, that can help them. We have a fantastic data center, as well. So, they know their kits are safe with us. >> Yeah, bring us inside a little bit. You talked about how many racks there. What differentiates your data center? There's you know, most companies, you know, we tell the average enterprise out there, you know. Friends don't let friends build data centers. There's other people that know what they're doing. So, give us a little bit of a virtual tour, if you would. >> Yeah, so our data center. Like I said, It was originally built for BT and for the NHS. And as they moved to cloud, the need for their data center shrunk. Leeds as a city is growing city and there's not many data centers in Leeds, so we took the opportunity to really re-launch the data center. We knew it was a very high spec data center, cause it cost a lot of money to build. And it gives the customers confidence that when they are going in there, it's very secure. It's very high resilience. And from a cloud platform, we've gone completely Nutanix. So it is literally, you can come in, you can touch Nutanix, you can play with it. And it's just the whole journey really, that to make sure they're in a safe pair of hands. >> Talk a little bit more about how Nutanix comes into play with your organization. >> We went with Nutanix because we're looking for something to be different. There's a lot of people who've got this UA to be WES in that V seller market. So we wanted something that was focused on SME. So we've got very, very much SME focus. And cost comes into it. Having that support, so being able to ring somebody up and not being in a big call center in Asia or in Europe. Somebody who can actually talk them through, what the issues are, also be very responsive, and put the customer first. >> Yeah, it's interesting, and when I think about kind of the traditional service provider. It's like they've build out their management stack, they build something at a scale, so that, you know, they can do something that their customer couldn't. It sounds like Nutanix is a different type of offering. We've been talking about it all week. It's not thriving in that complexity, but you know you just have a simple offering. And then, of course, you know price and easy to manage. Is something that service providers need, so, It sounds as if you built this ten years ago, you might have had to do something very different then how you do it today. >> Yeah, no, absolutely. It's given us a market that really hasn't been there in the past. You know, we can help resellers on the journey, we can give them a bit of a lift up, so. If their too small or they've just got going in cloud and they can't afford to get their own Nutanix platform, then we can get them going and then they can start going into Nutanix. But it's a real differentiate. It's like I say, to a lot of people, it's the safe bet it's your AWS. It's you know a Microsoft name. No one ever gets sacked for by Microsoft kind of conversation. >> I think one of the other compelling things is the cost of it as well. A lot of people think it's cheaper to go as your AWS. Actually it's mechanics are very cost effective for our customers and that's why it appeals for, you know the kind of smaller resellers that we deal with. >> You know, are you starting to do any connection now that you think about as your AWS have their direct connect. When you have people's environment, sometimes they might want to access those services or are you starting to look that, in that environment? Where some of the Nutanix hybrid solutions? >> Yeah, so what we do at the moment is we backup mainly to Azure. So we've, we've a central core platform with Nutanix and then, we're back up as a failover to Azure. But, again, customers don't like the complexity of even doing that as a back up. So it's been great coming to the event and seeing the Nutanix backup and the options there because our customers love Nutanix. >> So are you interested in the mine solution, that has been rolling out? >> Yes, absolutely. >> Yeah, yeah absolutely. That's one of the things that we're really looking forward to going back to explore. And that will be next on our road map. >> Are you starting to look out as to which solution with mine you're going to use or are you still under discussion? >> Yeah, we'll leave that to our technical director. I'm sure he'll point us in the right direction. >> One of the things we hear a lot about at this conference is Nutanix's culture. It's people first culture. It's humble, honest, hungry. How does that come into play in terms of your interactions with the company? >> I think for us, that's a culture that we have as well in our own business. And that really does shine through for every person that we've ever dealt with at Nutanix. There it's always customer first. I can't fault them, they're amazing. >> I think for us, it doesn't feel like you're a big company because it's such of a personal relationship. So it doesn't feel like you're talking to a big corporate company where you're not heard, you know, if you're not a a big customer. The relationships we've got with people work and just pick up the phone it might be a really senior position and they'll help us, and that's something that's really good in Nutanix. >> I'm wondering if you've had any experience with Nutanix support, so we know uptime is, is super critical. So what is your experience? >> Yeah, fantastic. I mean, from an operational perspective, I love the self healing, that's built into the platform. Anyway, I love the fact that my technical guys don't have to be uber technical to be able to operate. That's one of the other benefits in Nutanix for us. It ticks all the boxes from an operational perspective. >> I think from our side as well, the technical guys, so, our first and second line guys can understand Nutanix. They can get their head around it, so it's very easy to train and more with Nutanix as opposed to other platforms where it can take up to a year to really understand how the platform works. It is very, very simple for our support desk. Which means, it is less demand on the support that's got Angie then. >> Training in the skills gap is a hugely important issue in the technology world. It's in the United States and also in Europe. How are you finding it, what is it like to be a Leeds based company, are you finding the people you need to fill the roles you have open? >> We're really lucky actually, because our technical director is an ex-trainer, so we can do a lot of the training on site. But Nutanix training is something that we're definitely going to be tapping into. I've been speaking to the guys here, and that's another useful thing for us to take back to the UK. >> Give our audience a little bit of insight, so you know, what you get out of coming out to the Nutanix conference, you came last year to London, you came out here to Copenhagen. What were you hoping to accomplish? What are the conversations been, give us a little bit of a flavor. >> I think it's been good to network with other Nutanix customers to understand their journey. Definitely to learn about what Nutanix is doing now and in the future. When you're running a business it's kind of head down sometimes. Allowance, you know, you don't get time to really sit and look up what the market is doing. So for us, it's also to be part of our journey, you know, we went to event four or five years ago when it was much smaller, much newer name. And to see how fast Nutanix has gone is amazing. It really is. >> Absolutely, I think it's given us clarity on what we need to do next year. Like I say, you've helped us by coming here today and yesterday, seeing the presentations on how we can implement that into our own business. And how we can really take Nutanix forward. >> In terms of the future, you said you are going to, you're looking into Mine. You're thinking about using some of the Nutanix training, capabilities. >> Frames, Beam. >> So, there's a lot there. >> So yeah, we've really honestly taken so much back and I can't wait now. I think for me personally, it's re-energized me. I'm excited about going back and just working out where we can really take Nutanix forward. >> And what's next for Hardy Fisher? >> It's just growth, we're at an early journey now. So we're kind of at the start of our journey, over the next five years, it's all about growth. We see Leeds as a bit a city that's growing itself. We've had a lot of changes in Leeds as a city. It's still quite small. It's a digital city, but it's got massive focus on growing. We're having a big part of that because we're one of three data centers in Leeds. So, it's not a heavily populated area for data centers. And we're all about helping local resellers, you know, get on that ladder for Nutanix. >> So that will be a big driver for us, you know help the small MSPs. You know, let them touch and feel Nutanix in our data center. And then hopefully give them the leg up for them to buy their own boxes, and then co-locate that in the data centers as well. >> So, as as as devoted Nutanix customers, any advice for Dirige Pandey? He's got, he's under a lot pressure. It's a competitive landscape. You love Nutanix. >> Angie: He's nailed it. >> David: I think, just keep doing what they're doing. >> Rebecca: Stick to your knitting. >> Don't get sold to one of the bigger boys and keep the-- >> Yeah, absolutely, keep the culture. And the, everything that you're doing technically wise it's just unreal. We're blown away. >> I think the culture as well, keep it to grow as big as you are now, keep that culture which has been very hard. I mean, we try doing it in our businesses. You know we have a very hardworking ethic. But we want people to enjoy where they work. We want to have a good work flow, life balance. And it's very difficult to do in a big company. >> Is it, do you like working with each other, in your husband and wife team? >> Yeah, it has it's challenges. (laughing) It has it's challenges but we've worked together for 12 years now, so. >> It's gotten better at work. >> All right. >> It's very hard because, I sell it and I support it, so unless I sell it properly I get in trouble. (laughing) >> Dog house. >> I have to reign him in. >> Exactly, well David an Angie, thank you so much. It has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much for having us. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll have more for Nutanix.NEXT in Copenhagen coming up in just a little bit.

>> Announcer: Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark, 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 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, of course. We are joined by a good friend of theCUBE, Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO of Constellation Research. Thank you so much for returning to theCUBE. >> Hey, how you doing? Good morning! >> Good morning, good morning! >> Good morning! (laughing) >> Good morning! >> I don't know. I get all my accents wrong out here. >> (laughing) So, you got a shout out on the main stage this morning, from Monica Kumar, congratulations on that. She talked about you and your research on the infinite role of computing. You also do a lot with the future of work. I know that that is really right in your wheelhouse right now. What are you hearing, what are you seeing, what kinds of conversations are you having that are interesting you? >> Yeah, so, this infinite computing option, it's one of the that we're talking about, the fact that you can scale out forever, right? And the problem that's holding us back has been technical debt, right? So all that legacy that everyone's got to figure out. It's like, my connections, my server, my disk-rack recovery, my disaster recovery, my backup, everything. It's a pain in the butt. And I'm still trying to get onto the cloud. So on that end, we're like, okay, all this stuff is holding us back, how do we get there? Now, the future of work is a little bit different. We're seeing a very very different set of work. People have talked about where we are the gig economy, but that's just one aspect of it. Everything is being decomposed into microservices. Large processes are becoming smaller and smaller microservices, they're being reusable, well our work and tasks are following the same way. We're getting smaller and smaller tasks, some are more repetitive, some are going to be automated, and it's really about where we actually find the difference between augmentation of humanity, and full automation, and that's where the next battle's going to be. >> Yeah, Ray, some of the discussions we've been having this week, is how do we really simplify the environment? The balance I hear from customers, on the one hand, they're always like, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough personnel, on the other hand, oh my gosh, that full automation sounds like you're going to put me out of a job. We know we're not putting everybody out of work in the next couple of years. There are challenges; we worry about the hollowing out of the center of the economy, but here, what Nutanix is trying to do, of course, is, I don't want to have to thrive in that complexity anymore, I want to be able to drive innovation, keep up with that, take advantage of that unlimited resources out there, so, where do you see, you've been here at the show, what are you hearing from the customers here? Anything different in Europe versus back in North America that you'd share about that journey onto the changing roles? >> Oh it's a great point. It's about simplifying everything where you can, it's about areas of automation where they make sense. Here in Europe it's slightly different because a lot of the focus in Europe has been about cost and efficiency, followed by of course regulatory. Those have been the two drivers. And they've been battling that in order to be, even they will look at some level of innovation. Where in the US, people are head on doing innovation, regulatory and operational efficiency at the same time. So that creates a very very different environment. But what we have noticed are some patterns, especially when we look at automation and AI; there are four areas out of seven where we see a lot more automation that's happening. The first one is massively repetitive tasks, those are things, yeah, got to get that out of the way, we don't do this very very well. The second one is really thinking about massive nodes of interaction. When you're connected to multiple places, multiple organizations, multiple instances, that's something where we start to get overwhelmed, and then of course, there's lots of volume. If you've got lots of volume or requests that are coming through, you can't possibly handle that, and that's a place where we see a lot of machine scale. And the last piece is really when you have to scale, humans don't scale very well. However, it's actually not a hollowing out of the middle; it's actually a hollowing out of the ends in a very, very real end, because really really simple tasks go away, super complex tasks go away, and the middle actually remains, and the middle is things that are complex that cannot be recreated by math, they're also areas that require a lot of creativity, humans make the rules, we break the rules, and then the last part is really fine motor skills and presence, the machines still aren't as good. So we still have some hope. So the middle stays, it's the hollowing out of the ends, the high end jobs and the low end jobs are the ones where we're going to see a lot of risk. >> So what does that mean? So we have, leaving the middle there, and as you said, the high end jobs and the low end jobs go away, but what does that mean in terms of the skills? In terms of what employers are looking for, in terms of what they need in their prospective applicants and hirees. >> That's a great point. Soft skills are important; it's the qualitative skills that become even more important, it's also being able to manage and orchestrate the hard skills; because you don't necessarily have to know how to do the calculation, you have to just know which algorithm to apply. >> Okay, and then also, these soft skills of managing people, I'm assuming too? Because computers are not so good at that either. >> Yes. Soft skills are managing people, but also manage the human and machine equation that's going to happen. Because we have to train the machines, the machines aren't going to know that level of intuition, and there's a large amount of training that's going to happen over time. >> All right. So, Ray, one of the things Nutanix is doing is, as they've been transforming to not only subscription, software's always been at their core, but they're starting to do not just infrastructure software, but application software. I know you live in that world quite a lot, so when you hear Nutanix talking about building databases, delivering these services, it's something that I look at, Amazon does some of that, but for the most part they're infrastructure and build on top of us. How do you think, how is Nutanix doing, what are some of the challenges for them, going up against some of the bellwethers out there in tech, and all the open source projects that are out there. >> So the challenge is always going to be, there is a one dominant player in every market. And what they're providing is an alternative to allow the orchestration of not having that, not only that dominant player, but a choice. So in every single market, they're focused on giving users choice, and giving the ability to aggregate, and bring everything into one single plane. That is tough to do, right? And the fact that they see that as their big hairy audacious goal, that's impressive. If you said they were going to do this three years ago, I wouldn't have believed them. >> Well yeah, I think back to, remember almost 10 years ago, VMware tried to get into applications, they bought Zimbra, they bought a few others. Cisco did like 26 adjacencies, they were going to take over video and do all these things, and we've seen lots of failures over the years. They refocused on their core, was a big thing that I heard, that the users seem to be excited about. Are there areas that you're find especially interesting as to where Nutanix is poking? >> So, I would say that Nutanix three years ago was a little bit sleepy. They got comfortable, they did the stuff that they did really well, and it feels like, maybe about 12 months ago, Dheeraj had a different vision. Like something snapped, something hit, he said this isn't working, we're going to change things, and we've seen a whole bunch of new talent come into play. We've also seen a huge expansion of what they're trying to do, and a cleanup of all those side projects that were all going on before. So I think they've actually honed in on, okay, if we can simplify this piece, this is a money-winning business for some time, and they're talking about 80% margins last quarter, I mean that's huge, and that's just trying to save customers money, and make their lives simpler. >> Do you think that they have the messaging right? Because, I mean, they're going to this Thoreauvian/Emersonian idea of simplify, simplify, simplify, and it does resonate, of course! What customer doesn't want a simpler computing experience? But do you think that they are reaching the right people, and they have obviously very passionate customers, but are they getting into new businesses. >> I think they're getting to the businesses that their customers are asking them to, those adjacencies are huge, I think and when you think about cleaning up technical debt, all that legacy debt that you actually have to fix, I mean, this is where you begin. It's so hard to make that cloud journey to begin with, it's even harder to carry all that legacy with you. And we're going to see a lot more of this going forward. >> All right. So, Ray, talk a little bit about, I loved an event you did last year, the people's centered digital future. Help explain to our audience what this is about, and where you're taking it again this year. >> So that event was a one-time event. We were celebrating the 70th anniversary of the United Nations founding, we were celebrating almost 50 years of the internet, and 50% of the world being connected to the internet. And part of the reason that was an important event was, we really felt that there was a need to get back to the roots of where the internet had begun, and more importantly, talk about where we are today in the world of privacy. One of the biggest challenges we have in the a digital world is that your personal data, your genomics, all this information about you is being brokered for free. And what we have to do is take that back. And by taking that back, what I mean is, we've got to make all these rights, property right. If we can make that a property right, we can leverage the existing rules and legislation that's there, and we can actually start paying people for that data through consent, and giving people that ability, on consent to data, could create lots of things, from universal basic income, to a brand new set of data economy that equalizes the playing field, while keeping the large tech giants. >> There's some of those big journeys that we went on, you talk about the internet, this year's 50th anniversary of the first walking on the moon, and you look at how entire countries rallied together, so much technology was-- >> Yeah, look at India. >> Spun off of what they've done there, it's like we need some rallying cries in today's day and age to solve some of these big day and age. Is that AI? Where are some of the big areas that you see tech needing to drive forward in the next decade? >> I think the big area's going to be around decentralization, giving individuals more empowerment. We've got large, big tech companies, that are, I'd say, imbalanced. We start companies right away, building monopolies on day one, and we don't open up those markets. And the question is, how do we create a level playing field for the individual to be to compete, to bring a new idea, and to innovate, if that's continuously stifled by big technology companies without an opportunity, we're in trouble. And so that starts by making data a property right, to the personal data. It starts by also creating marketplaces for that data, and those marketplaces have to have regulations, similar to capital market flows. The way treat exchanges, we treat marketplaces, we need to do the same thing with the way we do with data, and then the third piece, there has to be some level of a tax, that goes to all these data economies, so that they can fund the infrastructure and the watch dogs that are there. Now this is coming from a free market, I'm a free market capitalist, okay? I can't stand regulation, but I also realize that it's so important that we have a fair market. >> But do you, we know so much about how Americans are so much more cavalier about their privacy than even Europeans, what will it take to galvanize Americans to care about those little crumbs that they're leaving on the internet, that is the data that you say should be a property right, that we should be paid for? >> I think it's going to start with companies actually take, and do the right thing, where they actually give them that opportunity to monetize that information. >> Will they do that? >> I think the new set of startups are starting to do that, because they're looking at the risk that's being posed, at Facebook and Google and Amazon, on the anti-trust, DOJ, FCC, they're all coming in at the same time, the FTC, they're all wondering, do we break these companies up or not? The short answer is, I don't think they're going to, because we're competing with China, and when you're looking at that scale of data, where Amazon's transactions are only 1/10 of Ali Baba's? That's huge. So the consolidation has to happen, but we need to create a layer that actually democratizes and creates a fair trading play. >> And those startups, you think, can compete with established players? >> I think once we set the roles, and the ground rules, I think people are going to be able to do that, but once you free that data, what are we competing on now? You have to pay for my consent, you have to earn my business, you can't trade it for free, or just say, "Hey look, you are the product." That changes everything. >> Rebecca: Yeah, that's a good point. >> Ray, I know you spend a lot of time talking to, and giving advice to some of the leaders in technology, you're welcome to get into some specifics about Nutanix, or some of the cloud players, but what are some of the key themes, what are people getting right, and what are they still doing wrong? >> Okay, so theme number one, this is going to be a multicloud hybrid world for a long time. Anybody that's bucking the multicloud trend, they've missed the point, right? Because we want portability in data, there's only two or three players in every single market, if I can't move my data, my workloads, and my IO in and out, then you've actually created vendor lock-in from hell. And I think customers are going to protest against that. The second one, and you guys are probably following this trend a lot, is really about AI ethics and design principles for AI. So what is ethical AI? We've got five things that are important: The first one is make sure it's transparent. See the algorithms, see what they write. Second one, make sure it's explainable. Hey, bias is not a bad thing, so if I'm discriminating against redheads, with, left-handed, and that happened to like, I don't know, Oracle, fine. But, if that was unintended, and you're discriminating against that, then we have to get rid of that, right? And so we have to figure out how to reduce that kind of bias, if it's unwanted bias. If you discover that you're discriminating, and not being inclusive, you've got to make sure that you address that. So then the next part is, it's got to be reversible. And once you have that reversibility, we also make sure that we can train these systems over time. And then the last piece is, Musk could be right! Musk could be right, the machines might take over, but if you insert a human at the beginning of the process, and at the end of the process, you won't get taken over. >> I want to hear about what the future of work looks like for Ray Wang. You are on the road constantly, you are (laughs) you are moving your data from one place, you are everywhere, all the time. So what do you have on next, what's exciting you about your professional life? >> I think the challenge's that we are living in a world where there's too much information, too much content. And you guys say this all the time, right? Separating the signal from the noise. And people are willing to pay for that signal. But that is a very very tough job, right? It's about the analysis, the insights, and when you have that, people don't want to read through your reports. They don't want to watch through the videos. They just want to call you up and say, "Hey, what's going on?" And get the short version of it. And that's what's making it very interesting, because you would expect this would be in a chat bot, it'd be in a robo advisor, doesn't work that way. People still want the human connection, especially given all that data out there, they want the analysis and insights that you guys provide, that's very very important, but even more important right now, it's really about getting back to those relationships. I think people are very careful about the relationships they're keeping, they're also curating those relationships, and coming back to spending more time. And so we're seeing a lot more of in-person meetings, in-person events, very very small, curated conversations, and I think that's coming back. I mean that's why we do our conference every year, as well, we try to keep 200 to 300 people intimately together. >> Those human connections, not going away. (laughs) >> Nope, not going away, in an automated, AI, digital world! This is our post-digital future. >> That's excellent. Well Ray, thanks you so much for coming on theCUBE, it's always so much fun to talk to you. >> Hey, thanks a lot. >> High energy guy (laughs). >> Low energy. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more from the Bella Center at Nutanix.NEXT coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.NEXT 2019 Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co host, Stu Miniman. We're joined by two guests this segment. We have Mayur Shah. He is the Global Head, Data Center and Software Defined Everything SDx at Wipro. Thank you for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> And Thenu Kittappa, Director GSI Sales at Nutanix. Thank you so much. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we're talking today about fluid ITs. Wipro, of course, is an Indian multinational corporation based in Bangalore. You gave us a talk yesterday here at Nutanix .NEXT. Tell our viewers a little bit about how you view fluid IT. >> Sure. So we believe that the kind of transition the industry is going through, the pressure businesses are getting in terms of having their offering aligned to the customer expectations, they're digital natives, and so and so forth have digital transformations. They are also under tremendous pressure of innovating much faster than they used to do before. And the same pressure has been put back to the IT. How IT support that kind of changes and agility, which business would need in general. We believe that now, previously we used to have a plan for five years and a roadmap and we used to forecast what kind of architecture mission may end. But now it's time for us to give that back to business. There are a lot of uncertainties and how we can handle those uncertainties that's main reason why we are thinking little out of box in terms of getting things fluid. >> Mayur, I like that comment because part of the transition used to be I bought a product and I thought about how many years did I depreciate that product for? So I want to get your, what are you seeing and how is it impacting your customers? Nutanix talks about building experiences, so are they meeting that goal? How is that helping with both what you're doing and ultimately your end customers? >> So, what we believe is as you rightly say the end user customer's experience, business agility, and their competitiveness for customers at the prime, right? So the way we are now aligning our offerings, aligning to customer needs, changing our models of measurement from SLS to business level BLS. Those are the things which we are doing for aligning to the businesses and ensuring that they benefit in terms of many of our offering are now experience-driven. So SLS and BLS are also experience-driven, so we in our virtual desk offering, we offer the customers based on the experience problem, the penalties are assigned. So we proactively manage the end user experience without them even knowing it. So those are the few examples. >> Thenu, I have to imagine this is a big piece of your job is the traditional channel used to be how do we get beyond selling boxes, selling services, consulting and everything, but the SI is more about that whole experience. >> It's actually a whole different experience. It's been a great show for us from that perspective. We have a lot of our partners starting up, giving us the support we need from the SI community. Wipro was a sponsor, so it's been great. And to be honest, that's exactly what we're trying to do with SIs here. We're taking the solution and outcome based approach. Let's talk to the customer, what their business needs are. Let's see what kind of solutions we build to fit that. It's not just Nutanix. How does Nutanix work with HPE? How does Nutanix work with the networking, SDN? Let's give them an outcome-based solution. And let's support it with the right level of experience. So essentially, just in time to market is the goal that we're trying to achieve with partners like Wipro. >> Thenu, can you give us some examples of what, the kinds of conversations that you're having and then how it influences you when you go back to your company and you go back to Nutanix and you are then in the war room trying to figure out what kind of next new architectures and designs you can provide. >> So normally when we work with customers and with GSIs, you start with the core problem of what are you trying to solve over here, right? You have a five year plan. Are you trying to grow to a certain extent? Are you looking for your VDI to cater a certain security needs or certain financial needs? And so, then, it comes down to what is the business requirement here? Is it scalability? Is it reliability? Is it security? Is it financial modeling? You might be sitting with a customer who says, this is a great option, but I don't have budget to do this. I want to transform myself to the next level of technology, but I don't have a budget. And when we have these joint customer conversations with partners like Wipro, they say, great, let's offer a solution. And here, by solution, we not only cater to the technology, but we're also looking at where you need to end up in five years, what kind of business models and commercial models we can do to support you and what are the right products we can bring to you so that you only concern yourself with the outcome. You don't care about the infrastructure stack underneath it. Let's make everything invisible for you. But they just take our invisible story to a whole different level. >> Mayur, when I think about the transformations that customers are going through, the education and training is often a big piece of that. Where does that fit in to what you're doing, what services Wipro offers, education there, and how much of it does the simplicity of Nutanix involve in that? >> It's a great questions. So what we actually, and it helps us a lot, when we bring in the complex technologies for our end customers, they also have the owners and they need to get appreciative of what we are offering. With Nutanix's simplicity it's all given. They know that things work and things work super simple. Now whatever we bring on top of that, that's where it adds a lot of value without missing too much of time for enabling our end customers, and that gives outcome. So we are, as a whole, as a solution, we are able to give that outcome confidence and experience to customers. >> So what kinds of conversations are you having at this conference, in terms of what kinds of learnings are going on? You're talking to fellow customers of Nutanix and able to say hey, what you're doing over there, maybe we could try something similar at Wipro. >> Yeah, so one good part what I've seen people are using platform for variety of use cases, variety of business applications. Now we at Wipro, we have mastered some of them, but not all of them. But we see a lot of customers speaking about how they are using massive scale for HyperCloud, for instance. They are using it for databases, applications, mission critical applications, and we feel now it's time for us to branch out into that. >> I'd actually like to add to that. All the conversations we've had is amazing with customers. You think you built a product to meet x use cases, and then the customer comes back and says, you guys did great with being on these X use cases, but guess what? I found out this X plus 1 use case, and it's perfect. And that is what we take back and say, okay, is there a market around this, which we can then commercialize and make it easy to consume? >> What would you say, so you're based in San Jose, and you've been with Nutanix for five years now. What would you say are some of the differences that you've seen from US customers versus here we are in Copenhagen, European customers, and also Indian customers? >> Oh, that's a difficult questions. You're really putting me in a difficult position here. But in general, I would, you know, our European customers look to innovation, but they also look to baked in solutions, and more tighter integration and collaboration with partners. The US customers want to be on the cutting edge of technology. They're very high risk-takers, so when you're defining a solution and a model that works for them, it's a completely different ball game in terms of how much risk they are willing to take, what price point they want to do, and then they're also very, very particular about I want Vendor A, B, and C to work together. Go make it happen. With a lot of the Indian and the Asian customers, and even our European customers, they're more SLA based. Mayur, what do you think? >> Absolutely. I think we see a clear, here in this area of Europe, they are much mature, the second and third level of outsourcing people. They are aware of SLAs, they are aware of the services. They expect a little more than what we do and we, let's say if you compare back to India and US in some time, they are the first time or second time outsourcers, but here's the difference, they clearly wonder about the outcome. >> Mayur, the announcements that we've had this week. Are there anything that you're looking to take back to your customers, or anything that either announced or some of the previews they've been giving that you're especially excited about? >> Sure. So I think there's a great timing. I was just talking last night. We are doing investments, innovation investments for three years, it's a three years plan. And exactly the synergies so well. The announcement, what we have heard here are kind of synergizing what we are doing in the road map. For example, we and the fluid IT what she told, is all about delivering those next generation future-proof architecture, leveraging those announcements. The era, we are working on databases as always, which covers the mission-critical application, and things in a much advanced way. We believe in our road map here, we calling it a service theater, which actually delivers the experience and outcome. So there are synergies they talked about insights. And we are talking about delivering those real time, predictable stuff, based on, and our vision is to give intent with everything, so you have to just define the intent and things will fall in place. So there are a lot of synergies and we definitely take back few of them, which is databases as a service, insights, IOTA, Edge, a few key things we will take from here. And of course the HyperCloud, the AWS migration. >> Well, Mayur's being very, very humble here. One of the announcements that we did make over here at the conference was Wipro has standardized with Nutanix on their virtual desk solution and we're going back to both our customers, their customers, and our field with this offering. So the virtual desk is their own IP. They've done very well in the past with virtual desk, but as they are looking to do more standardization, get in to the next generation solutions, we worked very closely with them to build a Nutanix and HPE-based stack with Centrix, to offer this as a turnkey solution, which they've already done, but with better economics and time to market. >> And do you see that as sort of the future? >> Yes. That pretty much becomes a fundamental building block based on which almost all of our other solutions are going to to get built. The next one coming up will be database as a service, similar constructs. How do you make database consumption and Ops transfer to the end user? Followed by IoT, now IoT is a real different ball game because everything is customized. A lot of customers like to go dabble in it, but at the end of the day you need to build a solution around it. >> Thenu, and actually one of the questions we've had is we look as Nutanix moves beyond just infrastructure software to some of the application software, seems that the GSIs would be a critical player for building services. >> Yes! We actually have this really funky graph, verticals, base our AoS, where do GSIs fit in. It's the solution and pulling everything together, and making it more of a customer business case based offering, as opposed to a customer piecing itself. It's becoming a big ask with G2Ks, right? They're not doing large RFPs, they're actually doing very business-based SLAs, and now the control lies with the business owners within large customers. So it fits very well with our story. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much Thenu and Mayur. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Our pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .Next coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

(Upbeat Techno Music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's theCUBE! Covering Nutatnix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix.Next. We are here at the Bella Center in Copenhagen. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside of Stu Miniman, the analyst for theCUBE. We have two guests for this segment. We have Manoj Agarwal. He is the SVP of Engineering at Nutanix. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you Rebecca. That's good. >> And Gil Haberman. He is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. So, our topic today is Xi Clusters. These were announced at Anaheim, at .Next back in Anaheim. Gil, why don't we start with you. Describe the business problems you were hearing from customers and how these Xi Clusters are designed to help solve them. >> Gil: Sure, first thanks for inviting me. I'm a big fan of theCUBE. It's so great to be here. To your question, at Nutanix, we've been working with customers on the vision of Hybrid Cloud for a number of years now. And the different challenges have evolved over time. Initially, there were pockets of public cloud adoption where customers wanted to simply find a way to operate across multiple clouds. But today, the challenges are different. Now, as customers are looking to adopt business critical applications that span private and public, bursting and migrating applications, there's a strong need for consistency across environments. And we gear around consistency around 3 aspects. The first is infrastructure. The second is operations. And the third is the consumption model itself. From an individual perspective, what we keep hearing is that the same VMs and applications must be able to work across environments, without significant replatforming or retooling. From an operation's perspective, cloud engineers truly need a way to utilize the same practices, integrations, in work that they have done on their applications for many years, across multiple clouds. So there's a need to sustain the same practices across these multiple clouds. And finally from a consumption model perspective, there's a need to have a platform that drives the same level of consistency in terms of licensing and software across different environments. And for that, we at Nutanix have to evolve to empower operators to be able to address all of these needs of consistency across private and public. >> Now, I would like to add something to it. You just think about three years ago. The entire world was talking about "Everything is going to be public cloud." And very soon, all these CIOs also realized that it's not going to be just public cloud or just private cloud. It's going to be Hybrid. And we ran a survey with 2,700 IT professionals who participated in the survey, and what we learned mainly 91% of them, they said hybrid is ideal. And the second thing that was not also a surprising thing was 94% of them, they said the app migration or app mobility is going to be the key. And then we look at that option like "How are you going to adopt?" And that was also strikingly similar, like what we see currently maybe 18% or so, that they are into the hybrid world and getting onto close to 41% or so in the next 24 months. >> Yeah, but Manoj, I'm glad you brought that up. When I talk to users, the thing that they're concerned the most about are their applications% and their data. And in IT forever, migrations have been a challenging thing to do and it was usually, you set up a migration and it takes you weeks or months to do it. Today, migrations aren't even going to be even a one time thing. If I'm moving from one cloud to another, if I'm moving from private to public, or even public to private. I need to have some flexibility to what I'm building. How has that informed how you're building your architectural designs? >> That's a great point. In fact, we always feel that architecture matters, and why the fundamental technologies that we are building should help. Two things that I'll say. One is the data replication technologies that we have built and strengthened over time. Plus the second thing is the network. If you get the network right, then you are very slowly there. And we had been reflecting on the data side, you know. 10 years of journey and data replication technologies like we have built. Networking we have been very hard at work on that front also in the last three years or so, with the building of Xi Cloud. We'll see and hear more and more, especially in the context of Xi Cluster. What you see is that we have done the ready integration with AWS ETCs. Thereby first of all all the services that exist in AWS. It's available to the customers with their app, running on XI Clusters without changing anything there. >> This is a competitive market so let's talk about differentiation. How do you see the product as completely different from your rivals and then how are you positioning it to your customers? >> Yeah. I'll go back to again the same thing. Architecture matters. We were not the first ones to go out with a hybrid converse like in 2013. There were a lot of competitive solutions that existed at the time. But we took our time. We wanted to make sure that we do it right. We do provide choice to our customers. That's where we matter. As we are building out solutions, again going back to the four principles. Applications sort of require change. You don't require an IPO presence to change, so when we are building the solution, we are making sure if you want to pay for private cloud, on-prem our service provider. Or you want a public cloud. Any of the big cloud players or this new cloud, that you have a common architecture underneath. You have the same management plain with the prism. You can really orchestrate, and manage the entire infrastructure. You have the flexibility in terms of the networking. Other services that you want to go and use, you have the choice of wahtever platform also. Like something that we don't want you to go and change if you don't need a change. Lastly, I would say, on the business side, we do want to give the smarty cloud world the flexibility for the customers to bring a cloud of their choice and if they want to switch, they should be able to switch with one click also. >> Yeah. Gil, I'm wondering if you can actually explain to our audience one of the challenges here is deploying unbared metal is not something that anybody can just do on the public clouds. For AWS, the first solution was actually VM ware on AWS. They had to develop that but they're now opening that to be able to use. Can you walk us through where we are with the cloud providers and that's I think part of the reason why this isn't yet generally available. Indeed, AWS has been the first to open bare metal and this is really the path for us at Nutanix to make clouds invisible as well. We worked with a number of platforms on Prem and now we want to extend that to public cloud and having an ability to actually access bare metal is the first step in doing so. Beyond that, what we've done is what we believe is the hard work of making things very simple to drive customer delight. And so what we've done is integrate into AWS rather than just running on top of AWS, inside existing accounts and VPCs of customers and the outcome has benefits on both technology and business perspective. From the technology perspective, cloud operators can see all bare metal as well as cloud native services in one place, one inventory. And we believe that this type of topology will provide better performance. And then on the business side, this allows us to do a couple of things. The first, if you are an AWS user like most of our customers, they can use AWS credits for that bare metal infrastructure. At Nutanix, we are now able to evolve our services to provide hybrid licenses, so our licenses would eventually be portable. And so you see how we are gradually building towards this portability across multiple clouds, AWS being the first cloud. >> Yeah, it's great to see Nutanix- We've seen a few other companies moving towards that model because if I'm software and truly agnostic, you should be able to have it across those environments. I believe Solidfire a couple of years ago started doing some of the things; A couple other companies. So the X in AWS sounds like it will be first. We know Google has been the partner of Nutanix for a while. Could you just give us where are we with Google and Azure? Kind of to round out the big three. >> Sure, so we have started to work with AWS and we have announced early access now inviting customers to sign up with us to get access. We are also actively working with Azure to figure out how to together bring better bare metal services and the type of software on top of that. And of course, we believe that other cloud vendors are going to open this up as well and Google Cloud being a close partner of ours is an important part of that strategy as well. >> And we are doing something with Google already as you know. We have integrated the entire stack using their nested vertilization technologies, like running on their vertilization the HB which is nested. Today, we run a lot of our customers prospect they run. The test, our experience the entire solution on Google test prime. We have brought out more than a thousand users every month, that they access it. So it's a journey, like when they have the full bare metal, you can see a lot more but we are very engaged with them. >> I want to talk about the future now and have you looked into your crystal ball a bit, 6, 10, years from now. What do you see- This is such a fast changing environment but how do you see the cloud evolving and then how do you see Nutanix? What role does Nutanix play? >> Last 10 years, it was all about how we bring public cloud into the private cloud, right? Next 5, 10 years when you think about it is all how do we really make it hybrid. The experience that what customers have come to expect in the last 10 years. You can go and pick any kind of platform on which you want to run the same stack. You won't need to worry about it. Something similar that needs to happen and the underlying architecture of technology which will go and drive that is going to be data mobility, same control plane that can go and extend this smarty cloud. This story by the way resonates very very well with the customers because it's not easy to get your IT for support, to get trained on different cloud technologies also because the talent things cost there. And if you can go and teach them one interface and have them run with the choice of infrastructure or the back form or the cloud, that's what we think we can make a huge difference for the customers. >> Yeah, so I want to make sure I understand when talking about your hybrid or multicloud strategy, we've got Xi Clusters help you get in and matches what you have on sight. Have you had a conversation about Kubernetes yet? Where does Carbon which is the Nutanix Kubernetes fit into this overall discussion? Is that just part of the platform that gets baked in and therefore we don't need to talk about it or am I missing a piece? >> That's a great question because the beauty of what we're talking about is that we bring the entire software and the entire platform with us wherever we go. Part of that stack is carbon and calm. We need the ability to have both traditional applications alongside modern applications with Kubernetes. Even hybrid applications that include some front end that might be containerized, maybe back end that is not yet containerized. And all that, everything that we've been doing on-prem, can now be moved into any other public cloud we provide. >> It's part of the compute, right? You got the VMs, now you got the containers. It's part of the backbone. >> So yeah, we've heard from some people say that Kubernetes is just the new containerized compute. We don't need to talk about it and I'm okay with that, because it's just in there. >> Yes. Absolutely. >> Excellent. Well Gil and Manoj, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Manoj: Thanks so much for hosting us. >> Gil: Thanks for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .Next. (Techno outro plays)

>>Live from Copenhagen, Denmark. It's the cube covering Nutanix dot. Next 2019 brought to you by Nutanix. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Nutanix. Dot. Next we are here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with Stu minimun. We are joined by Nicola Bosun awic. He is the VP GM desktop services at Newtanics. Thanks so much for coming on the show. And also you piss Carr who is an industry analyst and and the many time guest on the cube. That's right. Thank you so much for coming on the show. So you are actually the founder of frame and frame was bought by Nutanix a about a year ago. So tell us a little bit about the acquisition, how its acquisitions are challenging. How has it has, how has it been going? >>It's mayor great year. Uh, there's no better place than a tannics to do end user computing in VDI. And that's what frame was all about. How we make it simple. Uh, that was also all about Newtanics. How do you make computing simple, fast, delightful, and um, we've done, uh, so many things to really bridge that world of on prem and cloud off traditional legacy VDI, like Citrix and VMware on hyperconverged infrastructure and now new broker like frame. And we are really looking at that as one end user computing team and just do what's right for the customers. So it's been a blast. Yeah. Nicola, you know, last year when we had you on, we talked a lot about frame, so you've got a broader mandate now to do the whole desktop services. Give us your view of the landscape a little bit out there as you know, definitely. >>I understand, you know, VDI traditionally, boy was it complicated building that stack, the infrastructure and the software pieces. Um, you know, where are your customers today and you know, how's the industry doing it a whole on that modernization journey. >> Uh, it, as I said, it's been a great 12 months. If you're in VDI. A lot of people who are in the traditional VDI world with brokers like Citrix and VMware are looking to modernize their data centers and there is no better options than uh, hyperconverged and Newtanics to have bite size and linearly, um, scaled infrastructure, run VDI. We continue to innovate, we continue to work closely with um, the vendors, especially Citrix. Um, and at the same time as the focus is shifting to the public clouds, uh, we are, um, having our own opinion and how the broker in the public cloud should look like with frame and then mixing and matching where the desktops really are and really looking at very, um, industry and vertical specific use cases. We're seeing lot of new adoption in healthcare and financial services and with frame, we're seeing a lot of new use cases in education and public sector as well. Right. >>Is this, is this jiving with what you see as the terms of the way they're positioning themselves and what you're hearing from your sources in the market? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, um, you know, given the trend that, you know, applications are going into the cloud, um, it makes sense to kind of pick up those, you know, those applications that are harder to virtualize, harder to move to the cloud and you know, find a way to bring them to the cloud as well. To bring that, I don't know, that cloud like experience for the older applications as well. Um, and then the other hand there's, you know, the simplicity of running the, um, the older desktops. Uh, the traditional VDI just likes to set, I mean, it's difficult to set up that whole environment to manage it, to make sure it continues to operate and then to have something that kind of replaces that with a simple solution. I mean, that's what customers are looking for. Yup. >>Nicola, I know some of the conversations I had years ago was, you know, it's not even desktop. It's, it's about my applications, it's about my users. It's about how things, things are changing. They're in today's world where have many customers who are trying to do SAS first. You know, how, how do you, I guess, reframe that conversation of, you know, what was, you know, we spent over a decade with that VDI discussion. Look, I think we're going to end up, when it comes to infrastructure and when it comes to virtualization, we're going to come ups where some somewhere in the middle where not everything's going to be public cloud and that everything's going to be on prem. It's going to be somewhere in the middle of when it comes to application delivery versus full desktops. It started obviously with app virtualization, but more and more people are looking at delivering full desktop solutions. >>There is a great benefit to it, consistent performance, um, you know, isolation and security or some things that come to mind and we are now able to deliver great performance. Look at windows 10, which is a big migration. We can deliver great windows 10 performance using Citrix or using frame and um, for example, some of the innovation that NVIDIA's bringing to market with a virtualizing GPS. So for the longest time it was a niche and as becoming more of a mainstream, if you just want your desktop to be scrolling smoothly, you'll probably need your GPU. So I think that's where a VDI and a simplicity of VDI, um, really takes over. >>So you are talking about speed and security. What about design? How does that play into it? >>Well, kind of Newtanics is all about, you know, data delivery, design and delight. And a, I think with end user computing, uh, it's end user for a reason. It's experienced by a user, it's experienced by an administrator, and at the end of the day, best user experience is going to win. So for administrators, if they can install their applications and manage them in one click, that's a great benefit. Then that's what we bring with combination of hybrid converged and a frame. Same goes for end user experience, um, as opposed to, let's say 10 years ago when everybody was in a wired network. Uh, these days people work from anywhere. They work from Starbucks, they work over and allows a seller a. So it's very important to have that user experience. Um, you know, uh, be delightful. And, um, that's something that we're very focused on. Yeah. I think I've had so many discussions this year about kind of the CX, the customer experience as well as the employee experience. So, you know, I would think that this whole EUC discussion ties it. What, what are you hearing from them and seeing out there? >>So, you know, the, the whole, the whole discussion about experience. Um, I think it's really important. I mean, employees have to do their job. They are given the tools to do the job, but sometimes the tools that are given or you know, slightly older, um, they may not be modern, they may not be web-based, they may not be performant or, so the issue is how do you, you know, in a very specific niche and a very specific use case, how do you make sure that the older application will actually continue running? Right? Um, how do you bring that, you know, windows application into a, um, into a framework where you can actually work with it everywhere on any device? Right. And that's, that's of where, where I see the, um, um, the wish for a good employee experience cannot be broken down by the technical technical limitations of what applications can do. Right. Um, and the issue is, you know, not every application is cloud native, not every, every application runs in the cloud. So you have to have something that kind of bridges that gap between, you know, on the one hand what you want to offer to the employee and the other hand what you're kind of forced to use in specific use cases. Um, there's just no other way than, you know, w using that old windows application. Yeah. >>Nicola, once again, I think back to some of the years of talking about VDI deployments and it was like up, well, organizationally, we're now off to have the desktop team versus the server team and the storage people need to get involved. And you brought a customer to come talk to the analyst yesterday and they didn't, they were like, we don't want to worry about any of this. We want to worry about our application, what's going on. So help, help explain a little bit, kind of some of the transformational potential of the new model. It's almost the same way we can hyper converged compute within storage and hypervisor. We're hyper converging all these different roles from the storage role to the it role to the business for all where to be honest, you don't need three separate people or three separate teams to do it. Um, solutions like, um, frame for example, make it possible to do that from a single pane of glass and to manage it all. So the customer that we had yesterday is doing that thing. Exactly. And it's not going even to there. It, um, in some cases, um, like, Oh customer we're going to have tomorrow Vodafone, uh, that is, they're on a hyperconverged still has lot more than what I'd call a legacy. It's 5,000 applications delivered to 50,000 concurrent users and they're just doing a new refresh shot. It's here to stay. VDI is here to stay. Yeah. What are >>you see as some of the biggest challenges facing companies like Nutanix? Um, particularly in this space? >>So, I mean, the biggest challenge is going to be integration, right? I mean Nutanix is becoming a big company. It's up to you, I don't know, 5,500 people. I think it's a big company. It's a lot of products that, you know, the portfolio is expanding. And so making sure that all of those solutions fit into the portfolio. And again, coming back to that experience, right? Um, so can candidates annex deliver a solution for many different problems within the data center and Indiana briars cloud without it seeming to be, you know, different products that are not integrated where the user experience is bad. I mean, we've all been there where you try to run a data center and you got bogged down with all of the details simply because the products that you use are not integrated. Um, so I think, you know, from, from any tannics perspective, making sure that everything's integrated and worked well with all of the other products in a portfolio, that's going to be the big challenge for the next year. You know, Nicola, we had Dera John this morning and he talked about those experiences. You know, customers shouldn't have >>Oh my gosh. You know, I looked on the slide and there's 30 different Nutanix products and I can't even spell all of them. Um, you know, uh, so, uh, tell us a little bit about, uh, you know, integrating frame through and making sure a desktop just becomes a, you know, a piece of that experience. The big switch for us as being thinking about solutions, not products for that same reason because there's so many products right now in a portfolio and end user computing or VDI has been one of the key solutions that we are focusing on in the next 12 and 24 mods. So would, that really means is that all the products are designed to work seamlessly. So it starts with your, um, hyper-converged, um, widths, um, Citrix as a broker, horizon as a broker, a frame as a broker, but it extends way beyond that. >>So talking about files, you obviously need your enterprise file server that is very, very seamlessly integrated with the end user computing solution. Same goes for flow. You can now have boundaries of who can access VMs or now we have identity based micro segmentation. Um, and then, uh, things like beam where you can seamlessly again have one-click integration and now how much is something costing you right now and how much the same workload would cost you if you ran it on prem or in a different cloud. So I think all of these things are designed to work seamlessly and we spend a ton of time, I mean literally a ton of time to get together with all the teams and to make sure that that user experience is as seamless as possible. >>So I want to go deeper into your past when at the age of 22, you helped lead a revolution that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. I want to know the lessons that you learned as a revolutionary and how and how you apply them to the technology industry today. I mean because there is a lot of, you know, move fast and break, which is what you were doing then. Yeah. >>Now also like, ah, I, I spoke to a group of executive last night and mentioned, um, uh, those times in the 90s. I grew up in Serbia where the rest of the world was going for dotcom. Boom. We were dealing with, um, um, basically Yugoslavia breaking apart and in 96, from, um, um, pretty anonymous student in the, in a crowds after Milosevic's stolen election, um, I became the leader of what was a very, uh, uh, natural, but also very attentive, um, movement. Uh, within four weeks I was sitting with him just like this, negotiating and negotiating with about a hundred thousand people yelling and screaming under his window, and he had to, um, reverse the results of his election fraud. It took another couple of years. Then we got rid of him. The lesson that I learned at a very young age and just, you know, things just happen was that if you do things in an authentic way, if you speak with conviction ed the right time, you know, there, there are no things that you can do. >>And that was probably the revolutionary spirit that Newtanics shares when I met Dhiraj that, uh, you know, everything's possible that incumbencies not are insurmountable. And that's what led me to move to the U S um, go to my grad school, get BHD start gobbling companies. And looking back, I'm in my mid forties right now. It's pretty crazy to looking at the odds and they'll, what it takes to build a company, make it successful and how risky that is. Just going through some of these experiences when I was in my early twenties, certainly helped me. And, um, I think we'll live in the day and age where the risk is probably overestimated and that we should probably all take more risk. Uh, in modern day and age, the gain is potentially very large and the risk is relatively small. >>Those are that, that's great. But then the timing is everything too >>thing. And I know there was, um, a fall of two 96 20 cup, 20 something years ago. And I remember, um, you know, the biggest lesson that I've learned, if we've done exactly the same thing and we've done it 10 times better six months before or six months after, it wouldn't happen. It was really the right moment and the right wave of underlying energy that if you serve that way the right way, you can move mountains. But it's really important to have a krill clear message to do it with conviction and to do it the right time. >>Right. So it's a little bit of luck, but then also the willingness to take a risk. Absolutely. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. You've and Nicola. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you both. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more coming up tomorrow from nutanix.next.

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Copenhagen, Denmark. 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 in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, hosting alongside Stu Miniman. We're joined by Fran Scott. She is a science and engineering presenter. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> No worries at all. It's good to be here actually. >> So you are a well known face to UK audiences. You are a three times BAFTA nominated science and engineering presenter. Well-known. >> Give her a winner. (laughter) >> You're the Susan Lucci of science. You are the pyrotechnician and you lead the Christmas lectures at the Royal Institute. >> Yeah. I head up the demonstration team at the Royal Institution. We come up with all the science demonstrations, so the visual ways to show the science ideas. I head up that team. We build the demonstrations and we show science to people rather than just tell them about it. >> So mostly, you have a very cool job. (chuckles) >> I love my job. >> I want to hear how you got into this. What was it? What inspired you? >> Oh gosh, two very different questions. In terms of what inspired me, I was very lucky enough to be able to pursue what I love. And I came from a family where answers weren't given out willy-nilly. If you didn't know something, it wasn't a bad thing. It was like a, "Let's look it up. Let's look it up." I grew up in an atmosphere where you could be anything because you didn't have to know what you had to be. You could just have a play with it. I love being hands-on and making things, and I grew up on a farm, so I was quite practical. But I also loved science. Went to university, did neuroscience at university. I enjoyed the learning part but, where I was in terms of the science hierarchy, I found out that once you actually go into a lab, there's a lot of lab work and not much learning straight away, and it was the learning that I loved. And so my friends actually got me into science communication. They took me to the science museum and they were like, "Fran, you will love this." And I was like, "Will I?" And I was like, "You are so right." I got a job at the science museum in London by just approaching someone on that visit and being like, "How do I get a job here?" And they were like, "Well, you got to do this, this, this." I was like, "I can do that." I got the job there and I realized I loved science demonstrations and building stuff. Eventually I just combined that love of science and being practical together. And now I produce and write, build science props and science stage shows. And then it became a thing. (laughter) Hand it to me, I love it. >> So Fran, our audience is very much the technology community. Very supportive of STEM initiatives. Give us a little flavor as to some of the things you're working on. Where is there need for activities? >> I suppose the biggest example of that would be a show that I did a few years ago where there was a big push for new coders within the UK. And I was getting approached time and time again for visual ways to show computer coding. Or programming, as we used to call it back in the day. I didn't have an answer because then, I wasn't a coder. So I was like, "Well, I'll learn. And then I'll figure out a demonstration because this is what I do. So why don't I do it on coding?" And so yeah, I set about. I learnt code. And I came up with an explosions based coding show. Error 404. And we toured around the country with that. Google picked it up and it was a huge success just because it was something that people wanted to learn about. And people were stumped as to how to show coding visually. But because this is what we do day in and day out with different subjects, we could do it with coding just like we do it with physics. >> What do you think is the key? A lot of your audience is kids. >> Yes and family audiences. >> So what is the key to getting people excited about science? >> I think science itself is exciting if people are allowed to understand how brilliant it is. I think some of the trouble comes from when people take the step too big, and so you'd be like, "Hang on but, why is that cool? Why?" Because they don't under... Well they would understand if they were fed to them in a way that they get it. The way I say it is, anyone can understand anything as long as you make the steps to get there small enough. Sometimes the steps are too big for you to understand the amazingness of that thing that's happening. And if you don't understand that amazingness, of course you're going to lose interest. Because everyone around you is going, "Ah, this is awesome, this is awesome!" And you're like, "What? What's awesome?" I think it's up to us as adults and as educators to just try and not patronize the children, definitely not, but just give them those little steps so they can really see the beauty of what it is that we're in awed by. >> One of the things that is a huge issue in the technology industry is the dearth of women in particular, in the ranks of technology and then also in leadership roles. As a woman in science and also showing little girls everywhere all over the UK what it is to be a woman in science, that's a huge responsibility. How do you think of that, and how are you in particular trying to speak to them and say, "You can do this"? >> I've done a lot of research onto this because this was the reason I went into what I'm into. I worked a lot of the time behind the scenes just trying to get the science right. And then I realized there was no one like me doing science presenting. The girl was always the little bit of extra on the side and it was the man who was the knowledgeable one that was showing how to do the science. And the woman was like, "Oh, well that's amazing." And I was like, "Hang on. Let's try and flip this." And it just so happened that I didn't care if it was me. I just wanted a woman to do it. And it just happened that that was me. But now that I'm in that position, one, well I run a business as well. I run a business where we can train other new presenters to do it. It's that giving back. So yes, I train other presenters. I also make sure there's opportunity for other presenters. But I also try, and actually I work with a lot of TV shows, and work on their language. And work on the combination of like, "Okay, so you've got a man doing that, you got women doing this. Let's have a look at more diversity." And just trying to show the kids that there are people like them doing science. There's that classic phrase that, "You can't be what you can't see." So yes, it comes responsibility, but also there's a lot of fun. And if you can do the science, be intelligent, be fun, and just be normal and just enjoy your job, then people go, "Hang on," whether they're a boy or a girl, they go, "I want a bit of that," in terms of, "I want that as my job." And so by showing that, then I'm hopefully encouraging more people to do it. But it's about getting out and encouraging the next generation to do it as well. >> Fran, you're going to be moderating a panel in the keynote later this afternoon. Give our audience a little bit. What brought you to this event? What's going into it? And for those that don't get to see it live, what they're missing. >> I am one lucky woman. So the panel I'm moderating, it's all about great design and I am a stickler for great design. As a scientist, prop-builder, person that does engineering day in and day out, I love something when it's perfectly designed. If there is such a thing as a perfect design. So this panel that we've got, Tobias Manisfitz, Satish Ramachandran, and Peter Kreiner from Noma. And so they all come with their own different aspect of design. Satish works at Nutanix. Peter works at Noma, the restaurant here in Copenhagen. And Tobias, he designs the visual effects for things such as Game of Thrones and Call of Duty. And so yes, they each design things for... They're amazing at their level but in such a different way and for a different audience. I'm going to be questioning them on what is great design to them and what frictionless design means and just sort of picking their amazing brains. >> I love that fusion of technology and design as something they talked about in the keynote this morning. Think of Apple or Tesla, those two things coming together. I studied engineering and I feel like there was a missing piece of my education to really go into the design. Something I have an appreciation for, that I've seen in my career. But it's something special to bring those together. >> Yeah. I think care is brought in mostly because yes, one, I love design. But also I've worked a lot with LEGO. And so I was brought in to be the engineering judge on the UK version of LEGO Masters. Apparently, design in children's builds is the same as questioning the owner of NOMA restaurant. (chuckles) >> So what do you think? Obviously you're doing the panel tomorrow. What is in your mind the key to great design? Because as you said, you're a sucker for anything that is just beautiful and seamless and intuitive. And we all know what great design is when we hold it in our hands or look at it. But it is this very ineffable quality of something that... >> So the panel's later today actually. But in terms of great design, yes, we all know when we have great design. But the trouble comes in creating good design. I think the key, and it's always obvious when you say it out loud, but it's that hand in hand partnership with aesthetics and practicality. You can't have something that's just beautiful. But you can't have something that just works. You need to have it as a mixture of both. It's those engineers talking with the designers, the designers talking with the engineers. The both of them talking with the consumers. And from that, good design comes. But don't forget, good design means they're for different people as well. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on, because you are a professional pyrotechnician. We've never had someone like this on theCUBE before. This is amazing. This is a first time ever. >> I was strictly told no fire. >> Yes, thank you. We appreciate that. >> Well at the moment, as I said at the beginning, I'm lucky enough to head up the demo team at the Royal Institution. We are just heading into our Christmas lectures. Now if you don't know these Christmas lectures, they were the first science ever done to a juvenile audience. Back in 1825 was when they started. It's a tradition in the UK and so this year, we're just starting to come up with the demonstrations for them. And this year they presented by Hannah Fry, and so they're going to be on maths and algorithms and how that makes you lucky or does it make you lucky? We've been having some really fun meetings. I can't give away too much, but there definitely be some type of stunt involved. That's all I can say. But there's going to be a lot of building. I really need to get back, get my sore out, get stuff made. >> Excellent. And who is the scientist you most admire? >> Oh my word. >> Living or dead? >> Who is the scientist I most admire? (sighs) I do have... Oh gosh, this is... >> The wheels are churning. >> It's a cheesy one though, but Da Vinci. Just for his multi-pronged approach and the fact that he had so much going on in his brain that he couldn't even get everything down on paper. He'd half draw something and then something else would come to him. >> I had the opportunity of interviewing Walter Isaacson last year, and he loved... It was the, as we talked about, the science and the design and the merging of those. But reading that biography of him, what struck me is he never finished anything because it would never meet the perfection in his mind to get it done. I've seen that in creative people. They'll start things and then they'll move on to the next thing and there. Me as a engineering by training, it's like no, no. You need to finish work. Manufacturing from standpoint, work in progress is the worst thing you could have out there. >> He would be a rubbish entrepreneur. (chuckling) >> Right, but we're so lucky to have had his brain. >> Exactly. I think that's the thing. I think it gives us an insight into what the brain is capable of and what you can design without even knowing you're designing something. >> Well Fran, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was so fun. >> Thanks for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of .NEXT. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark it's the CUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage of Nutanix.Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside, Stew Miniman. We're joined by Monica Kumar, she is the SVP product marketing at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on the Cube. >> Sure, thank you for having me, I really appreciate it. >> So the last time we met, we were in Anaheim at the last big Nutanix conference and you were fresh into the job, six weeks in, you (laughs) and now you're seven months in, this is after a 22 year career at Oracle. >> Yes >> So you're a tech veteran, but tell us a little bit about how it's going, what you've seen so far, why the opportunity appeal and if it's living up to what your expectations were. It's been an absolute adventure at Nutanix. It's been, actually it's going to be close to eight months now and it was a bit scary for me to take the plunge after 26 years in the tech industry, I've had a fulfilling career. But there was a, actually couple reasons why Nutanix was so appealing to me and it's been a fantastic ride so far. One was, this intense focus on providing technology that's so innovative, that it's geared to simplifying IT's live, and geared to its business outcomes. But there's a bigger goal for Nutanix, which really drew me to the company, which is this obsession with customer delight and providing outstanding customer experience. So here I am, almost eight months later, I'm living it, in the Nutanix world and hoping we're delighting customers as well as we go along. >> Monica, it's a very much a different company. I look at Oracle and Nutanix. Many of the Nutanix executives and team have background in Oracle, you know, Oracle, Software at its heart, and helped deliver one of the stickiest applications in Enterprise as well as a role in IT, I mean the DBA is there. Lot of discussion here at the show here about moving from the discussion of HyperConverge to HyperCloud. Give us your thought as to where you see your customers, today, kind of the state of the industry, and where you see Nutanix fitting in going beyond Hyperconverge into the broader Cloud discussion. >> Yeah I think that's a great question to set up the context. If I think about companies like Oracle, Nutanix, and some of the larger software companies that been around for a while, there's a lot of commonality, I think, between them, right. One is catering to enterprise customers, so even the Nutanix is only 10 years old, I was surprised as to how many big global 2000 companies, big brands actually use Nutanix today. So we've actually almost been born in the enterprise and now we expanding out to the commercial space. So by that what I mean is, when you're born in the enterprise, you know how important data centers are to our customers. They've invested huge amounts, in some cases billions of dollars to create these fully functional data centers that are hosting all the applications and data and all the business critical databases in the data center. And now, they're trying to figure out how do they bring agility and flexibility and speed while preserving all this investment made in the data centers. So I think from that perspective, we very much understand it's about helping our customers who've built big data centers on premises to bring Cloud agility to those customers, whether it's on premises or in public Cloud, and actually the combination of both is where hybrid comes in. >> So what is the status of things, in terms of where are most companies at right now, would you say. >> Yeah, interestingly, we've run a number of surveys and in 2018 when we ran the survey around HybridCloud, 86 percent of the survey respondents said that's the IT model they would prefer because they can exponentially enhance the computing resources, they can actually without investing money in wheeling in servers and storage and space and pulling, they can actually advance and expand the stack where they can deploy applications, right. So it's the most preferred IT model, however, there's lots of issues in making it a reality. And I think we can talk about that. Almost 70 percent said they would love to make it a preferred model, but they are unable to deploy it because of multiple reasons. >> Yeah, it's interesting when I think of what I've heard from customers for years and years, you go talk to IT and they say, "I don't have enough headcount, I don't have enough money," "I can't keep up." Yet, some of the new deployment models, Oh my gosh, you're going to put me out of a job, you know, I won't be able to do anything it's like, wait I thought you didn't have time to do any of the things you want to do and didn't have enough money. If we could make it easier, if some of the pieces could be invisible or just handled, you could go work on all of those other projects that you've been wanting to. How is Nutanix helping customers through kind of that transition to, as you said, they want agility, they want choice, they need to be able to have IT be a participant with, if not a driver for the business. >> Yes, you know, if you think about in the last decade, IT has been very focused on infrastructure modernization or what we call data center modernization. So whatever we have, we want to make it simple, cut costs so it's most efficient, and I think that's a great initiative to embark on, but it's almost very inside, inward-centric. It's about how do I make my life easy, make myself more productive, cut costs in my work. I think if we turn it around to customer delight and IT wanted to delight the customers, and really focus on becoming a service organization, that's when things start changing because now we are talking about consumerization of IT. In our lives, we all are so used to delight, our smartphone response as soon as we click something or swipe something, we get the answers. There're lots of things in life that have changed where it's instant gratification in a way, and I think companies are also asking and demanding that of IT. It's like hey if I want IT resources, I want it right away. So I think IT as an organization is changing and really focusing more on becoming a service organization and delighting their customers and that's where automation comes in. That's where cutting down all the manual tasks, which a machine or a robot or software can do, so the human being can focus on what's more important to them, what's more strategic, and I think that's where having and choosing the right platform comes in, so that IT can provide more resilient services and really provide services at the speed the business is demanding. So to me, I think that's where companies like Nutanix come in, where we can help IT become that service organization. >> So when you're talking about this evolution of IT, I mean, what does that mean for the skills that become the in-demand skills, what does that mean for how IT is placed within an organization and how it interacts with other functions, I mean how does this change really manifest itself. >> Yeah, and I think to your point as well too, I think IT has to become a change agent, no longer can IT just be in a supporting role and just help advance the business because I think now businesses are realizing that if they don't delight customers, they can't really grow. They won't stay competitive, so IT has to become the change agent to use technology to advance and grow the business, and I think from that perspective, if you look at IT admins, Cis admins, storage admins, data administrators, all of them need to start thinking about what is the next level of skillset, which makes me become more of a dev-ops or a data-ops person, or an IT-ops person. As it was to simply just administering something, simply badgering provisioning is not good enough anymore. There needs to be some element of programming, some element of continuous delivery and some element of bridging the gap between a public and private cloud solution, where apps can run on both places, where data can be in both places. So we do want the IT skillsets to evolve in a way that they can become more cloud engineers in my opinion, as opposed to staying administrators. >> Yeah, Monica, I had a great discussion with a customer earlier in the show, and he said that customers what we used to do in IT is follow the rules and what I don't want you doing in the future is following the rules, I want you to try things, I want you to try to break things and they felt that Nutanix was a platform that enabled them to be able to do that. >> Yes, absolutely, I think IT is in such a powerful position today to drive change, and really by uplevelling the skills, the IT administrators would realize they become more strategic to the organization but they even have better job prospects for themselves like individually right. I think they can do so much better in their career as well. >> Yeah, there's the great line that the executives say: what if we train our people up on new stuff and they leave, and the response is what if we don't and they stay. (laughs) >> Yes, I totally agree. >> The danger. So in terms of this evolution of IT as a functional unit in an organization and also as a human being who just works in the industry. We're talking about all these changes. How is it also changing the way organizations work? Do you know what I'm saying, in the sense of how is this evolution of IT driving change in the workplace. >> Absolutely, I think some of the old sidewalls are breaking. Just let's use Nutanix as an example when we first came out with a hybrid on which infrastructure solution, we broke the sidewalls between compute storage and virtualization. You know there was >> Altogether now. >> Yeah, exactly all together now, exactly. So there was either sys-admin, storage admins, already with using hybrid conversions, they started to work together. Now more-so, as dev-ops becomes, like I said you know, it's dev-ops , AI-ops, IT-ops, data-ops, I think we're going to start to seeing the organizations merging almost, right, and maybe there won't be a need for having a separate DBA versus a separate storage admin, versus a separate sys-admin. Maybe we are going to a place where it's going to be dev-ops or some ops, you know, all ops. That organization that's going to help create the platform for apps and data working together because the technology will be so seamless and so simple to actually use that they can focus on the process that they need to create with the organization to deploy the technology and benefit from it. >> Monica, since you've now been at the company almost eight months, I'm wondering if there's anything now being on the inside that you've learned that you'd say, Gee I wish more people on the outside understood this about Nutanix. >> Yes, absolutely I think the one thing which I knew coming in, but you don't really realize it 'till you actually realize it, and you internalize it, it really is the intense focus we have on customer success. I mean we live and breathe by that, every single person from executive level down and I give you a very small example. About two months ago, I got an email, this random email from somebody saying, "Hey I just bought Nutanix" "last week and I'm having some issue" "and I just saw you joined Nutanix, you know," "I want to reach out to you." At first, I thought hm, but I responded and I said, "Well I'm glad you reached out to me." "Is there anybody you're working with at Nutanix?" And turns out he was working with some channel partners and somebody he gave me a name. Within 24 hours, we had done enough trouble-shooting and trying to figure out what the problem was. I reached back out to him saying, you can get the part that you need, and within 48 hours he had a spot and he emailed me saying, "Thank you so much", and by the way this was a really small customer in terms of the size of the opportunity that we had, but it doesn't matter to us. Every customer counts, and every customer's success is paramount to us. >> So all hands on deck kind of base-- >> It is all hands on deck kind of thing, yep, so I can say, to me, even though I knew going into it that that's a Big Four philosophy, but to live it, it's a totally different level. >> Great, well Monica thank you so much and congrats on the new job. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, first Stew Miniman, stay tuned on more of the Cube's live coverage of .Next. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Copenhagen, Denmark, it's theCUBE. Covering Nutanix.Next 2019. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of .Next Copenhagen Nutanix. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We're joined by Craig Routledge, he is the vice president HPE GreenLake Sales. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, good afternoon. >> So why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit about HPE and GreenLake. >> So HPE is the part of the old HP empire that's focused specifically on the hybrid computing world. So in the data sensors, the hybrid cloud world, and the edge and we're providing technology and services to our customers and our channel partners. And will continue to do so. And the announcement that we've made this week here in Copenhagen, is the announcement of GreenLake for Nutanix. >> So I'm not sure how much of our audience is very familiar with it. I've got plenty of experience with the various HP cloud initiatives over the years. But this is you know, at it's core, as a service as my understanding and help us understand where that fits in a customers over all kind of cloud portfolio. >> Yeah if you kind of take it back to the go back to real basics, actually almost before cloud. The customers access HP technology and infrastructures through capital purchase, through leasing, and some cases through subscription models, as the industry calls them. And then GreenLake was born about nine years ago in fact to help customers match cost to revenue. So it's a pay-per-use model. And that's where it was originally born. Before really the cloud was almost it was kind of around but not really in any scale. And then over the years, we've adapted GreenLake to be the private cloud solution for many direct customers then for channel customers, for service providers and partners. And now we've added the Nutanix partnership as well which, we've been announced as being ready for sale today onstage. Which is great timing by my engineering team I'm pleased to say. They were up late last night finishing it off. So its gradually evolving but were not just doing the private world, we're increasingly working in an environment where the equipment is installed in a colo. But it's still dedicated to that customer. Its not a shared service. And we're also increasingly, through out analytics portal, connecting to the public cloud world. So we've announced we have significant partnerships with the public cloud providers. And we can meter and monitor the customers usage in that solution. So we can provide a single tool set that gives them the private cloud usage and who's using it, and connect them to the public cloud world so they can get the same functionality in the pubic cloud. So they can see how much our marketing department are spending on computing storage, and networking and virtualization et cetera. >> It's a very different way for customers to think about it and many ways it should become more natural. If I got it right, I heard you say, its by the VM, or the container or by a certain flash increment. Maybe explain that a little bit? And you know, when and where would a customer say, "Oh well I need an increment of something that underneath "has Nutanix." >> Ah well it's interesting, you make in interesting point there actually. It is about customers buying work clothes, its the same way you buy a film on Netflix, or you buy a series or you might choose to buy episodes two, three, five, ten and 12 but not the whole book effectively. Not the whole library. And you buy that by the units of measure. So in Netflix, its a video or something. In the GreenLake world, its by virtual machine, at the VRAM level effectively. It could be by container, so it's the actual kubernetes container level. It can be at the gigabyte of high performing storage level. So we've disconnected the linkage between infrastructures. So the customer doesn't choose that infrastructure. The customer gives us a workload, and then we specify how that workload is designed. We have some recommended architectures. We're just about to launch the second dissertation of our quoting tools, so that a customer can get a quote on their smartphone, or our sales people in the pilot stages will be able to produce a quote on the phone. Now when that moves into operation, its our service team that are monitoring the customers usage 24 by seven. We own the metering and the management technologies. So we can snapshot the customers usage in their infrastructure environment, as often as we need to. So on Black Friday, you can guarantee we snapshot every retail customer in our portfolio at least every 30 minutes. And if there's a financial services crisis, as various presidents pick a fight with a global trade war. Share prices bounce up and down >> Not naming names. >> And dollars go in different directions and the RMB goes you need to meter the usage very rapidly, very accurately, and very often. And that's what our metering technology does. Now the service part of this, is not only do we kind of make sure that's all running 24 by seven, part of our service is to do the capacity management for the customers. So we take that responsibility off them. And if we think that the portal is telling us and the intelligence built into the portal, and into the experienced service managers saying, "You need an upgrade, we need to upgrade this piece." Then we can produce a change control note, one or two days, sign it, and then we can get some more infrastructure capacity rolled in of the chosen architecture for that customer. >> Just describing what you were saying about the retailers on Black Friday, and then watching the currency fluctuate based on whatever our world leaders are tweeting about. How has this in your mind changed the way the business world works today? Just the fact that we can see all this information this real time data. >> Its changed the speed and I think it it's the change of speed at which companies like ourselves have got to operate. And I think it's changed the speed at which the IT teams inside the end customers got to operate. And they get, I think they probably got the harder job than we have. An IT manager in an organization these days, not only has to watch those macro factors, the dollar going up and down, Britain finally sorts out its position on Brexit, we won't go into that one. And the IT team have got to look at that and see the impact on the business. But they also got to cope with the very rapidly changing environment. And a whole user base, I mean I don't know if any of you I presume you had to download the app on your smart phones. You press it, and if it doesn't download in three seconds, you're going, "Is something wrong here?" and that level of expectation in terms of the delivery of new application requests, is inherent in the user base now. Particularly the younger people are coming through in the wave of early stage employees and our customers. They expect instant gratification almost. They want a new app. They're a bit vague about how they want it to run, but they want it today. Now. And they want to pay a low volume price per click basis. So that's kind of, we're partly reacting to many of those trends. Part of our solution is in fact we provide, if we think the initial sizes, lets just say we need 500 Vms. Or we need 400 Nutanix and GreenLake licenses. We always provide a buffer. And in the early stage, lets say its 20 percent buffer. And that gives the customer some overflow room. So not only when we provision above their utilization but without a buffer to de-risk it for them. At our risk. And that's to make sure the service is seamless. And that's something that IT departments are not used to. But it matches the expectation of the internalized, I call them the IT consumers really, in business. Or customers of a bank. You know you dial your bank up on your app and you want to know what your balance is. And if you want to move money from that account to that account, you want it to go straight away. But I had a chasting experience on Sunday. My bank, they've got the app is online on Sunday. But they don't move money on the weekends. Am I'm like what? (chuckles) That was a bit stunning. And so my expectation is fueled by this kind of instant society that we live in. Yeah. >> So its order able now? >> Craig: Yes. Its order able now, we finished it >> Available? >> Available within 30 days. I mean, we think we'll have it available by the end of the month for delivery. >> Great and from a customer standpoint, will the customer be asking for Nutanix GreenLake? How does it, how do you give them the decision tree or is it a customer saying, " I wanted Nutanix." >> We have some people that are far more technically oriented than I am, technically literate than I am. We have some pre sales specialists inside the Nutanix team and inside the HP team. And we have some sizing tools as well to help us. So if the customer comes to us and says they want a particular workload, because we've expanded the choice, if they are talking to HP we'll look at what's the right solution. And if its Nutanix, then we use the Nutanix pre sales teams to help us. And that seems to be a very popular message in the marketplace. And is resonating very well. So we're helping the customer make a choice and obviously in a indirect motion, the partners will be helping the customer make that choice. And then coming us to, they'll specify the technology solution and they'll come to us with a specification. We'll turn that into a detailed specification. And a detailed cost and contract. >> So just GreenLake has been around for nine years now is this the first HCI based offering in the GreenLake portfolio? >> We've been working on the, we've had GreenLake on SimplyVity, which is the HP owned HCI solution. Two and a half, maybe three years now. And very successfully, its working very well in a few large cases. But it works different it works at a different level with different scaling parameters. So this is actually, the Nutanix partnership, and the reason why the two CEO's were excited, was this gives the customer another choice. And it gives them another choice other than the default virtualization engine, which everybody uses. And it also brings in the Nutanix expertise in end user computing, they call it VDI as I would call it. But that expertise and in the database world, it brings their expertise in that space is very valuable to us. So it augments our portfolio, and it brings two solutions to them. Not just the GreenLake solution, pay per use solution. But it also bring the proven HP server technology into their appliance portfolio. >> And the alignment on the optionality ] is really what is also driving this. >> Yes. And it is, we're both genuinely believe in customer choice in options. If the customer only got one choice, A: you've only given what the customer one choice and you might win or might lose, but you're going to have a resentful customer. If the customer says they want to go with HP and we only give them one choice, or can only give them one choice. Doesn't make for a long term relationship. And certainly I think both companies, HP clearly we believe having you know, lifetime we value a customer for its lifetime relationship with us. So its very important that we offer the customer choice, then narrow down to the right solution, refine that solution and draw it up into a contract. >> Excellent, so it's the right choice. Craig Routledge you are now a Cube alum. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage from .Next.

>> 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)

>> 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)

>> 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)

(news theme music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to theCube's preview of Nutanix.next London 2018. Happy to welcome back to the program two friends of the program, Julie O'Brien who's the Senior Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Sunil Potti who's the Chief Product and Development Officer, both of Nutanix. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, it's great to be here again. >> Alright, so, we've been there since day one. I was actually, just recently down at the Fontainebleau in Miami reliving one of my favorite sets that we did. It was beautiful Miami colors, which match the bright green and blue of Nutanix with theCube. I've been to every single one of em. You have. The European version, which is the third year. We did Vienna. We did Nice. And now London. So Julie, start us in as what we can expect this year. >> Sure, we actually just finished our .next tour in APJ in the Americas. We were from Beijing to Boston. Over 20,000 registrants and 44 cities. So, now we're coming off of that and heading into the conference, which is our multi-day event. First time being in London for the multi-day conference. We have a great lineup of speakers. From a main stage perspective, Bear Grylls. Who you may be familiar with. "Man vs. Wild" He's a well known survivalist. I'm sure he'll have tips to connect what we survive every day in technology with what he survives in the wilderness. We're going to have Jane Goodall joining us. Renowned anthropologist. She's giving back to conservation. A phenomenal woman who's going to be on stage with me in a fireside chat. Cannot wait for that. Anna Alex from a startup in Berlin, called Outfittery. We always like to bring in some fun, interesting companies from the region. They're actually using a mashup of AI with their clothing business, to figure out how to dress elegant professionals, such as yourselves, with all of the right clothing items. So she should be a lot of fun. And then I did want to share something really special today. There's breaking news that we haven't shared anywhere else yet on one of our new main stage speakers. For those of you who are football fans, this gentleman was one of the top performing German national football team members, when he played. And his name is Michael Ballack. So, he'll be joining us and we're really excited about that. For all the Germans out there, hopefully they'll be thrilled. >> We'll do some light juggling on the keynote. (Julie laughs) >> One of the things I always love about this show is customers always want to expand their horizons, learn new products, get to know what they have even better, help their job, but also expand your mind some. You've had some great thought leaders on the program. I've had the opportunity of interviewing some of them on theCUBE, which is great. Authors I've read. Professors that you read their research. Thought leaders in the space. It's always fun. But, the main reason most people go to Sunil is to learn about the solutions that they have, learn about some of the cool new stuff, and you're always well dressed on stage, and helping the customers understand where things are today and where they're goin. So what can they expect from you? >> I think this time around, just like prior times, is going to be a bit of the continuation of the journey, which is what is practical about the company, is that the vision continues to be consistently evolving. In a sense that we've embarked on this two-part re-architecture of the enterprise cloud. And in the first act it was all about converging various silos of infrastructure. We called it the Invisible Infrastructure Era. And then we believe, and you'll see a lot of this in .next London, is that a little more light around the reality that we are on the cusp of the world of many clouds. From going from the world of many silos of infrastructure to the world of many clouds. And a lot more depth of products, beyond what we've done in the first act around invisible infrastructure transforming to invisible clouds, is what's going to be the underpinning of the keynote. >> You bring up something we've been watching at a lot of the shows and in our research, cloud was supposed to be, many people thought it's going to be simple and and it's going to be inexpensive, and what we've found is that it's often neither of those. We live in a multi-cloud world. Absolutely. The question I have for many users is, how did you get there? Was it by choice? Do you have a good plan and who's going to help you get your arms around things or have we recreated, through multiple clouds and applications everywhere, the silos that we were trying to collapse in our data centers before? >> And I think some of this is also going to be, just like in any problem-solving, define the problem well is 50% of the solution. So in some cases, in the world of multi-cloud, one of the things that we've had to give some time and it's right of passage, is to really characterize, when we say multi-cloud, most people think it's just public and private. So it's to really characterize the problem of the multiple clouds, or the multi-cloud era, actually is a construct of many public clouds, but the "private cloud" is becoming increasingly more dispersed or distributed. All the way into the remote office branch offices. But also all the way into what we are calling the edge. Part of what we're going to be talking about is a pretty reasonable understanding of how we've seen some of our early customers templatize their different kinds of clouds and then overlay the solution, to say it's not one size fits all, but you need, from an operational perspective, at least, something that can be a single control play. >> You're absolutely right. If you follow the applications and you follow the data, it's becoming even more dispersed. I remember the early days when I first spoke to Dheeraj, it was, oh are we taking a bunch of boxes and collapsing it? And what it came down to is the premise is the challenge of our time is software for distributed architectures. Five years ago we weren't talking about edge computing and IOT and all those things, but that's following along those trends. >> And I think one of the core technical themes you're going to see is that the last ten years of cloud has been about the era of scaling out. And that's proven now and there's more to be done. I think to really fulfill this next ten years, you're going to see this thematic view of scaling in. Especially when you scale small, which is a different art than scaling out, to some extent. Especially if you want to solve problems at the edge, you want to do it consistently, so that you can actually follow the app, as the apps transform. Some of these newer architectural paradigms have to be understood. So that's going to be an underlying theme there. >> And edge computing, we know, is a really hot topic amongst our customers and this year we're going to have an API accelerator lab. So in New Orleans we had a hackathon, now we're going to do it a little bit differently. This is going to be really focused on giving people an opportunity to get their hands involved in our IOT product, along with some nooks as well. So it should be a lot of fun for people. This is a great area and it is a great application for that multi-cloud, distributed edge kind of environment. >> Great, so November 27th through 29th, in London. We're going to have two days of theCUBE, of course go to thecube.net and watch the program. Nextconf has always been the hashtag. I want to give you both the final takeaways, what people should tune into, other than, of course, watching your keynotes and theCUBE coverage. >> I think you'll see a lot on social media, hopefully to stay involved with all of the innovation that we're going to be announcing. You're going to hear a lot from the breakout sessions. People will be tweeting from those sessions. We have more than 60 breakout sessions across a range of topics, for people that are in different phases of their journey with us. Whether it's just hyperconverged infrastructure, whether it's blockchain, whether it's IOT and they're starting to think about the multi-cloud hybrid environment too. So there's going to be a lot of great information coming out of the events. Sunil? >> I think you covered it all, but in general there's going to be a lot of cool stuff, both people-wise, as well as technology-wise. But I think, hopefully, the common theme that every body will participate in is this construct of this whole Nutanix-vibe of dreaming big, acting fast, and having fun. >> Okay, good. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. And also breaking news, we're actually going to have a first on the program. We've got my first European cohost for a multi-day event, Joep Piscaer, who's cube alumn, been on a couple of times. And what I'm actually looking for our audience, I'd like to do my first non-english interview on theCUBE. Joep is fluent in Dutch. He's going to be taking the train into London. I would love to be able to do a short segment, preferably a user, but would welcome a thought leader, a partner, or somebody in there to be able to. As we've expanded our coverage, we did our first Chinese event last year. We've done many in Europe. We did our first Middle East show in Bahrain just a couple of weeks ago. So look for that. Like Nutanix, we're all over the globe with what we've done. Julie and Sunil, thank you so much. For Stu Miniman, once again, thank you for watching theCUBE. (news theme music)