>> Announcer: Live, from Anaheim, California, it's theCUBE, covering Nutanix .NEXT 2019, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Nutanix .NEXT here in Anaheim, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, John Furrier. We are so excited to welcome back to the program, Dheeraj Pandey, the co-founder/CEO and Chairman of Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Thank you for pronouncing my name diligently. >> You are welcome. >> John: Gotta work on that. >> So, Dheeraj, it was a poignant moment in the keynote when you got up there with many of the people who were sort of employee number one, two, and three, four at Nutanix. They are the builders, the dreamers, the visionaries, the innovators, the disruptors of this company, a company that you started. So I'd love you to just start out by reflecting a little bit on your journey and sort of how Nutanix has evolved. >> Yeah, I mean it's a poignant 10 years, you know. The moment itself is poignant and it brought a lot of nostalgia, you know, for just looking at the early folks and how we had to huddle together in the smallest of technical blips that you'd find in our thesis, because our thesis was very bold. It was, like, hey, we can put a lot of hardware into your software. It's, like, the way Apple would say, we'll get rid of the camera and make it into an app. Like, what? There's no need for a camera anymore. So that's what we had to do with data center infrastructure. So, those moments are memorable, they're etched in history and my memory, and every time you get a tough moment now, we actually invoke a lot of those tough moments from the past and say, look, the more things change, the more they remain the same. >> The beautiful thing about theCUBE, is our 10th year as well, we've been following your journey as well. We actually have soundbites of the early interviews, and one of the things I was always impressed with you guys was you stayed the course, you didn't waver on what was fashionable at the time. HCI was an early category. You were misunderstood at the beginning and then the numbers started to show and you guys built a great business. But now, you're 10 years old, you're public. All the numbers are out there. You gotta go the next level. This is your challenge with the team. What's the focus? What's the strategy? What's the marching orders for the team now, as you go past 10 years old? You got competitive pressure. There's marketplace. The numbers are there. It's a big piece of the pie there. >> Yeah. You know, I go back to everything I just said in my last answer as well. The more things change, the more they remain the same. The friction hasn't changed. Five years ago we were a much smaller brand. We didn't have a customer base. We didn't have money in the bank and we still had to keep raising money to fund ourselves. Today, we are running this business, spending, you know, a billion dollars every year now. But it's a free cash flow neutral business, and we have told the Street that we gonna keep running it like that, but just go back to the basics. The basics of this company are what made it come to here. The same basics will need to take it from here to the next 10 years. 10 years is the new zero. I mean, I said, look, we've reset the clock and it's a very metaphorical thing to say, but it's the new zero for us, you know. So going back to the basics are the three Ds I talked about. Data, we are greater data. And we continue to be amazing at data. Reliable, highly available, high performance data management. A greater design. You know, just making things simple, and we're really really really good at delivery and when we suck at it, we go and improve and are very resilient in delivering things, you know, so whenever some things falter within our customer success, customer service, the way we delivering things with your software and subscription, I think nobody can touch us in these three Ds. >> As you guys have proven a great loyalty, customer basis, very loyal on the product. As you have to go multi-cloud, as the Enterprise gets modernized, this is a big part of your current business. What are some of the things that you're looking at, in terms of these new products? Because you don't want to open the door up for either a competitor or a misfire on you guys. You gotta continue to provide product leadership. >> Well, the most important thing is honesty and vulnerability. The fact that these things are not awesome big products yet, but they are awesome nonetheless. So how do you really have the small wins? You know, I go back in time to, Look, it took 10 years for Amazon Prime to become Primetime. It took six years for YouTube to even start to figure out who YouTube is really gonna be, and you know, Google bought Writely, which was the company that became Google Docs. Five years, they didn't know what they were doing with those things, so what's really important for the new products is this long-term greed. You know, the fact that you really have this 10 year view of a multi-product portfolio, but the most important thing is how they gell well together, how they really integrate well together, because if we don't integrate these products, and we just throw it out as things, as opposed to an experience. Customers are, like, I can buy things from Best of Breed. So how do you really make these multi-product look like an experience is where the real Nutanix design value is actually shown. >> One of the things that you guys have a good customer reaction to is the simplicity and how you can integrate well and reduce all these manual tasks, which is, people talk about automation and everything, but you guys have customers saying, "I went from 24 racks to six. "I now run everything with the push of a button. "Not there yet with the one-click but pretty close." That sounds like the multi-cloud game right now, where it is kinda hodge-podge. No one's actually figured out how to bring it all together and orchestrate it. >> That's the money statement, John. That's where the money is. Complexities where we go in and really figure out how to really save money for our customers, make money for our partners and make money for ourselves. >> And the partner-side, HPE, a big announcement that you guys have been part of. They're gonna be coming on today. How's that going? Give us the update on the HPE. >> You know, the energy levels are high, but there's a bell curve of people, you know. You can't have everybody really be an innovator, an early adopter. We're looking for innovators and early adopters. Some great discussions happening with HP account managers. They're our account managers of very large accounts, and the word-of-mouth has to basically play its powerful game actually. >> I wanna ask you about innovation. Earlier, on a CUBE conversation, you talked with our own John Furrier, and you said, we disrupt ourselves, but you also just talked about these products being these sort of long-term play and really thinking about what the, more of a holistic view of what the customers need. I wanna hear about the Nutanix innovation process and sort of how you have kept that culture of a tech start-up now that you are a company with a market cap in the multiple billions. >> You know, as I said before, we are like a billion dollar start-up, you know. And it's not easy, because everybody wants you to grow up, like, behave and grow up, and I saw one of my slides in there taking real potshots of the sand and we haven't changed much, you know. So in many ways, we're reminding everybody that it's still Day Zero and Day One. Is the great cultural gravitas that we need to keep, retained in the business, actually, in the company? You know, having the kind of humor that we had, and you know, keeping it personal and personable with everybody, as opposed to, you know, stiff upper lip, and suits and mahogany tables and corner offices. Those are things that are the antithesis of what Nutanix is. And just keeping it humble, you know. Like, the fact that even though we have layers of management in the middle, how do you go six levels deep and really have a conversation as technical as you wanted it to be and as business incisively as we want it to be? And you know, there's a lot of things you can do by going six levels deep that otherwise were not possible if you just said, look, I just talked to my next level action team, and to us, that's the engine of innovation. >> And how is your leadership changed? >> I have a new customer called Wall Street. >> That's true. >> 'Cause you know, they buy my product. It just happens to be a retail product that you folks can buy, too. It's called NTNX, the ticker. So I have Main Street customers and then I have Wall Street as a customer, and I need to figure out where to really keep them balanced, because I sell products to both of them, and it's a journey. You know, it's never easy, because there's a customer that actually wants instant success. There's another customer that says we are with you for the long haul, and what I need to find in this Wall Street customer is the ones who are actually for the long haul. My leadership, actually, is about balancing the two together. >> So let's talk about the Wall Street thing for a second, because I think that's interesting. You've always said to me, you're gonna play the long game and you do. We've kinda proved that, but Wall Street, they're very short sighted right? So the earnings come out, you gotta deal with the shot clock, as a public company. As you go to Wall Street, how are they looking at the long game? Because there's major examples. Microsoft stock's at an all-time high. They were in the 20s a few years ago. Cloud obviously is validated, so you got a cloud vision, this cloud marketplace. You're in the core enterprise, which has been revitalized with private cloud. Again, proves your thesis originally. So you're in good position and you got the cloud game right there. What are they missing? What's Wall Street missing? >> I think the biggest thing is that in any transformation is actually messy. Look at all the transformations in the last 20 years. The good thing is that those that took the tough call of transforming themselves, they really have done well, you know. And this is not just Microsoft alone, but Adobe, where I sit on the board. There is Autodesk and there is Parametric PTC and Cadence and many many other companies that have gone through this transition of getting out of the box to being software and subscription actually, and that's the journey that we said we couldn't punt and postpone 'cause we wanna be a hybrid cloud company. How can we not have subscription on prem? If subscription is gonna be the off prem, it has to have on prem subscription as well. And I think it requires communication, constant communication, watch, don't be stupid, with Wall Street as well. >> Well, Wall Street likes those valuations. If you look at the SaaS companies, or subscription-based companies, their valuations are really on a multiple, much higher than, >> I mean, look, valuation, to me, is not an end in itself. If you do it right by Main Street, I think this Wall Street thing will take care of itself. >> Awesome. On the long game with your innovation, I gotta ask you about how you're gonna look at the partnerships and integrating in, because the competitor out there in the middle of the room there is VMware and Dell Technologies. They want to go end-to-end and they want to own everything end-to-end. You guys are taking a different approach. Could you share your competitive strategy in terms of how you guys are different than that, because you're partnering? You're competing in a different way. >> Yeah, as we go into becoming a bigger company and yet, having a real child-like brain, I think it's important, really, that we are in this cooperative world and every competitor is also a company we cooperate with. Look, I mean, we run on top of VMware and more than half our customers still use VMware underneath us. We are an app on their platform. So we are a platform company. We are also an app company and our platform should run all apps and our apps should run on all platforms and that's the way we look at it. That's the reason why Microsoft is relevant again, 'cause they're still looking at, rather than a single stack strategy, how do you really look at yourselves as living two lives actually, you know? And to compete, you just have to go back to the three Ds I talked about. If you just keep doing a really good job of data, disrupting the biggest hardware players out there in data, and be really really good with design and elegance and friction-less delivery, I think we'll be in good shape. >> One of the compliments that the analysts on theCUBE always pay to you, Dheeraj, is that you have a really good sense of the wave. You really know which way the technological and economic winds are blowing. I wanna know, what do you read? Who do you talk to? What signals are you paying attention to? Or is it just this innate sense you have that the rest of us can't hope to ever achieve? >> Well, thank for that compliment, first of all. I'm honored. But I just have this simple mantra which is, the more things change, the more they remain the same. So I bring a lot of things from my consumer life because I read a lot about consumer life and I have a little bit of an artist in me and even though I am supposed to be a geek, I was telling somebody I was trying to recruit the other day that, look, I'm really, at heart, an artist, more so than an engineer, and I think a lot of what you see in this conference and this company and the product portfolio, it's really the empathy for the other side. You know, that really brings out a lot of the innovation, and obviously, I don't innovate alone, but the people that are with us in this company, I just try to tell them about the empathy that I invoke for everybody else and I read a lot of history, I'm a big history buff, and not just the last 30 years of IT, which I invoke a lot, but I'm deep into, like, the history of humans, you know. Like, last two weeks, I spent a lot of time reading about Neanderthals and the hybrid Neanderthals with humans, modern humans, and there's another ones that they found in these caves of Denisova. They call Denisovans, you know. So I read a lot of history and that gives me a lot of perspective and a lot of courage and I bring a lot of those things into this new life, that's again, as I said, it's the same as the old one, with some new color. >> You're an entrepreneur. That's what entrepreneurship is all about. What entrepreneurial thing are you working on right now? 'Cause I've known, You've gotta have your hands in some new things. What's the new entrepreneurial thinking or project that you're taking on? >> Well, the one that is very interesting one for operating a business is Capital Allocation, and it's a difficult one because you have to, basically, be somebody who really balances content and delivery, you know, and content is products and delivery is go to market, and when you go to market, it's marketing and sales. So as a company, we were tested in the last nine months to really understand Capital Allocation. I'm a big fan of the book, The Outsiders. I just read this probably a year ago, and you could see that there was some themes in The Outsiders about running the business on free cash flow, which is nothing new. It's not like Amazon invented it. They've been doing it for those 40, 50 years. Second one is Decentralized Decision Making. The third one is a really good capital allocation. So as an entrepreneur, I'm learning to actually understand what it means to decentralize decision making, and do a really good job of capital allocation, and finally, go and tell the Street about why free cash is the way to run a business as opposed to profitability and a gap way, because a lot of our dollars are sitting in the balance sheet, and they aren't in the P&L. So I think really running the business where growth matters, which is about free cash flow, about making sure that we can really create more CEOs in the company, independent decision making, and finally, this idea that you want to run this business as if it was a bunch of businesses, actually. >> Great. >> Awesome. >> One of the things you keep talking about in this interview is balance. You're balancing the needs of Main Street and Wall Street, the needs of your cloud customers, the needs of your employees, while also growing this business. How do you balance at all? As the CEO of this fast-growing company? You said you're an artist. And you read a lot of history. >> Honestly, I'm not a very balanced person. If you ask me, like, work and life, family and work, is because of my wife that I find a balance there. >> So you owe it all to her? >> Yeah, I think you can say that again, and the same thing is true for, like, one of my team members, our COO, David Sangster. He says, "Look, our health, family, and work, "in that order," and honestly, mine is in the reverse right now. So I need to really go and, These kind of conversations remind myself that it's important to actually have some balance. >> Great, well, Dheeraj, always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Pleasure. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier. We'll have so much more from Nutanix next coming up on theCUBE just after this. (techno music)