>> Live from London, England, it's the Cube, Covering .Next Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, and welcome to the Excel Center in London, England, where 3500 customers, partners, and employees of Nutanix have gathered for the annual European show of Nutanix .Next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost for two days of wall to wall exclusive coverage from the Cube is Joep Piscaer, our first European co-host. Joep, I first met you two years ago at the Nutanix show in Vienna. Last year was in Nice. We're now in London, and now you're not just a guest, but a host. Thanks so much for joinin' us. >> Thank you. So, it was awesome three years ago I was a customer, then I transitioned into a tech champion as well, for getting to know the technology and the people behind Nutanix, and now I'm here as a co-host, looking at Nutanix as a company. >> Well, we really appreciate you joining us. Give us, first of all, some more credibility in the European space, and also we always love to get the practitioner viewpoint. So, you have been a customer, you're part of I believe the NTC Program that Nutanix has, so you understand the technology. We're going to get to talk to some of the customers, some of those executives, and the like, so lookin' forward to havin' ya' sit with me, and dig into it, including, a first on the Cube, you're going to do one interview in your native tongue of Dutch. >> Yes, oh yeah. It's going to be completely in Nederlands, so completely Dutch, and I'm looking forward to that. >> Alright, so Dheeraj Pandey was on stage this morning, and Dheeraj, masterful, gives quite a good keynote, talking about how Nutanix is now nine years old, and so therefore he says still very young when you look at most of the technology companies out there, but they've come a long way. I've watched Nutanix since the very early days, and still kind of blows my mind. Some of the companies I've watched in their ascendancy, I remember VMware back when they were about 100 people. Nutanix, I met when they were about 30 people. Pernixdata that Nutanix bought, Soft Jamb that we're going to have on later today, introduced me to the company when it was three people and a dog, and Nutanix now, over I think 3000, 3500 people, announced last night their Q 1 2019 earnings, and some of the quick speeds would be 313 million dollars of revenue. That is up 14% year over year for the quarter, up 3% quarter over quarter from the previous quarter. Strong growth in a lot of the financials, really moving strongly along their path to be software, which is 51% of billings were from the software, and expect to read somewhere between 70 and 75% in the next four to six quarters, so aggressively meeting that, and publicly traded company, you kind of look at it and say "Wow, this Nutanix has a seven billion dollar market cap before the market opened today. We'll see what the market thinks of their earnings." What's just it that at a high level, you've been watching Nutanix for a while, so what's your take on the company? >> So, you know, I met em' a couple years ago as well. I think they were 100 people big back then. I learned from them from a technology perspective, so I just got to know the technology, got to know why they were building the startup, building this technology, and this was back in the day when it was basically a VDI product, and it was hardware. It was a thin layer of software, and they kept building that out, and building it out. At some point I became a customer of them, when their appliances were becoming so mature, that I actually saw the advantages that they were touting. Ease of management, one click for everything, and that made such a difference in the world back then, that it's just so good to see them growing and growing from the VDI product it was at some point, all to where it is now. This is not a startup anymore, this is a big company, with a portfolio that's becoming very broad, very deep as well. So seeing them grow this quickly, it's been pretty much amazing to see. I haven't seen a company go that fast in a long time. >> Yeah, well it's one of the things that really, if you look at where we are in technology today, things move fast. So the rest of the team for the Cube is at Amazon re:Invent, and the amount of announcements coming out of them is just staggering, but we're going to talk here about Nutanix. Actually the amount of announcements that Nutanix had, considering as you said they started out, really you think of that thin layer, to really simplify IT. Deeraj in the keynote talked about, "We want to achieve invisible together." was the line that he used, and simplifying things are really tough. That's really what characterized the wave of hyperconverged infrastructure in my mind. When I talk to users, why the bought it, it was simplifying it. It was not, when you think back to VMware, VMware was real easy. It was "Oh, I'm going to consolidate. I'm going to get high utilization.", and there was a clear cost savings. Well today, this hyperconverge is, if you look at building it one way, versus buying it this other way, the actual raw dollars was not that immediately compelling. It is the operational simplicity, and therefore I can allow, in many ways they say IT can now say yes to the business, and focus on things that add value to the business. Move up the stack. a line that I've used at a few of these Nutanix shows is "First, I want to modernize my platform, and then I can do things like modernize my application, modernize all my operations around that." It's catalyst to help customers along their journey for digital transformation. Is that what you've seen? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So looking at my own experience, I've seen it so clearly that simplifying that infrastructure later, five, six years ago, that was the driver for us to move there. It's become so much more than just a simplification. It's become a story of freeing up time from the IT ops personnel to do other stuff. Just like you said, saying yes to the business, because infrastructure used to be hard. It used to be difficult. You'd need to spend a lot of time on it, and now it's really so easy, it's become a commodity. You either get it from the cloud, you get it from Nutanix or VM or whoever, and that frees up time for the IT ops personnel to do value add stuff on top of it, and I kind of see Nutanix going along that same route. They focused on the infrastructure part. They're still an infrastructure company I think, but they're expanding into that whole journey the customer's going through as well. I think we're going to here a lot more about the hybrid strategy, about cloud, about hybrid cloud, about how to manage that, instead of just the infrastructure stuff. >> Yeah, you bring a good point, that customer journey is definitely one that they talked about, and let's talk about the way you look at the Nutanix portfolio now. The way that Nutanix has framed it, is they gave, it was the customer journey of crawl, walk, run. So first, we have Core, which really is the primary product we've been thinking about, it's what the vast majority of Nutanix customers use, it's HCI, it's Prism, it's those pieces to manage that Core piece. Then, we add on top of that is Essentials, which really looked at some of the expansion areas. Files is one that they launched as an announcement about two years ago I believe it was, that they have Blocks now, which is now a highly scalable object model there, and the Prism Pro, so a bunch of pieces to add on and go beyond the Core, and then they have Enterprise, which is is ICloud's kind of the branding that they have along these, but Leap is DR as a service. They've got Frame, which is desktop as a service. They've got Era, and they've got a whole lot of other software solutions out there that make up this whole portfolio. I wouldn't say it was simple. It took me two or three times of hearing it before it started to crystallize, but if you look out from that customer lens, the customer doesn't need to worry about where these buckets have, it's the, you know, "I'm buying Core stuff, I'm probably growing to Essentials, and then there's areas where Enterprise will make sense.", and it's likely going to be a different go to market and different buying motion. Take something like Frame, who we're going to have on the program today. Frame today is not attached to the Nutanix appliance itself, it was born in the cloud, and many of the enterprise solutions are born in the cloud, multi-cloud. So what's your take on how they're splitting up and discussing the portfolio? >> Just like you said, it took me awhile to figure out what that whole portfolio was, you know, the Core, Essentials, Enterprise stuff, but I do think looking at it from a customer perspective, it does make sense. So they started out simplifying the Core infrastructure. Now they're simplifying the Essentials in the data center as well, like files, like micro-segmentation, like monitoring. Those are topics that customers still spend a lot of time on, but they don't necessarily want to. They want to have something that is readily off the shelf, it's easy to use, easy to expand upon, so I do see Essentials as a good expansion of that messaging that they have been giving for quite a number of years already. Simplifying what is already in the data center already, and then the stretch into the cloud, into the hyper-cloud, delivering services that are still so difficult to do yourself, like take VDI for example. That's still difficult. Sending up an entire environment, managing it, you have to have really specialized people to do that for you, to do the do the design, and being able to get that directly from the cloud makes that so much easier. So I do agree with the de-segmentation into three big buckets, and I do think customers are going to respond positively to it. >> Alright, so, you brought up a term hyper-cloud, that I really didn't feel that we heard a lot about in the keynote this morning. It's an area I want to poke and understand a little bit more when I hear from Nutanix. I was talkin' to one customer in prep for this, and he said a year ago, and the last couple of times, but hearin' a lot about Google. Diane Greene on the stage, I believe it was the D.C show, I didn't see Google here. I know there is updates as to where the Google relationships are going. They did mention Kubernetes. The Kubernetes offer that Nutanix has is called Karbon. I actually expect to see not only what we will have Nutanix on the program here to talk about it, but at the Kubernetes show Kubcon in Seattle in two weeks. Nutanix is one of the sponsors that we'll have on the program there. Other than Kubernetes and how that fits into the cloud native discussion, I haven't heard a good cohesive message as to Nutanix's hybrid, they talk about how Nutanix lives in a lot of environments, and many of their products live in multi-cloud, and there's some nuance there. I think VMware has a nice clear message on hybrid. Microsoft of course, and of course VMware is the partnership with Amazon is really the core of what they're doing there. They're doing more cloud native and Kubernetes. They bought Heptio. There are things going on there. Amazon is talking a lot more about hybrid. We'll see if they actually use the term hybrid when they talk about it. Nutanix's messaging, we're going to have Deeraj on today, he says "Azure Stack gets a lot of press, but there's not a lot of people using it. VMware on AWS gets a lot of press, once again, not a lot of companies using it yet". And while I agree, customers actually feel comforted by the message that they understand how do I get from where I am today, to where I need to go? And of course I'm not saying that everybody goes 100% public cloud. The hybrid multi cloud world kind of looks like where we'll be for the next five or 10 years at least, and Edge puts a whole 'nother spin on things. What do you want to hear from Nutanix? What is hybrid, customers might not care about hybrid, but the message about where they're going with cloud is I think what they want clarity on. >> Yeah, I agree. So I think Nutanix doesn't call it hybrid, they're calling it hyperconverged cloud, which makes sense from their historical background. I do think Nutanix has ways to go in developing their own hybrid. Cloud story, making a management layer on top of it, like VMware's done, like Microsoft's doing. So I do think Nutanix is only on the beginning of this journey for themselves, but you're only seeing the small acquisitions they're doing, or the small steps they're taking. Acquiring Frame is one of those unexpected things for me. I would never have thought Nutanix would go that direction, So I do think Nutanix is taking small steps in the right direction. But like you said, they're story isn't complete yet. Its not a story that customers can buy into fully just now, so they do still need a little bit of time for that. >> Yeah, well Joep, really appreciate you helpin' us break down this. We've got two days of full coverage. So much your goin' is that, right, MNA in the space, it's a software world, picking up pieces are easy, heck, one of the under riding rumors I've heard for the last couple of years is "will someone take Nutanix off the table?" Not something I expect them to specifically direct, but at a seven billion dollar market, that would be a large acquisition, but we have seen a few of those in the last couple a' years. so for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, stay with us for two days. Wall to wall coverage. Thecube.net is of course where to see all of the live and on demand content. Thanks so much for watchin' the Cube. (contemplative music)

(uptempo techno music) >> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> One of the only constants in the technology world is that everything is always changing. Talking a lot about digital transformation. If I roll back to 2012, converged infrastructure, changes in data centers and infrastructure were all of the buzz, and it was before we were talking about things like hyper-converged infrastructure. We ran across a company called Nutanix. First interview we did in 2012 with Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of the now public company. Surprised us a little bit in that not how they put things together but the why and what they had behind it. That almost 40 minute interview with John Furrier and I did really talked about the biggest challenge of our time is distributed architectures. Not about boxes, not about even just reconfiguring some of the silos but really some of the softer challenges that we've been attacking for decades really in our industry. Fast forward here we are in 2018 and want to welcome you to theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT Conference here in New Orleans. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host for these two days of broadcast, Keith Townsend. Keith, thanks for joining me. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> So we spend time, it's like what are we doing today? I think right down the block from here is the World War II monument, and how many years after World War II before it was called World War II? >> Keith: Yeah, good point. >> When we look back at what was happening converged infrastructure was a wave. At Wikibon, we were tracking cool things like flash really invading what's going on. Hyperscale architecture, for me personally I'd gone from looking at these enterprise architectures really hardware focused, failure domains, make sure that nothing ever breaks to the softer model of applications where you expect everything is going to break. And that's okay, chaos monkey rules supreme. At the end of the day, your application lives on. Much more granular, we weren't talking microsegmentation architectures and the like. Want to bring you in here, we've had the pleasure of being at every single Nutanix show. This is your first one for you so give us your first impressions of Nutanix .NEXT and what you're seeing. >> I go to a awful lot of shows and I've heard that Nutanix .NEXT was special and all to itself. I had breakfast with just customers, regular attendees, and there is slightly a different energy here. I was surprised at how open customers are about talking about their journey. Just talking about how they're using Nutanix. Where they have it deployed. Their origin stories much different atmosphere than many of the conferences that I've attended. >> And actually so when you talk software companies. There's certain shows where there's the passion and love. Keith, you and I cut our teeth on the virtualization community. >> Right. >> And I use to have the I love VMware bumper stickers and things like that. We've got a team at ServiceNow Knowledge. Dave Vellante said is one of the most passionate groups there. And it's interesting, some of the board members of Nutanix actually co-populate with what's going at ServiceNow. Another show we have going on this week is Red Hat. Obviously the open source community. Very passionate communities. The goal that Nutanix has is rather audacious. When they set out it's not like they said, "Hey, we want to be the leading "hyper-converged infrastructure player." They started in 2009. That word didn't even exist in our lexicon. They have a rather audacious goal. They want to be the next VMware in the model of Microsoft platform. What do they own, where does it fit? What does their ecosystem look like? And we've been watching this maturity, and we're going to have a lot of guests, customers, partners and executives but yeah, comments there. >> The goal is three billion dollars in software billings by 2011. I mean sorry by 2021. That is a big, big number. I think VMware revenues are somewhere around eight billion to put this into perspective, big ambitions. I think on stage, Sunil said that Nutanix is the world's best or leading cloud OS. That was a bold, bold statement. While one part of the Nutanix is a lot bravado backed with some pretty decent technology. The customers that we've talked to have said, they have not ran into a more humble company, and wanting to build brick by brick a relationship to help solve. I'm surprised that customers used this word, partner. They believe Nutanix is truly a partner in their journey towards cloud in delivering IT services. So while again, very bold from the financial statement, very bold from a technology statement. The customer passion here about Nutanix being a true partner in their journey. That's quite real. >> Yeah and it's interesting when you look at the pace of change. The half life of how long people love a brand has been shrinking very fast. >> Keith: Right. >> You think of the old days, it was brands like IBM and Microsoft had decades that they were in love. Apple still beloved by many but they get poked and poked and prodded. We talked about VMware, talked about Nutanix. The landscape today is one of the things. Let's talk about cloud for a second. You and I were making some comments in the Twitter stream during the keynote. When I think hybrid cloud, and I think who's got leadership there. Well first of all, you can't talk about cloud without talking about AWS. >> Keith: Right. >> First solution that anyone's going to support. The Nutanix solutions. It's either API compatibility or integration with what Amazon is doing. Secondly, you talk about hybrid. That's Microsoft's strategy from day one. Azure Stack, same OS, same operating model that's there. So for Nutanix to say they have the best. It's like Microsoft been doing this for a few years. They have a few more customers than Nutanix. >> Right. Not saying Nutanix is not doing great. They're adding a thousand customers a quarter, which is great for an infrastructure company. For a software company, it's good. >> Keith: Yes. >> It's not blowing it out of the water. If you're a Salesforce and you said, you're only adding a thousand new companies a quarter. It's like well Wall Street is not thrilled. So different space, how they're positioning themselves. We mentioned revenue. They're well over a billion dollars. Looking back, some of the shows we've done. I think it's like a $1.4 billion run rate. Market cap, a phenomenal nine billion dollars. When we talk about just value creation, the customers that they're doing. A lot of things really in the Nutanix tail wind pushing them along. As you said, coming to these shows it's always when you talk to the customers. When you talk to the customers in the hallway, are there certain things. It's like oh well we're glad the micro-segmentation stuff is something that we really wanted, but not the big gripes. They're not yet complaining about the pricing models. >> There is not a Nutanix text yet. Not a age retext. And it will be interesting, they made a lot of announcements today. Around Kalm, around flow, around database management. A lot of features. Extremely ambitious technically, and those technologies have to be paid for somehow. So long term, I really want to see if that love extends into when Nutanix needs to get to that three billion dollar in revenue. >> Yeah so maybe quick take on the announcement so far and the keynotes. I thought it was a good balance. A little bit of pageantry upfront, Mardi Gras. >> Keith: Marching band. >> The marching band and everything coming through. They had partners, Hackathon winners, customers up on the floats coming in. No beat probably four. Wanted to make sure that they weren't pegging somebody in the head with that stuff. But they had a good mix, I felt. They had a few customers onstage tell their stories. They got through the announcements. Some real meaningful announcements. Their first SaaS product with Beam. One of the four acquisitions that they've had over the last couple of years. That was from Minjar, was the acquisition. Netsol is another acquisition that they had recently and then Kalm was the basis. >> Keith: Right. >> A long with PernixData a couple years ago. Saccharin Vagoni, PernixData is somebody working on the IoT in Edge stuff. Keynote, announcements, what's your take? >> You know what, there's a lot there. They are innovating extremely fast. I think I interviewed Gar-iage, maybe a couple of years ago at Dell EMC World and I asked, is Nutanix a platform yet? And he say, "You know what. "We might be a little bit early to call Nutanix a platform. "I think today we've solved the completion of the foundation "of being called a platform." As we look out onto the show floor, we're starting to see a growing number of partners who are looking to integrate. We'll have Beam on later on in the program but specific announcements. The things that I'm somewhat excited about Netsil. They're taking a very different approach to network segmentation. And their micro segmentation and VM warriors. There are some advantages, disadvantages. Really looking forward to having that conversation. One click database management with Oracle and Microsoft. There's some guard rails around that we're thinking wow, how does Nutanix walk the line of making database administration deployment simple, but not anger Oracle to the point if there is court action. That's going to be an interesting set of conversation. >> I mean Keith, you know better than me. I hear database migrations and I just think of all the customer horror stories. David Foro from our Wikibon team has talked about, it's never easy. You'll get 80% or 90% of the way there and then things break, and you have to put it back together. AWS has been doing a lot of database migrations, and they've got 80, 90,000 of these that they've done. So how do they do this? It's great to say push button simplicity, but the proof is in the pudding. What are customers seeing? >> Yeah, when you're talking about big database mission critical. And that's another thing we heard on the stage this morning. A lot about mission critical. They're trying to shed this persona of being a VDI platform and that the platform is ready for mission critical applications. We've talked to customers that are indeed using it for mission critical stuff. But again, migration. They've had the relationship with IBM and Power for a couple of years now. And they still ran into a lot of customers that are saying they have no plans of moving AIX to Nutanix, however there's a plate. >> Well since you mention it actually, that was one of the announcements today. Nutanix is now supporting the AAX. >> Keith: Right. >> So before it was Power, now you need to get over to Linux, and that's something we've heard, gosh Keith. How long have we've been hearing the migration from Unix to Linux with the work load. 10 years ago, I remembered going events, and we were talking about that. And it's challenging, you need to-- >> Yeah, I remember getting excited about being-- >> The platform, the tool. >> Having IBM support Linux on mainframes, and thinking man I can finally get this stuff off of AIX. And then to Linux, and that was literally almost 20 years ago, so there you go. >> Yes, so many different announcements but started some the basic piece of it. 'Cause if you talk, there are customers that they have that are drawing over new things. We've got one of the customers that was on the keynote stage, Northern Trust. And he's throwing out things like PaaS and CaaS, which I'm hoping is containers as a service that he's talking about. Some of us propeller heads love talking about this. Lamb-dogot mentioned in the keynote talking about server list but the average Nutanix customers. This is the sand replacement. Many of the customers come and they say, going from my three tiered architecture, server, storage whether that be a traditional storage array or even an all flash array. I'm going to save 20%-40% just by collapsing it down to this architecture. Multi-Hypervisor, VMware of course very heavy, interesting dynamic always between VMware and Nutanix. Aged V growth, a little bit less of the aged V, the Acropolis Hypervisor and surrounding Acropolis services. At least to me, it felt a little bit less than before just 'cause the portfolio is broadening. But you've got so many pieces, it's basically almost any server you want. Nutanix is either an OEM or they will support it. There's all the Hypervisors they can connect to the cloud. When I look at that hybrid cloud message. It does start in your data center but it does extend to all of those pieces. If there is a little criticism I have there is that, at least my quick take. 50%-75% of the Nutanix customers are mostly of the, I use SaaS but I don't use a ton of public cloud. And therefore, I want to control my environment as opposed to but there are other customers that are, I'm doing a ton on Amazon, and Nutanix is great there. So went on about a bunch of things there. But just the base platform, what do you hear from people that are using Nutanix specifically HCI in general, and how that fits in the overall cloud picture? >> So overall they're cautious like you said. A lot of what core customers that I have talked to are very lets call it cloud anti pattern. However they're consuming Kalm, they're consuming Prism, they are consuming Nutanix in a cloud-like manner on premises. They're looking to one customer said, "To their internal customer, they are the cloud." They make IT and consuming Nutanix infrastructure simple, so it is a perspective thing. As we start to expand out Kalm and expect design become much more critical to this long term vision. And customers are still in a wait and see pattern. They're saying, "Well let's look." One to two years where the technology gets to be a little bit more mature. A little bit more tested. Tested by who is a good question and that ability to extend their internal infrastructure and operations to the external public cloud becomes more of a reality. >> Okay, Keith want you to just, what are you looking forward to get out of these next two days. Quick take from me. The three pieces that Sunil and Dheeraj been talking for a couple years. Invisible infrastructure, solid basis. They're there, they've got great feature functionality. I think when we talked to customers, other than these two features that VMware has that aren't yet here. I can move 75%-85% AIX one piece to get another 5% of that if we need. Invisible data centers, making good progress. Can see what they're doing today. They have a lot of the pieces. Things like Prism and Kalm are, Prism has been out for years, but Kalms GA and making progress. And then invisible clouds. First pieces are in place. They've got some software pieces there. What are we, look at Nutanix 3-5 years from now, are they a SaaS player? Are they primarily an infrastructure software player? The question I want to point to them. I had an interview with Rowan from Cisco, the number two guy and he said, "Cisco, the networking company. "10 years from now, they're a software company." It's not boxes and ports and things like that. So how far did they go as opposed to you and I were at Dell last week. Dell wants to be the leading infrastructure company, and therefore servers, storage, network are key pieces there. Tie into software, tie into cloud but that's my quick take around as to what I'm looking for. The progress that they're making is we always sniff out what's real. What has some work. Marketing is okay as long as the proof is in the pudding. >> We heard a lot about the delivery. Enterprise, cloud, company is the tag line. That is part of the company's brand. I want to understand how they make the claim. Not just how, how and why they made the claim. They are the leading enterprise cloud company. What does enterprise cloud mean to them when they say that? And you can't have a conversation about enterprise cloud without talking about the developer. So Nutanix by saying that they are enterprise cloud company is they're going in the opposite direction especially of Dell EMC. Dell EMC provides infrastructure to cloud companies. They might point to pivotal in VMware as being the software components of a complete cloud strategy. But Dell EMC itself, infrastructure company. Nutanix is making the claim, they are an enterprise cloud company. How are they pursing the relationship and capability with developers, infrastructure team, operations to make sure that they can live up to that mantle. >> Yeah, Keith, great point to help us wrap up one of the segments we heard talking about Edge computing. Nutanix wants to make invisible Kubernetes Tensorflow functions as a service. Made my head spin a little bit because we know the maturity of those solutions in what you need to do to understand it. So being able to simplify that. Well that would truly be genius. >> That would, if they can Nutanixise that, that will be great. >> Alright, well Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor. Thank you for helping me break down, looking forward to two days of interviews. I'm Stu Miniman. We're going to have wall to wall coverage here from the New Orleans convention center. Nutanix .NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with Justin Warren, and you're watching The Cube, the worldwide leader in tech covered. Happy to welcome back to the program, Satyam Vaghani, who is now the Vice President of Technology with Nutanix. Satyam, great to see you, you've got a long history with the VMware community, always good to catch up with you, how have you been? >> Likewise too, great to see you guys again. I've been good. >> All right, so I like, it's always the progression as to what discussed at the show. I was kind of poking at VMware a little bit, that in 2015 it was any device in any application one cloud, and the keynote this morning it was any device, any application, any cloud, and we're highlighting one of the things VMware's highlighting is NSX, they want to be kind of the interconnected fabric between the cloud and the edge. And of course I bring that up because, besides the virtualization stuff that you've done for years, you've got a little bit of a different role now, you joined Nutanix through the PernixData acquisition, so why don't you tell us what's been keeping you busy and excited these days. >> In a word, or in two words, edge computing for sure. You know, this has been striking to me too because I walked in to pick up my badge this morning, and the first thing I see at VMworld is IoT, you know there's this big area right next to where you pick up the badge. And so it's quite telling as to how computing is evolving. As you just said, you know NSX is one way to quantify that evolution from, you know, how do we stretch the cloud all the way into the edge. There's some other ways. And so yeah, I've been working on what defines that operating system that can converge the edge and the cloud into one seamless piece. >> There's definitely a lot of excitement around edge, but as with any early technology, if you're talking to a telco it means one thing, if you're talking to somebody involved in centers and IoT, it kind of means a different thing. We're not talking about kind of the robo-use cases that some people looked at, kind of HCIS, so what is that, what is edge computing in your parlance, and that OS, how does that fit into it? >> Great question, in fact I'll come back to the talking to different verticals, and how we can make some sense out of all those disparate conversations, maybe, you know as second part of my answer. But you know, the edge in my definition, is a way to collect, digitize the real world, that's one thing, but then take real-time decisions on all this data that is coming in from the real world. And so in my sense, the edge is all about taking real-time decisions on data, and then the cloud long-term is going to be about taking some long-term decisions about the same data or some subset of that data. You know, that Tesla is a great post-agile example right, as you know, in a self-driving car, you want to figure out whether you're going to get into an accident or not right at the car, which is the edge. But the longer term notion of how Teslas can be made to drive better can be all done in the cloud, deep learning et cetera. And so there is this very fluid movement of data and code between the two systems, that we as operating system vendors need to make possible. Otherwise, every agile application, which is really a hybrid application, some part of the logic runs here on the edge, some part of the logic runs on the cloud. It's going to be tremendously difficult to create these applications. And you mentioned, and very rightfully so, is you know, the interpretation of what edge computing or IoT means is very different by vertical. And so in fact right now, my number one mission is to look at all these different use cases and figure out what's common, right? I think back 30, 40 years ago, when the guys sat down to write POSIX, right, you know people figured out what is it that an operating system can provide that makes sense to 200,000 different applications. I think it's time to answer that exact same question for the world of machines, right? What is it that an operating system can provide which makes sense in the world of machines, that sells transportation, that sells defense, that sells health care, and blah blah blah, et cetera. >> So what are some of the things you've discovered in the research you've done so far? Have you got some early hints of what those pieces of commonality are? >> For sure, great question. And so you know, one common thread that unifies all these different use cases is your, most of the use cases are around getting insights from the data that's being collected, whether it's image data, whether it's raw numbers, whatever it is, and so you know, machine learning and analytics seem to form the core of any interesting application subset that you're looking at. And so then the question is, can you make it from an operating system point of view, can you make it very easy to build applications around machine learning, can you make it very easy to build applications around analytics? And the third thing is, you know, it's very, this is not about running virtual machines anymore, yeah, sure, inside at the very crux of the system you might be running virtual machines, but it's about a developer-centric world. So, the question is, can you make it such that the developers can just deploy code without worrying about whether the code runs in a virtual machine, in a container, in a combination thereof? Can you make it very easy for data to move across without the developer having to explicitly code develop? And so that's the common parts. >> I wonder, you know, what your thoughts are contextually when you go in there? So we actually had, at Wikibon we have a weekly research call, we were talking about serverless last week, and we actually saw, you know, for edge computing, serverless, really good, Amazon has their Greengrass, leverages Lambda to go in there because, sure VMs seem a little heavy for some of these applications. What should we look at kind of from that same point? >> I agree, I agree. It seems to be more serverless and maybe containers, because sometimes when you're trying to do serverless applications you need a bunch of infrastructure that then has to be packaged into containers. And so, between the two probably is where the compute part of edge computing or IT is going to be edge. >> Can you talk to us, you know, Nutanix, I think there's, obviously Nutanix and VMware, strong partnership for some things, which is, you know about three quarters of Nutanix customers are running VMware, but differences of opinion as to some other things that, you know, VSAN versus Nutanix, and Nutanix has AHV. I've heard you saying operating system a bunch of time, is that an extension of AHV, is it something else? VMware has plans as to how they're going to go from IoT, can you maybe compare, contrast what your vision, how that matches with your skillsets inside Nutanix versus, you know VMware who you know real well. >> Oh yeah, for sure. And so AHV, the distributed storage fabric, which Nutanix has, I think that is a great kind of, you know, substrate on top of which to now build a much more application-oriented edge computing kind of you know, stack, right. And so the edge computing stack is more about what other data services that you can provide, which are not data stores anymore, you know, it's things like structured data as a service, or unstructured data as a service, or streaming data as a service, and function as a service to your point of serverless computing or containers. And so I think this becomes, the Nutanix asset becomes a great substrate on top of which to build this much more application-oriented architecture. You know the VMware story I would imagine is kind of sort of the same, although VMware is I think remarkably leading with NSX, because you know, there's network, the extended network between the cloud and the edge is obviously a great problem to solve. I have my own biases, so I tend to lead with the application side of things, right, which is, you know, what does it, as I said, what does it take to make the next POSIX layer for machine learning or for analytics, and then the infrastructure base is obviously important, bit it is worry less, you know, I'm sure we are going to solve it. And so, in some sense the two stories are evolving in a very congruent manner. We'll see. I think the market is so big, and the use cases are so diverse, that for a change, we can potentially, if we kind of do it in a cooperative manner, we can probably evolve an interesting standard, interesting stack that is kind of sort of you know, stable. And so I think this could potentially be a story of cooperation as opposed to throwing stones at each other, but you know, time will tell. >> One of the things that VMware talked about in the keynote was security, and the nature of security being baked into things, and you mentioned that your focus is on applications, and certainly developers of applications, they don't really care anything about infrastructure at all. So this service consumption is something that they think is quite interesting. But you also mentioned how fast things are changing. Those three things at once, on the edge, how do you see security services developing so that they can be easily consumed by people, instead of it being this really difficult infrastructure problem? >> I wish I had just an easy one line answer, but I think I'll explain it, just the abstract of how I see this evolving through an example, right. Because if you think about iOS and Android, they have a very structured way of doing notification, and no app can do notifications by itself, it just has to get in. So I think, you know, probably it's time to solve security that way, right. You know, it's time to put some structure to how you can program the movement of data, the collection of data, the deployment of compute, of program onto a substrate, and if you tightly control that movement of data and the deployment of compute and so on, then there is a higher chance that you are going to be able to, from an operating system provider point of view, probably you are going to be able to deliver a much more secure system, because you've taken the bulk load of security programming away from the application developer, and made it an operating system core service, right? And of course that requires you to impose a framework on how you develop applications, which is, you know, the notification examples, right. I've imposed a framework on how you deliver notifications, and by doing so, I've kind of, you know, made a very seamless or very good experience. I think >> So it's taking a very opinionated approach to doing things? >> Satyam: I think so, yeah. >> Which, that does restrain choice a little bit, and one thing that various vendors say is, well we're all about customer choice. But sometimes there is too much choice. However on the flipside, IT so far has been making choices about how you should do security so far that haven't really worked out so well. So what do you think needs to change for this opinionated design to feel like the correct one that people will want to use, and not then feel constrained and, but I want to be able to choose to write my own encryption algorithms. >> I think if we can democratize the availability of data, so you know, the edge computing stacks are all about collecting as much data as possible, and then writing great applications on it. So if there is a security framework which doesn't impede the ability of different tenants, whether it's analysts, whether it's application developers, whether it's regular operators like the guy running the airport, if it doesn't impede their ability to interface with data, and if it doesn't impede their ability to deploy interesting compute on top of that data, then probably we have a way to go. So I think having a great security framework, but in way that still democratizes the availability of data, the movement of data, and the deployment of compute, if we can achieve that, I know I'm asking for a bit too much, (Justin and Stu laugh) but probably the source of my next five patents. I think it's a doable thing, it's a doable thing. >> Satyam, why does Nutanix have a right to be a player in IoT? You know, I look at it, you know these are going to be some pretty gnarly ecosystems. I look at, you know, we did some early work with GE when they were coming up with the idea for the industrial internet, you know there's some really big challenges, you know, you're not going to create those centers and all those devices, you know, some of the really big companies in the world are working on some, you know, the messaging protocols and things like that. Where realistically does Nutanix play and how do you fit into that really big and very immature ecosystem today? >> Great question. So various different takes on it. One is, I think it's a natural evolution of the company strategy. We started by saying, look, here's hyperconvergence 1.0 the ability to converge, compute, storage and networking into this box. Hyperconvergence 2.0, which is what we are executing right now as we speak, is this orchestration layer between public and private cloud. So we have converging public and private into one. So things like Calm, et cetera. And so we naturally think the next step of our strategy, hyperconvergence 3.0, if you will, is a convergence of the edge and the cloud. And so just from the point of view of how we evolve the enterprise cloud operating system, we think this is the natural place for it to grow into as a piece of technology. The other way to look at it is, it's time to build the next hypervisor, and the next hypervisor is the hypervisor for data as it moves around in all these clouds between ridiculously disparate places, right, from an oil rig all the way to some mainland data center or from an airport into the cloud and so on and so forth. And so the process of creating hypervisor for data is a distributed data systems problem, which we have been really good at, historically. And so we think we deserve a good cut at it. And the last thing I'll say is, if you think about how ideal world, you used the example of G, great respect for companies like that, but think about it, you know, those companies had to evolve all of that by themselves because they happened to be the sensor vendor, and so the G's of the world, the Honeywells of the world, they had to not only make the sensors, but now they also had to make some compute capability to make some sense out of all that data. But now that sensors are here, they are here to stay, they are all open to your point, you know, the protocols to get data out of it, MQTT, CoAP, this that, everything is open. So now it's genuinely the time to focus on the data and code aspect of the data that's coming in. You know, 40 times more data is going to hit the edge than the cloud will ever see in three years. And you know, that deserves a, kind of a swing from traditional data operating systems guys like Nutanix and some of the other guys you see on the show floor. >> You mentioned it's a distributed computing problem, which is obviously very hard to do. But there's a networking aspect, and that's one thing, particularly in cloud and other things, it tends to get overlooked quite a bit, I mean the poor network people feel left out. What implications do you think there's going to be for this level of data from all of these sensors and the amount of computing and decision-making that will happen at the edge, as distinct from in the cloud, talking between different devices in the edge, but then also providing the data back to cloud. What are some of the network impacts that that's going to have? >> Great question, there's so many of them but, something that is front and foremost in my mind, because I literally got out of a customer conversation on this, is you know, for example, there's this customer who does smart oil rigs, and they now need to move that data, some of it at least, to the cloud, but the network is really flaky. So there is obviously the problem of securing that network, and so on, but now there's also the problem of what does that mean to the application itself? Can you express the flakiness of the network as a policy that a programmer can program towards? You know, when flakiness of the network happens, literally from a programming and API point of view, the programmer can make a choice as to, you know, for all the streaming data that's coming in, the programmer can choose either to drop all of it, you know, when the network's flaky, or to you know, have a data moving system which can catch up, when the network becomes stable again. So all those things now become a, these are all infrastructure problems that now manifest themselves into how you program the system, and so we are having some conversations around that. And so yeah, you know, there is so many interesting possibilities here, I don't even know where to start. >> Whole new programming abstractions that we may not even be using today. >> Exactly. And there's obviously the hardware part of the problem. People are creating LoRa networks, they are creating NBD, this new type of LT network just for IoT data, and so there's a whole bunch happening in hardware as well. >> Satyam, pull this all together for us. What, you know, you said you're meeting with customers. What can they do today and what are some of the major kind of milestones that we should be looking for to say, oh, I'm hearing from Nutanix customers they're doing this, we've reached that point, you know, give us a little bit of a today and maybe a year or two out if you can. >> Great question. So I think the here and now thing customers can do as well, apart from the obvious thing of figuring out what other interesting ways that their business wants to monetize data coming out of their own operational infrastructure. Assuming they've figured that out, you know the important thing they can do now, is to start creating their dispersed cloud, right. Cloud of assets out in the field, you know, in factories and airports and oil rigs and aircraft carriers, that they can manage centrally, right, and that they can deploy applications into centrally. And so now they don't need a specialist on an oil rig to figure out how to operate infrastructure. So that's a here and now problem. They can set it up right now, centrally managed clouds, with central application orchestration on those clouds. The second part of the thing, is to create a new generation infrastructure, which is one level higher than virtual machines and data stores. It's infrastructure that gives their developers the ability to use data as a service, both on the edge and on the cloud, and to deploy compute as literally code, functional service, either on the edge or on the cloud, and so that gives them a homogeneous system, a much more developer-friendly system to deploy applications that can, you know, that can consume data at a volume, at a pace that we have never seen before. And the only way to make that consumption possible is if we can make the movement of data, the availability of data across this dispersed cloud very, very easy. So that's step two, is a data and code hypervisor, something that we haven't seen yet in the industry. >> Satyam Vaghani, pleasure to catch up with you as always. We look forward to watching the progress as all of this progresses. >> Thanks guys, I'm jazzed. >> From Justin Warren and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here, from VMworld 2017, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)