[digital Music] >> Okay, welcome back to "theCUBE," Supercloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." We got a very special distinguished CUBE alumni here, Rajiv Ramaswami, CEO of Nutanix. Great to see you. Thanks for coming by the show. >> Good to be here, John. >> We've had many conversations in the past about what you guys have done. Again, the perfect storm is coming, innovation. You guys are in an interesting position and the Supercloud kind of points this out. We've been discussing about how multi-cloud is coming. Everyone has multiple clouds, but there's real structural change happening right now in customers. Now there's been change that's happened, cloud computing, cloud operations, developers are doing great, but now something magical's happening in the industry. We wanted to get your thoughts on that, that's called Supercloud. >> Indeed. >> How do you see this shift? I mean, devs are doing great. Ops and security are trying to get cloud native. What's happening in your opinion? >> Yeah, in fact, we've been talking about something very, very similar. I like the term supercloud. We've been calling it hybrid multicloud essentially, but the point being, companies are running their applications and managing their data. This is lifeblood for them. And where do they sit? Of course, some of these will sit in the public cloud. Some of these are going to sit inside their data centers and some of these applications increasingly are going to run in edges. And now what most companies struggle with is every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, their edge is different and they then have a scarcity of staff. Operating models are different. Security is different. Everything about it is different. So to your point, people are using multiple clouds and multiple locations. But you need to think about cloud as an operating model and what the supercloud or hyper multicloud delivers is really a consistent model, consistent operating model. One way for IT teams to operate across all of these environments and deliver an agile infrastructure as a service model to their developers. So that from a company's managed point of view, they can run their stuff wherever they want to, completely with consistency, and the IT teams can help support that easily. >> You know, it's interesting. You see a lot of transformation, certainly from customers, they were paying a lot of operating costs for IT. Now CapEx is covered by, I mean, CapEx now is covered by the cloud, so it's OpEx. They're getting core competencies and they're becoming very fluent in cloud technologies. And at the same time the vendors are saying, "Hey, you know, buy our stuff." And so you have the change over, how people relate to each other, vendors and customers, where there's a shared model where, okay, you got use cases for the cloud and use cases on-premise, both CapEx, both technology. You mentioned that operating model, Where's the gap? 'Cause nobody wants complexity, and you know, the enterprise, people love to add, solve complexity with more complexity. >> That's exactly the problem. You just hit the nail on the head, which is enterprise software tends to be very complex. And fundamentally complexity has been a friend for vendors, but the point being, it's not a friend for a company that's trying to manage their IT infrastructure. It's an an enemy because complexity means you need to train your staff, you need very specialized teams, and guess what? Talent is perhaps the most scarce thing out there, right? People talk about, you know, in IT, they always talk about people, process, technology. There's plenty of technology out there, but right now there's a big scarcity of people, and I think that talent is a major issue. And not only that, you know, it's not that we have as many specialized people who know storage, who know compute, who know networking. Instead, what you're getting is a bunch of new college grads coming in, who have generalized skill sets, who are used to having a consumer like experience with their experience with software and applications, and they want to see that from their enterprise software vendors. >> You know, it's just so you mentioned that when the hyper converged, we saw that movie that was bringing things together. Now you're seeing the commoditization of compute storage and networking, but yet the advancement of higher level services and things like Kubernetes for orchestration, that's an operating opportunity for people to get more orchestration, but that's a trade off. So we're seeing a new trend in the supercloud where it's not all Kubernetes all the time. It's not all AWS all the time. It's the new architecture, where there's trade offs. How do you see some of these key trade offs? I know you talked to a lot of your customers, they're kind of bringing things together, putting things together, kind of a day zero mentality. What are some of those key trade offs and architectural decision points? >> So there's a couple of points there, I think. First is that most customers are on a journey of thoughts and their journey is, well, they want to have a modern infrastructure. Many of them have on-prem footprints, and they're looking to modernize that infrastructure. They're looking to adopt cloud operating models. They're looking to figure out how they can extend and leverage these public clouds appropriately. The problem is when they start doing this, they find that everything is different. Every little piece, every cloud is different, their on-prem is different, and this results in a lot of complexity. In some ways, we at Nutanix solved this problem within data centers by converging separate silos of high computer storage and network. That's what we did with HCI. And now this notion of supercloud is just simply about converging different clouds and different data. >> Kind of the same thing. >> And on-prem and edges, right? Trying to bring all of these together rather than having separate teams, separate processes, separate technologies for every one of these, try to create consistency, and it makes life a lot simpler and easier. >> Yeah, I wanted to connect those dots because I think this is kind of interesting with the supercloud was, you get good at something in one cloud, then you bring that best practice and figure out how to make that work across edge and on-premise, which is, I mean, basically cloud operations. >> Exactly. It's cloud operations, which is why we say it's a cloud is an operating model. It's a way you operate your environment, but that environment could be anywhere. You're not restricted to it being in the public cloud. It's in your data center, that's in the edges. >> Okay, so when I hear about substrates, abstraction layers, I think two things, innovation cause you extract away complexity, then I also think about from the customer's perspective, maybe, lock-in. >> Yes. >> Whoa, oh, promises, promises. Lock in is a fear and ops teams and security teams, they know the downside of lock-in. >> Yes. >> Choice is obviously important. Devs don't care. I mean, like, whatever runs the software, go faster, but ops and security teams, they want choice, but they want functionality. So, what's that trade off? Talk about this lock-in dynamic, and how to get around. >> Yeah. >> And I think that's been some of the fundamental tenants of what we do. I mean, of course, people don't like lock-in, but they also want simplicity. And we provide both. Our philosophy is we want to make things as simple as possible. And that's one of the big differentiators that we have compared to other players. Our whole mission inside the company is to make things simple. But at the same time, we also want to provide customers with that flexibility and every layer in the stack, you don't want to lock to your point. So, if at the very bottom hardware, choice of hardware. Choice of hardware could be any of the vendors you work with or public cloud, Bare Metal. When you look at hypervisor, lots of choices. You got VMware, you got our own Ahv, which is KBM-based open source hypervisor, no lock-in there, provide complete flexibility. Then we have a storage stack, a distributor storage stack, which we provide. And then of course layers about that. Kubernetes, pick your Kubernetes, runtime of choice. Pick your Kubernetes, orchestrator and management of choice. So our whole goal is to provide that flexibility at every layer in the stack, allowing the customer to make the choice. They can decide how much they want to go with the full stack or how much they want to go piecemeal it, and there's a trade off there. And they get more flexibility, but at the cost of a little bit more complexity, and that, I think, is the trade off that each customer has to weigh. >> Okay, you guys have been transforming for many, many years. We've been covering on SiliconANGLE and theCUBE to software. >> Yes. >> I know you have hardware as well, but also software services. And you've been on the cloud bandwagon years ago, and now you made a lot of progress. What's the current strategy for you guys? How do you fit in? 'Cause public cloud has great use cases, great examples of success there, but that's not the only game in town. You've got on-premise and edge. What are you guys doing? What specifically are customers leaning on you for? How are you providing that value? What's the innovation strategy? >> Very simply, we provide a cloud software platform today. We don't actually sell anymore hardware. They're not on our books anymore. We're a pure software company. So we sell a cloud soft platform on top of which our customers can run all their applications, including the most mission critical applications. And they can use our platform wherever, to your point, on the supercloud. I keep coming back to that. We started out with our on-prem genes. That's where we started. We've extended that to Azure and AWS. And we are extending, of course, we've always been very strong when it came to the edge and extending that out to the edge. And so today we have a cloud platform that allows our customers to run these apps, whatever the apps may be, and manage all their data because we provide structured and unstructured data, blocks, files, objects, are all part of the platform. And we provide that in a consistent way across all of these locations, and we deliver the cloud operating model. >> So on the hardware thing, you guys don't have hardware anymore. >> We don't sell hardware anymore. We work with a whole range of hardware partners, HP, Dell, Supermicro, name it, Lenovo. >> Okay, so if I'm like a Telco and I want to build a data center at my tower, which could be only a few boxes, who do I buy that from? >> So you buy the software from us and you can buy the hardware from your choice of hardware partners. >> So yeah, whoever's selling the servers at that point. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so you send on the server. >> Yeah, we send on the server. >> Yeah, sound's good. So no hardware, so back to software that could transfer. How's that going, good? >> It's gone very well because, you know, we made two transformations. One is of course we were selling appliances when we started out, and then we started selling software, and now it's all fully subscription. So we're 100% subscription company. So our customers are buying subscriptions. They have the flexibility to get whatever duration they want. Again, to your philosophy, there's no lock-in. There is no long term lock-in here. We are happy if a customer chooses us for a year versus three years, whatever they like. >> I know that you've been on the road with customers this summer. It's been great to get out and see people in person. What are you learning? What are they viewing? What's their new Instagram picture of Nutanix? How do they see you? And how do you want them to see you? >> What they've seen us in the past has been, we created this whole category of HCI, Hyperconverged Infrastructure. They see us as a leader there and they see us as running some of their applications, not necessarily all their applications, especially at the very big customers. In the smaller customers, they run everything on us, but in the bigger customers, they run some workload, some applications on us. And now what they see is that we are now, if taking them on the journey, not only to run all their applications, whatever, they may be, including the most mission critical database workloads or analytics workloads on our platform, but also help them extend that journey into the public cloud. And so that's the journey we are on, modernized infrastructure. And this is what most of our customers are on. Modernizing the infrastructure, which we help and then creating a cloud operating model, and making that available everywhere. >> Yeah, and I think one, that's a great, and again, that's a great segue to supercloud, which I want to get your thoughts on because AWS, for example, spent all that CapEx, they're called the hyperscaler. They got H in there and that's a hyperscale in there. And now you can leverage that CapEx by bringing Nutanix in, you're a hyperscale-like solution on-premise and edge. So you take advantage of both. >> Absolutely. >> The success. >> Exactly. >> And a trajectory of cloud, so your customers, if I get this right, have all the economies of scale of cloud, plus the benefits of the HCI software kind of vibe. >> Absolutely. And I'll give you some examples how this plays out in the real world based on all my travels here. >> Yeah, please do. So we just put out a case study on a customer called FSP. They're a betting company, online betting company based out of the UK. And they run on our platform on-prem, but what they saw was they had to expand their operations to Asia and they went to Taiwan. And the problem for them was, they were told they had to get in business in Taiwan within a matter of a month, and they didn't know how to do it. And then they realized that they could just take the exact same software that they were running on our platform, and run it in an AWS region sitting in Taiwan. And they were up in business in less than a month, and they had now operations ready to go in Asia. I mean, that's a compelling business value. >> That's agile, that's agile. >> Agile. >> That's agile and a great... >> Versus the alternative would be weeks, months. >> Months, first of all, I mean, just think about, they have to open a data center, which probably takes them, they have to buy the hardware, which, you know, with supply chain deliveries, >> Supply chain. and God knows how long that takes. >> Oh God, yeah. >> So compared to all that here, they were up and running within a matter of a month. It's a, just one example of a very compelling value proposition. >> So you feel good about where you guys are right now relative to these big waves coming? >> Yeah, I think so. Well, I mean, you know, there's a lot of big waves coming and. >> What are the biggest ones that you see? >> Well, I mean, I think there's clearly one of the big ones, of course, out there is Broadcom buying VMware or potentially buying VMware and great company. I used to work there for many years and I have a lot of respect for what VMware has done for the industry in terms of virtualization of servers and creating their entire portfolio. >> Is it true you're hiring a lot of VMware folks? >> Yes, I mean a lot of them coming over now in anticipation, we've been hiring our fair share, but they're going other places too. >> A lot of VMware alumni at Nutanix now. >> Yes, there are certainly, we have our share of VMware alumni. We also have a share of alumni from others. >> We call the V mafia, by the way. (laughs) >> I dunno about the V mafia, but. But it's a great company, but I think right now a lot of customers are wondering what's going to happen, and therefore, they are looking at potentially what are the other alternatives? And we are very much front and center in that discussions. >> Well, Dave Alante and I, and the team have been very bullish on on-premise cloud operations. You guys are doing there. How would you describe the supercloud concept to a customer when they say, "Hey, what's the supercloud? "It's becoming a thing. "How would you describe what it is and the benefits?" >> Yeah, and I think the first thing is to tell them, what problem are you looking to solve? And the problem for them is, they have applications everywhere. They have data everywhere. How do their teams run and deal with all of this? And what they find is the way they're doing it today is different operating platform for every one of these. If you're on Amazon, it's one platform. If you're an Azure, it's another. If you're on-prim, it's a third. If you want to go to the edge, probably fourth, and it's a messy, complex thing for their IT teams. What a supercloud does is essentially unify all of these into a consistent operating model. You get a cloud operating model, you get the agility and the benefits, but with one way of handling your compute storage network needs, one way of handling your security policies, and security constructs, and giving you that, so such a dramatic simplification on the one side, and it's a dramatic enabler because it now enables you to run these applications wherever you want completely free. >> Yeah. It really bridges the cloud native. It kind of the interplay on the cloud between SAS and IAS, solves a lot of problems, highly integrated, that takes that model to the complexity of multiple environments. >> Exactly. >> That's a super cool environment. >> (John speaks over Rajiv) Across any environment, wherever. It's changing this thing from cloud being associated with the public cloud to cloud being available everywhere in a consistent way. >> And that's essentially the goodness of cloud, going everywhere. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, but that extension is what you call a supercloud. >> Rajiv, thank you so much for your time. I know you're super valuable, and you got a company to run. One final question for you. The edge is exploding. >> Yes. >> It's super dynamic. We kind of all know it's there. The industrial edge. You got the IOT edge and just the edge in general. On-premise, I think, is hybrid, it's the steady state, looking good. Everything's good. It's getting better, of course, things with cloud native and all that good stuff. What's your view of the edge? It's super dynamic, a lot of shifting, OT, IT, that's actually transformed. >> Yes, absolutely. >> Huge industrial thing. Amazon is buying, you know, industrial robots now. >> Yes. >> Space is around the corner, a lot of industrial advance with machine learning and the software side of things, so the edge is exploding. >> Yeah, you know, and I think one of the interesting things about that exploding edge is that it tends to be both compute and data heavy. It's not this notion of very thin edges. Yes, you've got thin edges too, of course, which may just be sensors on the one hand, but you're seeing an increased need for compute and storage at the edges, because a lot of these are crunching, crunching applications that require a crunch and generate a lot of data, crunch a lot of data. There's latency requirements that require you and there's even people deploying GPUs at the edges for image recognition and so forth, right? So this is. >> The edge is the data center now. >> Exactly. Think of the edge starting to look at the edge of the mini data center, but one that needs to be highly automated. You're not going to be able to put people at every one of these locations. You've got to be able to do all your services, lifecycle management, everything completely remove. >> Self-healing, all this good stuffs. >> Exactly. It has to be completely automated and self-healing and upgradeable and you know, life cycle managed from the cloud, so to speak. And so there's going to be this interlinkage between the edge and the cloud, and you're going to actually, essentially what you need is a cloud managed edge. >> Yeah, and this is where the super cloud extends, where you can extend the value of what you're building to these dynamically new emerging, and it's just the beginning. There'll be more. >> Oh, there's a ton of new applications emerging there. And I think that's going to be, I mean, there's people out there who code that half of data is going to be generated at the edge in a couple of years. >> Well, Rajiv, I am excited that you can bring the depth of technical architectural knowledge to the table on supercloud, as well as run a company. Congratulations on your success, and thanks for sharing with us and being part of our community. >> No, thank you, John, for having me on your show. >> Okay. Supercloud 22, we're continuing to open up the conversation. There is structural change happening. We're going to watch it. We're going to make it an open conversation. We're not going to make a decision. We're going to just let everyone discuss it and see how it evolves and on the best in the business discussing it, and we're going to keep it going. Thanks for watching. (digital music)

(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of the Global .NEXT Digital Experience brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Digital Experience. We've got two of the c-suite here to really dig into some of the strategy and partnerships talked at their annual user conference. Happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni first of all, we have Tarkan Maner. He is the Chief Customer Officer at Nutanix and joining us also Rajiv Mirani, he is the Chief Technology Officer, CTO. Rajiv, Tarkan, great to see you both. Thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE. >> Great to be back. >> Good to see you. >> All right. So Tarkan talk about a number of announcements. You had some big partner executives up on stage. As I just talked with Monica about, Scott Guthrie wearing the signature red polo, you had Kirk Skaugen from Lenovo of course, a real growing partnership with Nutanix, a bunch of others and even my understanding the partner program for how you go to market has gone through a lot. So a whole lot of stuff to go into, partnerships, don't need to tackle it all here upfront, but give us some of the highlights from your standpoint. >> I'll tell this to my dear friend Rajiv and I've been really busy, last few months and last 12 months have been super, super busy for us. And as you know, the latest announcements we made the new $750 million investment from Bain capital, amazing if by 20 results, Q4, big results. And obviously in the last few months big announcements with AWS as part of our hybrid multicloud vision and obviously Rajiv and I, we're making sale announcements, product announcements, partner announcements at .NEXT. So at a high level, I know Rajiv is going to cover this a little bit more in detail, but we covered everything under these three premises. Run better, run faster and run anywhere. Without stealing the thunder from Rajiv, but I just want to give you at a high level a little bit. What excites us a lot is obviously the customer partner intimacy and all this new IP innovation and announcement also very strong, very tight operational results and operational execution makes the company really special as a independent software vendor in this multicloud era. Obviously, we are the only true independent software vendor to do not run a business in a sense with fast growth. Timed to that announcement chain we make this big announcement with Azure partnership, our Nutanix portfolio under the Nutanix cluster ran now available as Bare-Metal Service on Azure after AWS. The partnership is new with Azure. We just announced the first angle of it. Limited access customers are taking it to look at the service. We're going to have a public preview in a few months, and more to come. And obviously we're not going to stop there. We have tons of work going on with other cloud providers, as well. Tying that, obviously, big focus with our Citrix partnership globally around our end user computing business as Rajiv will outline further, our portfolio on top of our digital infrastructure, tying the data center services, DevOps services, and you user computing services, Citrix partnership becomes a big one, and obviously you're tying the Lenovo and HP partnership to these things as the core platforms to run that business. It's creating tons of opportunity and I'll cover a little bit more further in a bit more detail, but one other partnership we are also focusing on, our Google partnership and on desktop as a service. So these are all coming to get around data center, DevOps, and user competent services on top of that amazing infrastructure Rajiv and team built over the past 10 years. I see Rajiv as one of our co-founders and one side with the right another. So the business is obviously booming in multiple fronts. This, if by 2020 was a great starting point with all this investment, that bank capital $750 million, big execution, ACD transition, software transition. And obviously these cloud partnerships are going to make big differences moving forward. >> Yeah, so Rajiv, want to build off what Tarkan was just saying there, that really coming together, when I heard the strategy run better, run faster, run anywhere, it really pulled together some of the threads I've been watching at Nutanix the last couple of years. There's been some SaaS solutions where it was like, wait, I don't understand how that ties back to really the core of what Nutanix does. And of course, Nutanix is more than just an HCI company, it's software and that simplicity and the experience as your team has always said, trying to make things invisible, but help if you would kind of lay out, there's a lot of announcements, but architecturally, there were some significant changes from the core, as well as, if I'm reading it right, it feels like the portfolio has a little bit more cohesion than I was seeing a year or so ago. >> Yeah, actually the theme around all these announcements is the same really, it's this ability to run any application, whether it's the most demanding traditional applications, the SAP HANA, the Epics and so on, but also the more modern cloud native application, any kind of application, we want the best platform. We want a platform that's simple, seamless, and secure, but we want to be able to run every application, we want to run it with great performance. So if you look at the announcements that are being made around strengthening the core with the Block Store, adding things like virtual networking, as well as announcements we made around building Karbon platform services, essentially making it easier for developers to build applications in a new cloud native way, but still have the choice of running them on premises or in the cloud. We believe we have the best platform for all of that. And then of course you want to give customers the optionality to run these applications anywhere they want, whether that's a private cloud, their own private data centers and service providers, or in the public cloud and the hyperscalers. So we give them that whole range of choices, and you can see that all the announcements fit into that one theme: any application, anywhere, that's basically it. >> Well, I'd like you to build just a little bit more on the application piece. The developer conversation is something we've been hearing from Nutanix the last couple of years. We've seen you in the cloud native space. Of course, Karbon is your Kubernetes offering. So the line I used a couple of years ago at .NEXT was modernize the platform, then you can modernize all of your applications on top of it, so where does Nutanix touch the developer? You know, how does that, building new apps, modernizing my apps tie into the Nutanix discussion? >> Yeah great question, Stu. So last year we introduced Karbon for the first time. And if you look at Karbon, the initial offering was really targeted at an IT audience, right? So it's basically the goal was to make Kubernetes management itself very easy for the IT professional. So essentially, whether you were creating a Nutanix, sorry, a Karbon cluster, or scaling it out or upgrading Kubernetes itself. We wanted to make that part of the life cycle very, very simple for IT. For the developer we offered the Vanilla Kubernetes system. And this was something that developers asked us for again and again, don't go around mucking around with Kubernetes itself, we want Vanilla Kubernetes, we want to use our Kube Cuddle or the tools that we're used to. So don't go fork off and build the economic Kubernetes distribution. That's the last thing we want. So we had a good platform already, but then we wanted to take the next step because very few applications today are self contained in the sense that they run entirely within themselves without dependence on external services, especially when you're building in the cloud, you have access, suppose you're building an Amazon, you have access to RDS to manage your databases. Don't have to manage it yourself. Your object stores, data pipelines, all kinds of platform services available, which really can accelerate development of your own applications, right? So we took the stand said, look, this is good. This is important. We want to give developers the same kind of services, but we want to make it much more democratic in the sense that we want them to be able to run these applications anywhere, not just on AWS or not just on GCP. And that's really the genesis of Kubernetes platform services. We've taken the most common services people use in the cloud and made them available to run anywhere. Public cloud, private cloud, anywhere. So we think it's very exciting. >> Tarkan, we had, you and I had a discussion with one of your partners on how this hybrid cloud scenario is playing out at HP discover, of course, with the GreenLake solution. I'm curious from your standpoint, all the things that Rajiv was just talking about, that's a real change, if you think about kind of the traditional infrastructure people they're needing to move up the stack. You've got partnerships with the hyperscalers. So help explain a little bit the ripple effect as Nutanix helps customers simplify and modernize, how your partners and your channel can still participate. >> So perfect, look, as you heard from Rajiv, this is like all coming super nicely together. As Rajiv outlined, with the data center, operations and services, DevOps services, to enable that faster time to market capable, that Kubernetes offering and user services, our desktop services on top of that classical industry-leading, record-breaking digital infrastructure. That hybrid cloud infrastructure we call today. You play this game with devoting a little bit, as you remember, we used to call hyper-converged infrastructure. Now we call it of the hybrid cloud infrastructure, in a sense. All those pieces coming together nicely end-to-end, unlike any other vendor, and from a software only perspective, we're not owned by a hardware company which is making a huge difference. Gives us tremendous level of flexibility, democratization, and freedom of choice. Cloud to us is basically is not a destination. It's an operating model. You heard me say this before, as Rajiv also said. So in our strategy, when you look at it, Stu, we have a three pronged approach on top of our on-prem, marketplace on-prem capable. There's been 17,000+ customers, 7,000+ channel and strategic partners. Also as part of this big announcement, this new partner program we called Elevate, on the Elevate brand, bringing all the channel partners, ISEs, platform partners, hyperscalers, Telco XPSs, and our global market partners all in one bucket where we manage them, simply the incentives. It's a very simple way to execute that opposite Chris Kaddaras, our Chief Revenue Officer, as well as Christian Alvarez, our Chief Partner Officer sort of speaking on global goal, the channels, working together tightly with our organization on the product front to deliver this. So one key point I want to share with you, tying to what Rajiv said earlier on the multicloud area, obviously we realize customers are looking for freedom of choice. So we have our own cloud, Nutanix cloud, under the XI brand. X-I, XI brand, which is basically our own logistics, our own basically, serviceability, payment capability and our software, running off our portal partnerships like Equinix delivering that software as a service. We started with disaster recovery as a service, very fast growing business. Now we announced our GreenLake partnership with HPE in the backend that data center as a service might be actually HP GreenLake if the customer wants it. So that partnership creates huge opportunities for us. Obviously, on top of that, we have these Telco XSP partnerships. As we're announcing partnerships with some amazing source providers like OBH. You heard today from college Sudani in society general, they are not only using AWS and Azure and Nutanix on-prem and Nutanix clusters on Azure and AWS for their internal departments, but they also use a local service provider in France for data gravity and data security reasons. A French company dealing with French business and data centers, with that kind of data governance requirements within the country, within the borders of France. So in that context we are also the service provider partnerships coming in. We're going to announce a partnership with OVHS vault, which is a big deal for us. And tying to this, as Rajiv talked about, our clusters portfolio, our portfolio basically running on-prem on AWS and Azure. And we're not going to stop there obviously. So give choice to the customers. So as Rajiv said, basically, Nutanix can run anywhere. On top of that we announced just today with Capgemini, a new dev test environment is a service. Where Rajiv's portfolio, end-to-end, data center, DevOps, and some of the UC capabilities for dev test reasons can run as a service on Capgemini cloud. We have similar partnerships with HCL, similar partnerships with (indistinct) and we're super excited for this .NEXT in FI21 because of those reasons. >> Rajiv, one of the real challenges we've had for a long time is, I want to be able to have that optionality. I want to be able to live in any environment. I don't want to be stuck in an environment, but I want to be able to take advantage of the innovation and the functionality that's there. Can you give us a little bit of insight? How do you make sure that Nutanix can live these environments like the new Azure partnership and it has the Nutanix experience, yet I can take advantage of, whether it be AI or some other capabilities that a Google, an Amazon or a Microsoft has. How do you balance that? You have to integrate with all of these partners yet, not lock out the features that they keep adding. >> Right, absolutely, that's a great point, Stu. And that's something we pride ourselves on, that we're not taking shortcuts. We're not trying to create our own bubble in these hyperscalers, where we run in an isolated environment and can't interact with the rest of the services they offer. And that's primarily why we have spent the time and the effort to integrate closely with their virtual networking, with the services that they provide and essentially offer the best of both worlds. We take the Nutanix stack, the entire software stack, everything we build from top to bottom, make it available. So the same experience is there with upgrades and prism, the same experience is available on-prem and in the cloud. But at the same time, as you said, we want people to have full speed access to cloud services. There's things the cloud is doing that will be very difficult for anybody to do. I mean, the kind of thing that, say Google does with AI, or Azure does with databases. It's remarkable what these guys are doing, and you want to take advantage of those services. So for us, it's very, very important, that access is not constrained in any way, but also that customers have the time to make this journey, right? If they want to move to cloud today, they can do that. And then they can refactor and redevelop their applications over time and start consuming these sales. So it's not an all or nothing proposition. It's not that you have to refactor it, rewrite before you can move forward. That's been extremely important for us and it's really topical right now, especially with this pandemic. I think one thing all of IT has realized is that you have to be agile. You have to be able to react to things and timeframes you never thought you needed to, right. So it's not just disaster recovery, but the amount of effort that's gone in the last few months in enabling a distributed workforce, who thought it would happen so quickly? But it's a kind of agility that, an optionality that we are giving to customers that really makes it possible. >> Yeah, absolutely. Right now, things are moving pretty fast. So let me let both of you have the final word. Give us a little bit viewpoint, as things are moving fast, what's on the plate? What should we be expecting to see from Nutanix and your ecosystem through the rest of 2020, Tarkan? >> So look, heard from us, Stu, I know you're talking to multiple folks and you had this discussions with us, end-to-end, and look for the company to be successful, customer partner intimacy, IP innovation, and execution, and operational excellence. Obviously, all three things need to come together. So in a sense, Stu, we just need to keep moving. I give this analogy a lot, as Benjamin Franklin says, the human beings are divided in three categories, you know? The first one is those who are immovable. They never move. Second category, those who, you know, are movable, you can move them if you try hard. And obviously third category, those who just move. Not only themselves, but they move others, like in a sense, in a nice way to refer to Benjamin Franklin, with one of our key founders in the US, in a sense as the founders of this company, with folks like Rajiv and other executives, and some of the newcomers, we a culture, which just keeps moving and the last 12 months, you've seen some of these. And obviously going back to the announcement day, AWS, now Azure, the Capgemini announcement then test as a service around some of the portfolio that Rajiv talked about or a Google partnership on desktop as a service, deep focus on Citrix globally with Azure, Google, and ourselves on-prem, off-prem. And obviously some of the big moves were making with some of the customers, it's going to continue. This is just the beginning. I mean, literally Rajiv and I are doing these .NEXT conferences, announcements, and so on. We're actually doing calls right now to basically execute for the next 12 months. We're planning the next 12 months' execution. So we're super excited now with this new Bain Capital investment, and also the partnership, the product, we're ready to rock and roll. So look forward to seeing you soon, Stu, and we're going to have more news to cover with you. >> Yeah, exactly right, Tarkan. I think as Tarkan said we are at the beginning of a journey right now. I think the way hybrid cloud is now becoming seamless opens up so many possibilities for customers, things that were never possible before. Most people when they talk hybrid cloud, they're talking about fairly separate environments, some applications running in the public cloud, some running on premises. Applications that are themselves hybrid that run across, or that can burst from one to the other, or can move around with both app and data mobility. I think the possibilities are huge. And it's going to be many years before we see the full potential of this platform. >> Well Rajiv and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, congratulations on the progress, and absolutely look forward to catching up in the near future and watching the journey. >> Thanks, Stu. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And stay with us for more coverage here from the Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>>lie from Copenhagen, Denmark. >>It's the >>Q covering Nutanix dot Next 2019. Brought to you by >>Nutanix. Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix. Stop! Next here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, coasting along side of stew minimum. Of course. We're joined by Regime Mirani. He is the CTO clad platforms at Nutanix. Thank you so much for coming on the Cubans. You need >>to be here as usual. >>So you were up on the main stage talking about your guiding force. Your mission to make enterprise computing so reliable, so ubiquitous that it's invisible. >>You don't think about >>it. You don't even get a little No, I mean, look, >>if you look at any successful technology, consumer technology doesn't need to be aware of the details around it, right? I mean, take cars, even because the first introduced you probably had to understand Rick operate. There was how it all works. Remember for water in the radiator. But most people don't know how to do that today. I wouldn't know how to do that today, even though my Utah actually had to do some of those things. Um, that isn't the point. of the cars or self driving. Now the same thing should happen to computing. And we spend way too much time today just doing things that keep the light. Don't nights on. Just imagine infrastructure patching things up, grading them. I really should be something that not what idea is doing i d should be focusing on the business, delivering applications that their customers need and not so much on managing infrastructure. >>Rajiv, that one click Simplicity is so important, yet we know things are becoming even more complicated. Bring us inside a little bit that you know, you've got 14,000 customers. Guess and there's been a major, basically rewrite of a less to be able to be ready for all of the new ash cloud Native envy me obtained, you know, you name it all of these things. How do you balance getting all of this new stuff up with making sure that you keep that simplicity and don't make things for all of your customers while all the jet engines, uh, you know, >>it takes constant effort. It takes a conscious effort to make sure that things are in drifting away from our goal of being simple and to be frank. At times it has and you know, we periodically to audits off all our work floors. Make sure that as simple as you think they are and haven't drifted over time. And occasionally we do find some rail clunkers and have to go back and fix those things. What >>makes it >>different is that we start with a fairly opinionated view on how things should be done. The idea is to make it simple for 99% of the people, while still offering the all that washed options of one person power users would need them and making sure that we understand what 90% 99% of people need. And focusing on that is very important to a lot of customer focus study sort of design reviews, but also this constant going back and you're taking work feel like we m creation like provisioning of'em. When he started, it was pretty simple right then, as we started adding more and more options eyes, this thing going to use a PC I passed through isn't going to use this option. That option suddenly realized that now they're 30 things that people are feeling into provisional we have, most of which nobody cares I care about. So you go back, read I tte keep doing that again and again and again. >>So rich Eve It's one thing when you talk about living on different servers, whether it be super micro underneath or Delhi Emcee Lenovo H p e. It's >>gonna be a >>little bit different if you're talking about where you're going with H p E Green Lake with, you know, the X in AWS that you talk about when I talk to people, you know, it's like, Oh, I'm trying to use terror form and you know, But I have to write it. One way to work with Amazon. I have to write it another way. If it's, you know, azure G C P S o. You know, will Nutanix be able to keep that simplicity and bring, you know, homogeneity to thes dispersed invite? >>Absolutely. So the point is, watch a layer of abstraction right the way we are going to public cloud away we go every server winter out the way of doing things and sigh all if it starts with the hyper wiser and the story of stock and networking with three layers of abstraction. And if you have the same three components everywhere, everything we built on top of that remains exactly the same. Prison was the same on a P S. On the same. Everything looks the same. So higher level constructs like calm and so on don't have to be aware of what the actual substrate is creating a calm blueprint, whether it works on ZAY on AWS or whether Trump's on SX or whether runs on Nutanix H way. The blue blueprint remains exactly the same. Now, if you want to consume more, service is if you want to consume. So this is an Amazon, which are not available on premises. You want to use things like auto scaling groups in Ec2. Sure, you could then create blueprints that our customers we're putting in the substrate. >>So, in terms of this, you said, you start with a very opinionated place of where the customer is well, First of all, it's based on customer feedback and customer surveys. And so where were are you right now in terms of where the customer is? Are you meeting the customer now, or is the customer ahead or what? Where would you describe that? I think it >>depends on what you're looking at. If you're looking at the core products, absolutely, the customers are with us. They were ready to consume. They actually drive a lot of the innovation that we're doing. We're feeding, feeding back changes that we could be doing to make things even simpler on the private cloud side that's getting there. I think we get a lot off feedback on files on on present pro on com on on Flow because those have started getting a lot of adoption in the market, and we do get a lot of feedback on them on. So our newer products that you started a war being more recently, it's a more collaborative process. There were actually working with customers directly understanding their problems on dhe, moving a roadmap forward based on that. So while it's early in terms off adoption in production, the whole process is very collaborative in those situations. So we really are very close to the customers there. >>What are some of the biggest customer problems right now that they're facing what's what's keeping them up at night and therefore keeping you up at night? >>Security is always a big one. Complexity, people skills. All those things are big problems. In fact, one of the biggest things like that was just training enough people to handle all the complexity in a data set. Is the Morrigan removed from that? The more they don't have to focus on that, the easier you make their lives. The other thing is just a lot of time to spend on routine activities which, which acquired disruption to service is right. This is something we've talked about before. Why does it Why does it require a legacy three tier system to have maintenance windows and downtime to do an upgrade? Google our has downtime. Google is never down for maintenance. Doesn't mean they're not already there waiting all the time. So how do we bring that same kind of capabilities on premises that's gonna focus our long power? >>So, Rajiv, when I'm talking to users out there, when they talk about all of the items that are out there that they need to deal with and the routine task automation is something keeps, you know, coming up. So tell us where automation fits into some of the new things that you were talking about today in this week with your customer? >>Yeah, automation >>for us. Waking automation in three steps anything that's automatic better be safe. First of all, safety is paramount. Started security. It has to be simple, and we talked about how calm provides for that. And then you can start adding in this new wave off technologies around artificial intelligence and machine learning. And it's not so much about automation right now. It's all gone to me. It's it's autonomous operations, not just scripts. That due to a task on dhe, that's >>an area >>we invested in very heavily early on with our prison pro product way, build our own patented or thumbs for machine learning applied them to operational metrics like capacity planning. And what if modeling and dynamic alerts and what we've been doing with that is extending that more into the application layer so that not only can you apply these algorithms to CP when memory, we can actually get insights into Hey, the Leighton see on this particular application looks somewhat unusual, or the amount of cash available on a sequel server is unusually low and act on those, and the other part is acting on on alert. Something happens. There's a human being need to get in wall to solve for that. And if it does, then well, it's not really automatic. Right? So that's the other part that we introduce, which is a cross for a product which lets you define these action chains that automatically, uh, what about to be triggered when Annie went on alert takes place, they can go ahead and fix the problem. But also, you know, simple things like send your slack notification or an email locked. They went, maybe create a snapshot of your wee am so that you could go back and be back problems later. All that sort of thing made really, really simple. >>Yes, it goes back to the simplicity and the invisibility to this. >>Yes, yes. Uh, autonomous data centers, by definition, have to be invisible, right? If if if If you're to get involved in marriage and autonomous Data center, then what's the plane? It's a point. Exactly. So the whole idea is that, uh, human involvement in day to day operations against solo that everybody's focused on applications on line of business use cases. >>Rajiv, when it when it comes to those applications. You know, you talked about some of the new enhancements like envy me on and obtain, You know, Where are your customers today? You know, Are there any interesting applications that you're seeing them deploying today? Ah, Pattern. I've talked about the last couple of years of the Nutanix show, is modernized the platform and then modernized the absolute top of it. Things like container ization. I'm sure to bell curve in a journey where all the customers But you know, what are some of the patterns that air starting emergen where they finding success? >>Yeah, This >>whole wave off new applications around data pipelines with Kafka spark things like that Apache stack effectively which are putting more more off load on storage in particular. So that's that's one area. We see customers looking for more performance. But >>even, >>you know, some of the traditional ah traditional uh, applications like ASAP Hana and epic and meditate expanse. They also have patterns which can benefit greatly with some of that wants wants that we have been making and gets a technical issue. No, The size of the working said with it all fits and car and on sst was spitting on magnetic drives. But something like we've been doing is moving the overheads. If you do have a miss and you go to slow a media, you still get good performance. And that's really how we're getting good to the new. >>Well, yeah, maybe without getting, you know, we don't need to go drill down into the core of the intel chip everything. But you know, Nutanix doesn't just take off the shelf stuff and, you know, put a box together. It's software, and there's work that happens with your partners in the ecosystem. Give us a little flavor as toe. You know where you're making the investments and where some of those partnerships and integrations or a key? >>Yeah, So on the platform side, Ah, a lot of the investments happen in validation of the platforms, making sure that we're ahead of the curve in adopting technologies but also feeding back from our side things we would like to see in the platform. Right? So how do you adapt things like R d m A. To handle not just the traditional work with the happy converge workload? How do you essentially look for things in this new class? of memories that would benefit from data locality for us. So that's one class off partnership that we have the hardware vendors with GHB, with Intel, with the IBM, a whole bunch of people. But >>then >>we also have partnerships up the stock these days with companies like service. Now, with we for backup for for our mind product. I think you saw a little bit of that today. It's a whole bunch of things happening across all areas. >>One of the things that it really comes across at this conference is just how strong Nutanix culture is. The company culture, the humble, honest, hungry and another word that's creeping in now is resilient. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your division of the company and describe how the company's resilience, the employees and the company itself has really displayed itself. >>So, you know, as it any company you know, Any time you go through the kind of growth we have, there's the forward momentum that everybody sees. They also a lot of setbacks that people don't really see, and they've been a whole bunch of us off these in our history. They've been areas where literally. The product has has a floor which is so fundamental we call it internally a near death experience. What's really great until again, from an engineering point of yours, how the teams come together at that point instead of these war rooms, even working weekends, Everybody's there. Everybody's on it and nobody talks about. Hey, look, where's my work? Life? Balance of things like that, especially when they're the customer in world. If there's if there's a problem that's causing customers outages, our engineers will give up everything. They'll give up everything and not just at work with their lives to make sure that gets fixed. And that has helped us get Basti setbacks get back in stride. Happens last Now. It used to happen a lot earlier, but spill this real culture resilience from the big *** in the early engineers. >>All right, Rajiv, what's exciting? You going forward? You know you don't have to touch on this one. But you know, when I saw at the end, the site clusters and hibernate feature was something that was like, Oh, yeah. I don't think I've seen that as to how I could make sure I save my data be ableto, you know, Shut things down. Maybe start there. But give us You know what a little bit. Look forward as to where the team's playing. >>Now, that's kind of, >>you know, thinking that detail thing that you have to do. What, you want to launch a new product, right? Okay, look, the whole point of doing doings, I clusters on Amazon. One of the biggest use cases. This cloud bursting cloud busting is not just about increasing your workload size, scaling it up at some point, you want to scale it down? How do you do that for state for work? Stateless. It's easy. All I'm registering Web servers over that sort of my way, they're gone. But our database that I scaled out over there well, that data can't go away. So we had to find ways to essentially solve for those from. So that's how the hibernate feature came around in general, The bigger question that you asked about, You know what I'm most excited about? I >>think this >>whole convergence of private and public cloud with same stack on both sides is a new new tank. It really hasn't existed before. Um, the father applications can now move back and forth seamlessly between public cloud and private cloud without rewriting without re factoring without a big lift and shift is very, very interesting. But by itself, it's not enough. Um, the flip that's missing is what about data movement? What about if you have your data and Amazon and I want to move it on premises? That there really are no good solutions of the Amazon doesn't give you a P eyes on dhe the tools to do that. So I think data movement's gonna be a big thing. And then Billy, a common service's tack on board because it's not just networking, storage in and compute anymore, right? If you're an Amazon, you're probably using all kinds off. Networking service is security groups. Ah, Route 53. How do you take those kind of service is and also make them available on premises. >>So, Rajiv, is there anything you've learned as a team when you look at AWS outposts or Oracle clouded customer, we've had a few years of talking about, but not a lot of deployments yet, so, you know, not saying you're late to the market, but you know what would have been able to sit back and learn from what has been done so far. >>So the >>reason we >>a little bit late to the market is that we think of solving a problem which the other windows are not, Which is kind of what I alluded to before that is that how do you support both the legacy applications on the cloud Net Cloud applications? How do you provide for migration both ways? Applications of a born in the cloud and now you want to move them on premises or applications of a born on premises and you want to move them to the Cloud Outpost is great. I think it's a good good product of technologies that AWS are thinks that hybrid is the right strategy, but it's also one problem. It's also the problem off cloud applications running on premises it does not solve for the problem of legacy applications running and cloud right, that is just a cz difficult as ever. That's that's not become any easier without force. Similarly, if you look at what we are very swing with AWS, it's also legacy applications going going to AWS. But in doing so, they don't have access to all the different networking services that AWS offers because you're not running and a sex, and you're kind of running a different networking start tonight. So with well, thought long and hard about this problem. And I said, Hey, look, we're not going to take the easy answer over here. You can take Take our stock, which is known to run both legacy and cloud native applications. If probe in that on Internet natively into Amazon so that you can use Amazon service is you can use our service is you can a legacy. Applications can run more than applications without giving up. Anything on that, I think is why signal this longer? But I think it's a more powerful solution for the long term. >>Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. It's always a pleasure having you on my back and see us again. Thanks. I'm Rebecca Knight for stew. Minutemen stay more of the cubes. Live coverage of dot Next Nutanix here in Copenhagen,

>>Live from Washington DC. It's the cube covering Boomi world 19 how to bide bullying. >>Welcome to the cue of the leader in live tech coverage. Lisa Martin with John furrier live at Boomi world 2019 in DC. John and I are pleased to welcome one of our next guests, Rajiv Ahuja managing director, Deloitte consulting. Rajiv welcome to theCUBE. Thank you Lisa. So just saw the news yesterday, a partner summit, Deloitte named the 2019 innovation partner of the year. Congratulations to Deloitte on that. >>Thank you very much. We are very proud and honored to be an innovation partner with Boomi Uh, it's been a great journey with boomi. >>You are worldwide partner of the year last year. Talk to us about the Deloitte Boomi partnership, the Alliance, all the good stuff that's going on there. >>imooBSo we've been a boomi partner for a number of years now and our partnership has grown leaps and bounds over this time. Uh, we picked up Boomi as a, as an Alliance partner as years back because of the strength of their product. Phenomenal innovative product, great I-PASS platform. Uh, we love booming because of not just the features of its platform and product, but also because of the fact that it's easy to implement for our clients. Uh, it, it, it's easy to implement, uh, from a business perspective. Um, beauty of the product is that it has a lot of prebuilt integrations that it provides to our, our partners. Uh, and, and, and as a, as an Alliance partner with them. Uh, it provides by this all that we need from, in terms of training, in terms of, uh, you know, sales opportunities that we worked together with them on. >>As a management consultant and a global system integrator. You guys are, you work with a lot of big customers with big problems, big projects, broken down into smaller projects. What's the landscape look like from a customer? Digital transformation has been talked about for many, many years. People process technology. Why is Boomi doing so well? What's the, what's their secret sauce and what are the customers liking about booming? >>Excellent question. Um, so when we think about our clients right now, our clients are dealing with really business problems. They're talking about digital transformation. They're talking about, uh, cloud. They're talking about IoT, they're talking about, about, uh, how do we, how do they use AI? So those are the big problems that our clients are dealing with. Those are the big challenges and opportunities that declines have in front of them. And when our clients think of these, these opportunities and challenges are, there are three things that they need to deal with. They, they need to make sure that when they undertake these large transformations, they're able to easily integrate data that currently resides in a lot of their on-prim applications. In many of these transformation, the long pole in the tent happens to be the integration layer. That's what kind of holds back a lot of these transformation efforts. >>And Boomi is an excellent product to help them with that. A second area where clients kind of have to deal with Israeli, the speed of innovation. That's a big challenge that our clients have to deal with today. Uh, and, and, and, uh, you know, go another day is when you could bring out a new release of your product every three months, every six months. Our clients, customers, they need to see some new features every few weeks. And, and a large part about making change happen quickly is around being able to bring in the relevant data from your enterprise pretty quickly as well. And again, Boomi with its simplicity, uh, and providing an ability to simply integrate, uh, uh, products quickly. And you know, that helps with that agility as well as the speed of innovation or the number of projects increasing in companies. Because, you know, with data and agile application development, there's more projects happening. >>Do you see the numbers increasing? Can you share some insight into what that looked like? Is it a lot, is there order of magnitude? Is it changed? Is it the same game is 10, 15 years ago, but just broken down into smaller projects? One big project comes in. What's the, what's the, what's the project landscape like? >> So for us, uh, it's been, uh, a tremendous growth journey over the last 10 years. Okay. The number of projects, again driven by digital transformation efforts, cloud efforts, the number of projects, the kind of projects, the flavor of projects that is coming up. And the sheer volume of projects is around clients thinking about moving to SAS based application models, thinking about their digital transformation and then taking up more mobile as well as digital projects at this stage. Thinking about their, their uh, you know, big M and a deals at this stage. Uh, all these kind of changes within their environment and within their demands that their customers and the mining of them. That has really spiked up the level of number of projects that we see at the state. >>Are you seeing that in terms of the spike in projects similar between like an established business that might have all these silos of, of applications that don't connect versus like a, say a younger startup that might have a ton of data and they're trying to move so quickly? Are there the types of integration projects that they're needing to implement to transform? Pretty similar, >>so, so, eh, similar, but there are some unique characteristics for each of these. Uh, two uh, sort of buckets of clients I would say, or bucket of companies in a more traditional companies today. Really the need is around. Um, and I'll give you a few examples, right. Um, there is a big need among larger companies to, to move to cloud. A number of our clients have mandated that moving to cloud and taking their, their applications to the cloud is their priority number one. For a typical large sized company, their application landscape could be anywhere from about five to 600 applications in the ID portfolio to close to four to 5,000 applications. So if you look at that application landscape, the reality is that the push to the cloud at this moment of time across most of our clients, they have 15 20% of their applications in the cloud. They're using certain sass applications, they have their own custom applications that have been put on a cloud platform and then they still have a large proportion of their applications on prem as well. So that's the reality of application landscape. For our last scale clients and with this reality, the ability to integrate cloud to cloud applications, cloud two on-prem applications and on-prem to application on prem applications. That's, that's the key need for integration for our large scale clients. >>Reggie, I want to get your personal opinion on something. You've been in the industry for long time now. You seen many waves, maybe computer, client server, local area networking, inter networking, internet, web, web two. Dot. Oh, cloud cloud one. Dot. Oh, cloud 2.0 which we're in now. What is the big story in your mind, what's the most important story that in tech today in your mind and what's the most important story that isn't being told or isn't being shared? Talked enough about >>the, the big story that has been talked about and I mentioned earlier, right? Is, is multicloud that's the big story that kind of is on the surface. The big story is that ultimately everything has to be business driven. It's the customer that is demanding change from our clients. The customer is saying that they are, they want to just deal with mobile. The younger customer, which will be the customer for of tomorrow, they want to be mobile. Right? And our clients, whether it's financial services clients or retail clients or any clients, uh, in most of the industry, you know, that's where their mind is. They want to be mobile first. They want to be cloud first. So that's the big story that's being told. And every client across flawless, all all industries that we support, that's the same story that we hear at every line. Right? The second big story at our clients is, is that that, that the computational power as has gone has, has improved so much that IOT connections with IOT, that's reality now that is coming reality, that's becoming reality. The third big story at our clients is that the traditional on prem applications that run the core guts of our clients, they haven't gone away. They're here to stay for some time. Most of our clients want to transform their core applications, but, but they haven't yet spend the money to, to transform them, >>you know, and great perspective. Thank you for sharing that insight. Uh, one of the interesting things about cloud 2.0 I'm calling it cloud 2.0 cause we were kind of in cloud 2.0 world cloud one. Dot. O was compute storage scale up Amazon born in the cloud API APIs, agile grade cloud, cheap windows enterprise is hard. Multicloud hybrid cloud Coobernetti's containers, legacy infrastructure sins you mentioned. But one thing that's interesting and I'd like to get your thoughts on is that network management used to be a small white space. Then that turned into observability companies going public great solutions. So observability is now a big category. Automation is taking configuration management and turning that into a whole category around automation. Automation is a really big hot trend right now that's ultimately a data driven business driven opportunity. So observability automation, these are tell signs for cloud 2.0 what is your view on this? Someone who's been in the industry for while talking to customers as they start to think about standing up IOT or scaling up mobile automation's important. Data's important. What's your >>no, absolutely. At the end of the day it's all about data. At the end of the day, uh, when we talk about automation, right, and we're talking about end devices, we're talking about connectivity with the end devices, we're talking about our IOT and those connectivity. But at the end of the day, the heart of it is integration and bringing data that is residing either on prem, in core systems that you have all on the cloud in the courses from that you have, how do you bring that data at the forefront of your edge? A second key aspect around around cloud to auto is it's an ecosystem. Basically. It's an ecosystem place based basically not just in terms of sharing data within your walls and sharing data with your own ecosystem partners, but it's an ecosystem based play in cloud to Datto in terms of also utilizing what your ecosystem provides. So today there is really no need for a lot of our partners to kind of do a lot of lot of their compute inside. You know, when you think about AI, a lot of gold is available in the market today that you can leverage with your ecosystem players. So ecosystem players. Also another interesting aspect about cloud dude auto that often gets old. >>You talked a minute ago about you know, the, the need to have cloud to on prem integration on prem to on-prem, et cetera. And one of the things that I was reading about Boomi is, well, iPads used to be all about 10 years ago connecting on prem, sorry, the cloud to on-prem. Now it's any data source anywhere, any integration edge. You talked about that we have this as consumers, we have this demand to have everything mobile, right? Whenever, whatever it is that we want to call an Uber or maybe a CFO needs to procure some software. What, how does that influence Dillard's go to market strategy with Boomi knowing that booby is integrating on prem cloud edge? All of it? >>So great question. Uh, there are, there are really freaky, um, kind of opportunities that we see when we implement with our clients. Uh, the first big opportunity that we see is when our clients are, are taking a journey to the cloud. Uh, let's say many of our clients want to implement core SAS solution. They're implementing a net net suite solution, they're thinking of SAP S four HANA implementation on the cloud. They're thinking of both the implementation on the cloud, right? With any large SAS platform implementation, there is always need for connectivity to on-prem applications, other SAS applications at times two end devices, right? That's the point where we see a lot of our projects. That's the point where we see a lot of opportunity to help our clients using Boomi as an integration platform. Right? A second big area where we see, uh, our clients needing help is when in their life cycle there is a big event, for example, a big MNA deal, a big divestiture that that might be planning product launch or something significant, something significant. >>And at that point of time, for example, a typical divestiture deal, typically the company that is being so love at times as a part of the deal, the expectation from the buyer is that the core ID infrastructure that they're buying from the company would also be transformed as a part of the deal. And when that's the case and we have a number of examples of those where where you know as a part of the deal itself, the seller tries to modernize it infrastructure and the first thing they do is they go for a plethora of SAS applications to replace their core legacy applications and they want to integrate them very quickly. And that's another situation where we've seen a product like Boomi being very successful in helping us implement. So those are the two big use cases. And the third one is as obviously as you talked about around digital transformation, so driven by digital transformation, whether it's mobile alone or mobile along with transformations along with gain of some edge computational transformation. That's a situation where again, you know they're there, they're leading a large transformation within their organization. And a part of that is answer is making sure that from an integration perspective they standardize and that's where Boomi comes into a lot, a lot of picture as well. >>Well where do you have tons of opportunity? Tons of momentum. Thank you for joining John and me on the QB day, sharing what Deloitte and Boomi are doing together. And again, congratulations to Deloitte on the partner of innovation partner of the year. Thank you so much. Pleasure to talk with you for Regina and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Boomi world 19 thanks for watching. Thank you very much.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Moscone here. We're at San Francisco VMworld 2019. I'm John Walls, along with Stu Miniman, here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here for our first of three days of coverage here at a very exciting program. I was just blown away by the keynotes this morning. We'll talk about that with Beth Phalen and Rajiv Ramaswami here. Beth is president and GM of data protection at Dell EMC, and Rajiv, of course, the chief operating officer at VMware. So thanks to you both for joining us. >> Good to be here, yeah. >> John: Good to see you both. >> Glad to be here. >> So first off, let's just talk about, if you will, the vibe of the keynotes. Pat, great command of the stage, obviously. Lot of big announcements. But I was just, I thought the whole presentation and the size of the crowd and their reactions were fairly impressive. What was your take on that? >> I totally agree. Being in the audience, it was comprehensive, it was holistic, it told a story that people could connect with, and it recognized just how much the world of IT is changing, and what VMware is doing in influencing that. I was impressed. >> Yeah, no, no, from my vantage point of view, being on the inside here-- >> Yeah. >> It's, yeah, our portfolio continues to get broader and broader. Our relevance to customers keeps getting bigger. And this year in particular, we had a whole series of announcements here. There were two major acquisitions, our largest two acquisitions, over the last week. So there was a lot to digest. And in fact, we were actually working on putting that story together at the very last minute, as you can imagine, because these acquisitions were literally announced on Thursday. (Beth laughs) So a lot came together, it came together beautifully. I thought Pat did a great job putting it all together and giving the story. >> Yeah, I know, the Pivotal, obviously, everybody went 10 days ago, two weeks ago, saying, "It can't happen that fast, can it?" Well, the answer is yes, it can happen that fast. >> Rajiv: Let me give you one more story there. >> Yes, yes. >> You might remember Callum Eade was on stage. He was the guy who swam across the English Channel-- >> Beth: Mm-hm? >> At the very beginning. So just to tell you how last-minute that was, he finished his swim, I talked to him on Friday morning, and then I went to Pat and said, "Pat, you know, one of our guys "actually swam across the English Channel." (Beth laughs) He said, "Yeah, we should have him ontage at VMworld." (Beth and John laugh) >> So we flew him over over the weekend-- >> Wow, wow. >> Here, got him to Vmworld, and there he was onstage. >> (laughs) Oh, man, that's impressive. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It was a great story. It was a good call to bring him in. >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> All right, so obviously, you have this strong partnership that got a little stronger with some announcements today. >> Rajiv: Yeah. >> So let's get into that a little bit. Beth, if you would, talk a little bit about what you announced on stage, or what was announced onstage today. >> Yeah, I mean, there are three things that we're talking about this week, with our good partners at VMware. How we make sure that we have data protection for the Dell EMC cloud, for the VMware Cloud, excuse me, on Dell EMC. Previewing what we're doing to protect Kubernetes environments, which is super exciting. And then the project we talked about just quickly on stage this morning, around how we're doing work together to bring PowerProtect into, as tight as possible, to the best integration for vSphere and our VMware customers. So, Rajiv, anything that I missed, or-- >> Yeah, no, no, at the big-picture level, look, I mean, you've had a long history in data protection solutions. You modernized your portfolio quite a bit over the last year-- >> Beth: Yeah. >> With the introduction of the new X400 appliances and the IDPA PowerProtect software. >> Beth: Yeah. >> And we've been talking together for a while now about, what can we be doing together better? >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> And this just came across, you know, we've been working on this together, and now we have specific things to talk about. So on the first one, which is really data protection for VMware Cloud, now, VMware Cloud on AWS, one of the first use cases, important use cases, is actually around disaster recovery. So customers want to use the cloud or the data as a backup for a DR site. And very cost-effective to do that, it makes a lot of sense. Now, we've been working to continue and improve that solution, and making it much more broadly applicable, making use of native cloud storage capabilities. For example, Amazon S3. And so, that's really the collaboration that we are doing with Beth's team here, where we're using their underlying technology to build a VMware data disaster recovery as a service that will work on our VMware Cloud environments and make use of native cloud storage capabilities. So, very powerful, brings a lot of value for our customers together. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think that everybody watching probably understands just how important it is to have a DR site, but for many companies, it's cost-prohibitive and really old-school to think about having a dedicated DR site. So using the cloud as your destination, if something were to happen, you had to recover, it is an excellent fit, and I expect it to be one of the fastest-growing use cases. We're already seeing it. It's going to continue to grow dramatically going forward, having DR as a service as a core to people's recovery strategy. >> Yeah, Rajiv, one of the things we've been watching is, VMware's always had a robust ecosystem, but it's been going through a major shift. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> You know, VMware kind of at the center, and the server, storage, and network around it to where everything fits in the multi-cloud environment. When we see data protection with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, it's obviously a natural fit, because it's under there. What do you talk to your partners about when you say, "Okay, the Dell side of things is getting "further embedded into VMware"? How do you make sure that you have an open and robust ecosystem without unbalancing that? >> That's a great question. VMware has always prided itself on being a platform company, and you're only a platform company if you actually have a broad ecosystem of people who are building and developing on your platform. >> Stu: True. >> So we are not walking away from that one little bit. We continue to support a very broad-based set of providers across many different functions, whether it be data protection, whether it be security, whether it be compliance, you know, a whole bunch of things around the platform. What we will do, though, is we will pick a set of partners, and we will do deeper integrations with them, right? We are always going to have broad APIs available for everybody. Just as another example with Carbon Black that you saw today, yeah, we had actually partnered with Carbon Black on a deep integration between Carbon Black and AppDefense, okay? But at the same time, we have open APIs with every Guest Introspection provided that there is, and we will continue to maintain that, with every endpoint provided that there is. It's much the same way here. We're going to do deep integration with Beth's team. We are actually using some of their technologies to enhance our services, but also enabling them to do better integration with vSphere and the whole VMware environment, while at the same time allowing a rich ecosystem of third-party providers to work with us on top of our platforms. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Beth, was wondering if you could help us dig in a little bit to that Kubernetes space. >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> So, obviously, a big presence here at the show, you know, Prevalent talked in the keynote. When I walked the show floor, everybody's talking about Kubernetes. >> Beth: Mm-hm, mm-hm. >> So from the data protection standpoint, what's been done to more into that environment? What's different that people might not have known from your group from just a couple of years ago? >> Yeah, a couple of things. One, we've been working on this jointly with Jon Rose's organization and doing an incubation on this for well over a year, and working with Velero, making sure that everything we're doing is tied very closely with what's going on at VMware. And as you start talking about the container space, what you're saying with data protection, it's a different set of assets that you need to protect. You have to make sure that you're protecting the metadata, you have to bring up the whole environment. And so it's sort of a variation on a theme, and what we're particularly proud of is that we're approaching it in a way that's really ground-up and designing data protection, not retrofitting the past, but what are the needs for a Kubernetes environment, and make sure that they can restore that, come back to whatever data they need to do and whatever applications they need to get back to. >> Beth, you talked about Velero, too. I mean, so, what you're talking about, how does that enhance or how is that adding to the data protection capabilities of that, then? What are you building on, in terms of enhanced services there? >> Well, I think, what I understand about the project, I'd like to hear your point of view too, is as Velero builds out and working on the Kubernetes environment, it becomes the center for people's production environment, right? And as you move into a production environment, data protection becomes an essential part of that. So whereas a couple of years ago, Kubernetes might have been something that people were dabbling with, or maybe had not their most important applications running on, it's now becoming center and core. And so, what we're doing, working with VMware, is making sure that directly integrated into that, the UCS has that need around backup, disaster recovery, and all types of RRTO and RPOs are all met, even though now the application's being run in a Kubernetes environment. >> Sort of the conversation around, as we talked about Tanzu, VMware Tanzu-- >> Yeah. >> Which is in our portfolio. >> It's a great name, by the way. >> Thank you. (Beth and John laugh) So the portfolio, the idea here is you're going to have build, run, and manage, and when you look at the manage component of this, it's not just that every service is going to be developed by VMware. There's going to be a set of third-party services that run on top of this platform that will do functions like backup, disaster recovery, for Kubernetes clusters. And my anticipation is that Dell would be a second party, third party on that environment as part of the overall Tanzu portfolio, as a marketplace-type service. >> Beth: Yep, that's what we're working towards. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, just following up on that Tanzu, VMware has mostly been a platform, an infrastructure layer for applications-- >> That's correct. >> You know, Pivotal was the group that really dealt with the modern. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> But you've made some acquisitions. Data protection's always had that integration with the application. What's changing now that requires Dell and VMware to kind of delve upstack a little bit more than it might have in the past? >> For us it's very simple, as Pat already articulated. The world is moving to where it's all about how to build and manage your applications portfolio. That's become a CIO's top job. And so, for us to be relevant to that space, infrastructure companies naturally need to move up-- >> Mm-hm. >> Address the needs of application developers, and while at the same time the application developers need the infrastructure teams to deliver the infrastructure that they can easily build around and manage these apps without having to do it all themselves. So that's really, the bringing together of the developers and the IT operators is what we are doing. And that's the rationale for why we brought Pivotal in-house, and why we are building this overall Tanzu portfolio. >> It's kind of what goes around, comes around, right? >> Absolutely. Well, as Pat explained, right? >> Right. >> You know, six, seven years ago, we weren't really in a position to focus on it. >> Right. >> And it made sense to have Pivotal stand alone-- >> John: The time was right. >> And they invested, they built up their franchise over time, and here we are. The time is right. >> Right, Rajiv, Beth, thank you. I appreciate the time, good to see you. >> Beth: Great discussion. >> Congratulations on day one! Off to a great start, and-- >> Not over yet. (Rajiv and Beth laugh) >> (laughs) Oh, I know, I know, and nor for us. But a great start. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, sir, good to see you both. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Beth, always a pleasure. >> Yes. >> Thanks for being with us once again. >> Thank you. >> Oh, sorry, (laughs) sorry. >> With more live from theCUBE, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2019. (upbeat electronic music)

>> (upbeat music) From San Francisco it's the CUBE covering VMware radio 2019, brought to you by VM ware. >> Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin with John Furrier in our exclusive coverage of VM ware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. John and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube Rajiv Ramaswami, COO of products and cloud services Rajiv, Welcome back >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh thank you glad to be here as always >> Lisa Martin: 15th annual radio a lot of research a lot of innovation. Give our viewers an idea of some of the historical products and services that have come out of the radio and the innovation programs at VMware has been doing for a long time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah I mean, I'm excited about Radio right I mean many of our key innovations came out of Radio. Very early back in the days the fundamental concepts of vSphere replication and disaster recovery came out of Radio papers, a long time ago. Some of the innovations within vSAN were showcased at the radio many many years ago. So across the board, I would say many of the products you know are key portions of the products were deployed I mean in the form of Radio papers over the years and if you look at this year for example you know we can see how things have changed with the times as VMware is evolved, so does Radio along the way. So this year, I was struck by the number of papers on machine learning and AI right, it's forward-looking of course everything we do here and it's just now ML is now across many of our products and that's being you know seen in Radio and of course, what we see at Radio is always more forward-looking than what's actually in the products. So that's an area I see a lot of work and another area I see a lot of work on is Kubernetes and the cloud native and then of course the traditional areas of how to optimize storage, networking and even when it comes to networking and so forth, papers on cloud networking and how you know we can optimize for networking in the cloud So in general, I mean the trend here is a reflection of what we are probably likely to do in the next several years >> John Furrier: One of your jobs as Chief Operating Officer I see, to operate them on the product side of the business generate that kind of enablement for the sales team and ultimately customers right. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yes >> John Furrier: So you've got to kind of mind the farm here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: kind of cultivate and see what's organically growing out of VMware from the top engineering and stuff top papers. what's the process? how do you go attack the all the action because there's a lot of forward-looking stuff there's a lot of pie in the sky is a lot of cool different stuff that looks weird >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: but sometimes that weird stuff looks is actually going to be the future so you got to have a broad perspective, how do you act this? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, in fact I would say one of our biggest jobs is portfolio management. We have to look at balance our investments across this range that you talked about right so at any point in time we will have a set of technologies and products that we incubating these are relatively new sometimes new areas for us sometimes extensions to existing areas that we are incubating and these are of course businesses that don't drive much revenue right now but over times yes hopefully well right and then there are businesses, I'll give you examples of each of these now there are businesses that are in growth mode where we've already established a good product market fit we know that we can scale this business and its a different set of investments and in that growth category and then there are relatively mature businesses that we know we need to run efficiently in fact they need to generate cash that we can go back and invest into these other right and then there are things that we want to get out of and diverse so we look at our R&D portfolio along those and at any point in time there's stuff in everyone of these buckets to give you some examples of what's in each of these today obviously we have a big focus in cloud native most of that is incubation at that point right not substantial revenue, yet a big you know we've acquired Heptio for example last year to bolster our own internal efforts so a lot of work a lot of effort being put into that with the idea of building a future business in a significant way some of our more recent growth business were are now very much in the scale category you look at VSAN, you look in a EXSi, you look at VeloCloud as part of the overall networking portfolio these are all in the scale category right they have substantial revenues are growing very nicely we're investing some of our other bigger businesses like vSphere which is our classic you know foundation for everything we do Yes, I would say in the mature, you know category and then over by an large we've reduced investments and some small businesses, I mean if we were to look at historically vCloud Air that the business we got out of right so these we do along the way otherwise >> John Furrier: a good call, or you quit call >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah so in fact one of Raghu's and my biggest jobs really is to figure out how much we put in each of the these buckets, make sure you're placing enough in the future of best category while also making sure your delivering on the numbers for the day >> John Furrier: I love that's exactly what I was going at this about the future bets >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: what is on the business side one of the I asked Pat Gels, I'll ask you the same thing but different context, you know this is an engineering celebration as well as kind of competition internally I guess kind of proud to be people are proud to be here kind of an elite status but engineers want to work for a company and solving hard problems >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: also retention and attraction thing. what are some of the hard problems that you're trying to deal with on business side? you're operating some of the core products and it sounds easy to say abstraction layer make things look easy, but these are hard problems what are the hard problems that you're solving that need to come out of this world? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and some of these are better not this product they cut across every aspect of the company so far example we as a company are trying to move towards more of a cloud oriented business model right so that's why are group is called products and cloud services and those are combined in the sense that everything that we build up the product over time most of its get software also as a service and the underlying code base and the technologies are all the same great example for example is our VMware cloud offerings right they are all built on VMware cloud foundation which is offered as a software package for our customers who want to build private clouds its also available as a service from us as well as familiar for our partners. Now, for us the notion of transforming our company to be able to do both right just products from moving products to also to being delivering cloud services has a profound impact across every function R&D for sure, go to market in terms of how you align the Salesforce to sell that all our systems that are necessary to transact that business so that's a pretty big transformation that we are going through right now. >> John Furrier: That's a lot of software that needs to be code and automation is not easy >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: that's why machine learning problem is hot here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely yes >> Lisa Martin: What is that balance when you are looking at innovations that come out of not just radio but the other innovation programs that VMware has about managing the balance between the R&D investment and the investment that's going to be needed on the sales and marketing side to get the product or service the solution out on the market to start really dialing up this as a big revenue contributor. How do you look at that as you talk about that portfolio a minute ago and when something becomes like say it comes out of radio and it's well, this is a really good idea, but how are you looking at balancing the R&D investment versus what you know you're going to have to do to get it to market? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and by the way that's a great point there because, you know too often engineers think about hey I've the coolest product let me go build it they don't think about how it needs to be sold and the how it needs to be sold is equally important the front more important than how you build it right. So in our world so when we do our planning on an annual basis for example we look at a holistic plan that covers the entire gamut right which means R&D, sales and marketing right and when within sales and marketing, investment across what our core sales team needs to do what our specialist sales teams you know For example some of these newer products will require specialist to sell they might be targeting different buyers within the customer base right, so we have to align our R&D and go to market investments together to create a full plan for the year and we do that for pretty much every product in our portfolio >> John Furrier: what I going to ask, I want to ask you a business question I know R&D is going to be key you guys did a great job, so Congratulations but one of the things that we're seeing in the market is new shifts in the landscape of either tech enablement or trends like kubernetes or 5G gives companies an opportunity to reset their architecture >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: and you now see with virtualization some of the things that you guys are doing we're seeing couple pivot points for customers now one cloud native, kubernetes >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: software - defined, your on-premise cloud operations, not C private cloud [Rajiv Ramaswami] yeah >> John Furrier: cloud and then like 5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: a little bit of you know networking these are major trends >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: how should companies start thinking? okay I have an opportunity as a catalyst to shift what what's your take on that trend advice to those customers because they might be able to do wholesale changes or migration >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, look from a customer perspective right, every one of them is going through this transformational journey and depending on you know where they are right, so if you take Telco's for example that's where the 5G applies primarily, I mean they have they go through this big capital cycles of investment that are geared towards massive technology generation size so last generation was 4G LTE and now the next thing is 5G and that is big new capital cycle and there's an opportunity at that time for them to fundamentally re-architect how they deployed their infrastructure and that's what they are doing with network function virtualization is 5G and so if 5G and we kind of go hand-in-hand together and its an opportunity too for them to go deploy a new infrastructure that is much more virtualized much more using standard hardware running everything in virtualized applications what's right the network function than they could before >> John Furrier: so the edge now is more dynamic than it was years ago so we look at 4G. What we have, what year that was, but I mean that even with healthy there's many many years ago the edge was not built out now you have a programmable intelligent, the edge market >> Rajiv Ramaswami: exactly >> John Furrier: how is 5G going to impact the Telco's? because this might be the right time for them to actually have a real business model. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, well look I think 5G's offers them to try out many different models for example given that many the 5G radios are much more shorter range right, so your going to deploy more smaller cell sizes that means for example there's a new business model possible where you deploy radio multiple operators are sharing that radio, right where as traditionally today you know your base station so AT&T has their own, Verizon has their own tomorrow you could be okay you could have a bunch of >> John Furrier: basing radio service provider >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah in the buildings right here that and that could be shared by all the providers so its a completely different business model so those are the kind of things that 5G enables >> Lisa Martin: are there any projects that are being featured here talked about here at radio 2019 along the spirit of and NFP,5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah there's a bunch of projects I mean on the floor right, you can go in fact even in the posters that you're sitting around here you'll see a lot of projects in 5G we have some nascent efforts on this what we call networks slicing for example >> Lisa Martin: and what is that? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so the ability are going to share the network that you deploy a single network infrastructure and you are able to slice that into chunks and have different people use those chunks >> John Furrier: and I think that points out a trend that we've been reporting least on the queue and ways people say don't move data around move compute to the edge or software-based virtualization. You're putting basically virtualization on the radio's >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes exact software exact edge yeah, >> John Furrier: so when you look at the marketplace when you say okay VMware, it's got a transfer over one of the things that's come up a lot we've heard on the cube is a VMware's great, they don't know networking though now of course if NSX is didn't win now we know where that comes from multiple competitors. But talk about the networking aspect of what you're doing? because, the investment in this era that's the first real SDN company there's been some SDN around before but you guys not only do SDM you got networking, you got compute, security, talk about networking in the innovations there >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah let me talk about the division for networking and then also how its part of all the solutions right not necessarily just a stand alone sale so networking fundamentally you know it used to be about connect, for example it used to be about connecting in the campus, your laptops and desktops into the network right it was called workgroups and then campus networking or your land campus LAN then it became Wi-Fi came in there right and the in data center it was about connecting servers to storage and servers to other servers right all about this box mentality in the branch it was about putting in a branch router and providing a network connection through that right, but if you look at fundamentally what networking is evolved to now it's about connecting, what connecting users applications and data and these could be anywhere, right. you use this could be anywhere you could be sitting in a Starbucks shop accessing your applications that are sitting in a cloud someplace not even running through your enterprise network so the notion of a classic network has changed completely. so the network now is much more, it's really a virtual network because, you don't you know its not physical plumbing anymore that matter yes you need the physical plumbing the physical plumbing is going to be provided by multiple people that you as an enterprise do not even necessarily control. You might control your campus LAN you might control your data center, but you don't control the could right, you don't control running over a service partner networked into the edge of the branch and so fundamentally now the new networking layer has to be a layer of software that really delivers and connects and secures these applications users and data and that's really the concept of SDN that's evolved into what we call the virtual cloud Network and that fundamentally is our focus and for us we're not really burdened by the fact that we have an underlying physical network business that we have to go protect and we have to go build. >> John Furrier: your software company >> Rajiv Ramaswami: we're software company >> John Furrier: so you know like Cisco you (mumbles) switches and routers that's if you don't have one on the top of them >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah it doesn't matter what do you have underneath right everything runs on top and so that's the fundamental philosophy now when you look at how this is now starting to get deployed of course you know and you're seeing, we started out with the data center and we started you know focusing on virtual machines connecting virtual machines now we now extend that to connecting containers. Right, you can you need to network containers right applications running in containers they need to be networked you need to network base metal machines you still have some of those leftovers right, so you've got a network do's and then you have to network applications running well >> John Furrier: its not a software question, I want to ask this is the trend who was seeing hyper convergence is proven >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: glass multiple things into one thing and reduces one footprint and some easier to manage the 5G and these shifts and technologies cause some give people that operating reset they're our architecture a lot of people say okay Cisco's got gear, I got UCS and other thing >> Rajiv Ramaswami: sure >> John Furrier: so how it collapse that in well? they want me to not do that you guys are kind of a different approach or do you then Cisco? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so this is exactly what we do right so now you take the networking that we've got with virtual floor networking and you actually integrate that as part of a solution with our VML foundation okay and now what, are you have a full solution that can be deployed on any hardware right, can be Cisco UCS hardware, can be del hardware or it can be HP hardware so you essentially have a software foundation that includes compute storage, networking automation all put together in a solution that you can deploy on Prem and you can deploy in the cloud >> John Furrier: that's like super hyper convergence >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes and in fact hyper-converged now it's not just about storage and compute anymore right that's how it started out. Its our compute storage networking all put together available not just on Prem, in a hardware appliance software that can be run on anything and extended it into the cloud that's really the new hyper-converged >> John Furrier: and that's new chanak's is plan actually, they are moving from a hardware, trying to do software. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah we've always been there right. We started out with software and we've expanded that to the hybrid cloud right. Think about where we're at now we've got you know we mark Loudon AWS, we've got our four thousand plus VM cloud provider partners and increasingly more and more users >> John Furrier: so, you are saying copied you guys basically >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely >> John Furrier: okay >> Lisa Martin: imitation is the highest form of flattery (laughing) >> Lisa Martin: question for you in terms of customers. You know we we're I'm sure going to hear some phenomenal successful customers at vmworld, which is just around the corner, how our customer is going to benefit from the innovation? and this is we talked about the competition, competitive nature of radio, but also the fact that one of these guys and gals are doing this in their spare time so this is really deep-rooted passionate projects we expect customers in any industry to be able to benefit from this and say the next nine to twelve months? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah look I mean at the end of the day you know these are complex systems and software that we have provide and deploy all right and a lot of innovations as under the covers and we have to translate that into value propositions that resonate with the customer that they can go deploy so what's the customer trying to do right? so think about it from a customer lens in so the customer is trying to say, well okay I'm on this journey I've got for example figure out how to have a completely you know dynamic infrastructure where I can run my applications and those could be if my existing applications modern applications that I'm building and they need to be able to run flexibly anywhere I want to be able to run them on Prem I want to be able to run them in the cloud give me an infrastructure that can solve that problem and that's really what we do with our hybrid cloud solution so the and so we have solved that problem for the customer then the customer's next problem is going to be around saying that well I want that flexibility I want to use AWS, I want to use Azure, I want to use Google and every one of these has a silo by itself I've got to retrain all my people to come manage every one of these separately VMware can you help us with that and we provided consistent operations and management's control planes that work across everyone of these clubs but allowing them to solve that problem easily and networking and security we already talked about right there's notion of being able to connect the absence users and data so converting all these innovations into you know solutions that customers can use is really what we do well >> John Furrier: you know we like to put pressure on you guys and ask the tough questions we've got to say you guys have done a great job, over the past couple of years on the product tech site a lot, a lot of clarity on vCloud air get that out of the way amazon relationship now that you got vCloud foundation, things are coming together the numbers are up >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: Boss happy everyone's happy. What's next? What's the big next journey chapter and wave you ridin? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: look I think we're still early days when it comes to the two big transformational seems to be around right. cloud in containers I think we've got all of our solutions in the market now. We have to scale and build them past talked about this mission of how to you know make these cloud delivered service bigger chunk of our portfolio going forward and then containers in kubernetes I think is a big big cloud native with a big new area for us a lot more to go when it comes to networking in times transforming networking insecurity. I do expect us to be doing more and more there in that front and on the inducer I thin on there which we didn't cover much about here there's a fundamentally massive opportunity for us with modern management on Windows right with our partnership with Dell and taking really work space one into every windows machine that's out there and you also saw that partnership announcement with Microsoft last week at deltek world a couple of weeks ago so all of that I think you know There is a lot for us to execute >> John Furrier: I just want an alienware monitor the curve monitors are so good. I want one of those. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah those are beautiful monitors, elite. >> Lisa Martin: Well an impressive trajectory that you have no doubt the queue will be following closely, Rajiv thank you so much for joining me on the cube VMware radio 2019 we appreciate your time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: oh thank you Lisa, thank you John glad to be here again thank you >> Lisa Martin: our pleasure for John Fourier, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from San Francisco at VMware radio 2019. Thanks for watching (high intensity music)

live from London England it's the cube covering dot next conference Europe 2018 brought to you by Nutanix hi and welcome back on with you pissed car and I'm Stu Mittleman and welcome to the CTO segment at Nutanix next 2018 welcome back to the program to my right is Vinnie Gill who's the CTO of cloud services and to his right is Rajeev Murray ani not very honest I mean you know the CTO of cloud platforms a gentleman thanks so much for joining us again thanks dude for having us being back all right rajiv and Binny mechanics it's been kind of busy since last time we've chatted AOS got really a file system rewrite there's been some M&A integration going on as well as organic activity so you know I love talking the CTO is just if you can bring us inside a little bit you know what's been happening what your team's been working on some of the hard challenges I mean things like page be nested hypervisor on top of DCP you know these are some hard challenge getting ready for nvme over fabric you know so some real you know massive things that happen underneath the cover as well as some new products so didn't want to start with you it's tough yeah you know what I'm keeping you to your team busy oh the teams have been quite busy especially you know once you have you know more than 10,000 customers and a product that's earning a lot of revenue coming in and at the same time you have to change the dark surfer preparing for the next generation so it's a lot of work I mean if you're starting from scratch it's much easier whether you know we've had a lot of experience bringing in new capabilities making it transparent to the customer one-click upgrade is really important for us so learning from the past we have been able to rewrite the engine the storage in a way that customers wouldn't notice but it's gonna run just faster you know kudos to the team that they've pulled it off and it goes across the board when we are acquiring new companies that come into the fold of the Nutanix family the whole idea is to make it look seamless to the customer because that's one thing that you know customers know us for like hey is the willit have neutronic simplicity so a lot of learnings we have created some thumb rules to guide people coming in and those are working fine for us and there's you know a method to the madness over here there is in the end one vision that we want to provide a true hybrid cloud experience to our users do that we feel you're the first start by building the best private cloud you can't have hybrid without private and to do that we need to have an infrastructure that actually works for private cloud so we start with HCI as an initial platform we build on top of that with private cloud features and not just still a networking compute and storage like in the past but more platform services like era and carbon and so on and then once we have that we can then layer on the new hybrid cloud services so even though it looks like getting a lot of things it's all guided by that one region so tell me you know that hybrid that hybrid cloud vision you know where doesn't lead us doesn't lead us to you know the public cloud in the end does it lead us to a new 10x cloud where where does that help customers go towards well the way I look at it is that it doesn't lead to any one place it leads to multiple clouds there'll be private clouds of the edge clouds distributed clouds big central public clouds the important thing is can you move applications and data between between flowers and analogy I use is you know 20 years ago if you if you were writing applications to Solaris you were pretty much locked into Sun if you go by writing applications for hp-ux you were pretty much locked into into HP once Linux came along and made it possible to write applications for any x86 everywhere got independence from from from underlying hardware and the same thing will happen with cloud today you have to write applications for Amazon for GCP for Asha who can build an operating system that actually commoditize is all that that makes it possible for you to run on any cloud with the same set of applications so that kind of sounds to me like you're you know doing V motion and H a India res but then you know for a new generation of technologies well not be motion across clouds is of course the goal it is the goal but it's not just enough to move the applications around data around you have to move the management plan has to be the same so the lot more to it than just simply copying by it's across maybe you want to add to it yeah I mean basically adding to what Rajeev said if you ask where will hybrid cloud lead I think it leads to a dispersed cloud you know some of it was also mentioned by readers in the keynote which is you know this big monolithic cloud concept has to atomize into much smaller pieces and distributed and that's what's going to happen but you start with solving it at the hybrid and at least solve it for two and from two you go to many and that's what's really exciting yeah it's a really good point then I want you to help expand on that a little I I think back to companies that don't portfolios and you look at it and say okay well I product a B and C and boy I I don't know how to use those together because they for an inner basis and how do I work them together today you know I think micro-services architecture I think about api's pulling everything together what are those guiding principles that you give internally to teams to make sure that I can use the pieces that I want they work all together they work with you know there's really broad ecosystem you have and all these multi cloud environments so you know as much effort we put in building architecture for the product design I mean we have to put the same amount in terms of how is it going to be consumed by the customer in just having a long portfolio is no longer what customers are looking for looking for simplicity so to your point one of the things we are really careful about is especially when we are acquiring technology in organically is how do you make sure identity and billing is it's the same right that's the most important thing so you don't have to login once in this product once natural basic stuff but if you get it you know right it's just delightful the other thing is about experience developer experience and user experiences these are the two other out of the four factors user experiences around like do I have to learn this again like if you look at companies like Apple I mean if I've used the Mac use they try to make it very similar such that even a two-year-old can figure out how to use it and we would like to say that if you have been an IT industry for two years you should be able to use any Nutanix product and developer experience is around api's we have a standard that we have Jade version three intent full api is and that is creating a standardization across you saw a little bit of the opening the demo today there you know I went through calm and epoch and flow and prison throw all from one pane of glass it didn't look like four different products in fact why not mentioned there were four different products it probably wouldn't have been obvious that they were and that's important to us keeping that experience seamless is very important and that comes at a cost I mean it's we could have released it as soon as we acquired some of these things and punted it on to the customer to figure out how these pieces come together but we know our customers have a higher expectation from us so we take the time and from from that perspective you know as a as a user you know I'm used to working with different types of clouds public private I wrote anything in between and the amount of interfaces I have to touch to get you know something working to get a series of products to to align to do what I wanted to do that's becoming such a difficult task that you know having a single interface or having a familiar interface would actually help in that so maybe you can talk a little while use that UI to go into the public clamor into the hybrid cloud as well to make you know that experience easier as well talk about a couple of things one whenever there's a proliferation of technologies and you're trying to glue it together I mean single pane of glass is one thing that people talk about I think that's not the most important thing I mean obviously it's a requirement it's a necessary condition not a sufficient one to make it sufficient you also have to bring in opinion into the design and the opinion is where we are taking some decisions for the customer where you know the customer would care about learning about those things and that's where no tonics will come in and through our best practices we put our opinion in the design of the product so that the number of decision points where the customer is minimize and that's how you basically start consuming this diversity out there at the end of the day for the business the only two things matter that business logic and business data infrastructure is sitting in the middle lights it's like a necessary evil so you know if we can hide it and make it seamless you know customers really happy about it can you talk about that the feedback loop you have with customers things are changing very fast you know it's hard for anybody to keep up you know this week even you know hoot anacs has a lot of announcements that I'm sure will take people all the time to there how do you get the feedback loop to customers to make sure your your they're getting what they need from to understand your products and your understanding where they are in their journey and you know mature the product line yeah I mean we have a whole bunch of channels we have we just had a customer advisory board yesterday you know invite customers and have a really deep intimate conversation and frank conversation you know what's working for you what's not working we have our engineering team on slack channels and whatsapp channels with our customers especially the customers who are really you know they complain about a product and they have opinions amenity so we just try to short-circuit this thing and then it's all about empathy so getting a team note here the customers just absolutely retrieve I definitely want your pin but just feedback actually I talked to a few customers and they said I don't know how Nutanix does it but for a company their size I feel like I get personal attention in touch points so congratulations it's good the stuff you saw today is a direct result of the feedback the grouping of products into core essentials and enterprise kind of also reflects the customer journey a lot of customers start with us for with the core once they get used to that get their sense as far as build a true private cloud and only then they started looking at multi cloud so right products for the right customer it's something that we are taking very very seriously at this point so I want to dive into that you know right product right customer so one of the announcements you made is carbon had kubernetes as as a manager platform so what customers do you do you service with that product how do you go into customers like that and how do you help them kubernetes is one of the most fastest growing technologies in the IT space that we have seen in the in the recent years and a lot of our customers I would say especially this year we have seen they have developers using containers and they are at a point where they're trying to decide how can I put it in production a production has a many requirements their carbon is being used by our customers who are trying to see how they'll put containers into production and what we are doing with carbon is we providing native kubernetes api Zsasz is there an open source but we're solving the heart problems of upgrades scale out high availability troubleshooting these mundane things that you know usually people don't want to do and that's where we come in and help so I've seen customers use our storage volumes for even databases containerized to stateless things it's all across the board but still early years I mean for this kind of ecosystem but it's headed into you know it's going to be the future you know one of the things I found really interesting to watch is over the last two decades we've talked about intelligence and automation in infrastructure but really things are happening fast now when you talk about you know whether a I or ml there's really things that are creating some intelligence that it's not like oh I created some script and it does something but you know it's working well I know there's a number of places that that fits into your portfolio maybe maybe prism X play it would seem to get some good resonance and cheers from the audience because maybe they've all played with you know the you know if TTT so start from there and how do you think about the AI in ml space yeah so we we look at you know computing evolving from manual mostly manual in the past to more automated but really you want to get to this autonomous computing that that sort of talked about so you know think of it as you know causes to be really difficult to drive in the past it used to require knowing how the carburetors work and cleaning them out once in a while to the point where maybe 15 years ago pretty much didn't know anything about the internals of a car but you could drive it was reliable it would work which is probably where we are today in IT but the real goal is to get as an autonomous computing the self-driving cars at Tesla Google now where you don't even have to be paying attention at the car will just drive itself yeah I have TTT and the x-play stuff that we have as a step in that direction it's obviously very early but it's the beginning of a journey where you can then start taking feedback loops learning what works modeling that out and extending capabilities on your own and that is something we'll be looking at over the next few years and you know it's something where I don't think it's it's not cute and that's why it needs to be done it's actually required you know if you look at Moore's law it applies to machines so every year you will have double the number of course and you know the same dollar can buy more if you look at humans that's not true I mean ever here then you're only getting more expensive in fact lower for customers here say talent is scarce so just by that definition you see machines are growing and the people who manage the machines are shrinking or you know static so you have to put in a layer of the machine which is smart in the in the between in between of the human and the large form of machines and that if you don't do it there is no data center so it's inevitable and you'll see this happen more and more so that kind of sounds like you're you know positioning your portfolio in a way that you enable the IT of people to not care about infrastructure as much anymore but help you know the their employer their customer do other stuff so how does your portfolio relate to the freeing up of time for those employees for those jobs personnel people some of it is just goes back to the poor design principle I would go to them basic you know how do we how do we start as a company we're looking at storage and they were dual controller a and B a ties B is running but guess what I'm worried that B will also die is the same age so I have to run to fix a run to fix a is my weekend and the night wasted if I had n one dies fine of it's a capacity problem so that goes to the core like how do we design things that are scale out and web scale we talked about so everything that we do including now prism central scale out I have to rush to go fix things hardware will always fail right and that's you know it permeates in the entire organization in terms of how we design things and then on top of that you can add automation and machine intelligence and all that but fundamentally it goes to engineering when you talk about we talked about earlier in the discussion kind of the rewrite that went on for emerging applications and emerging technologies I guess what's exciting you these days you know the industry of the Hall containers you know we looked at you know Flash technology containerization you know I looked at Nutanix when it first came out as was you know some of these waves coming together hyper scale and software-defined and flash all kind of with a perfect storm for the original generation what what are what are those next waves coming together that that you think will you know have a massive impact on the industry a lot of innovation going on on every layer of the stack I mean if we start with the hardware it's been coming for a while but it's almost here now the whole concept of having persistent memory essentially dims blocks having memory that can persist across reboots and we byte addressable so this is a big difference for the storage market right we've always had block addressable story let's become flight addressable paradigms of computing will change and Wharton's will change how we write programs will change so there's a whole big wave coming and getting prepared for that was very important for you yeah and if I control into that a little bit cuz you know what I thought about you know before it was I had you know like like pull of storage and my full of compute and I had my networking and well you know what your solution is I just have a pool of infrastructure but I need specific data in specific places and latency is really important you know Amazon just announced do you know a new compute instance with hundred gigabit networking for you know the same type of application we're talking about Hana and persistent memory and the like so do we not think of it as a pool anymore it's a here you know metadata and data are gonna get more localized so how should we think of your infrastructure going forward you should think of it as a fool we should worry about making it all all work well and that's that that is essentially our job if we can succeed at that then you would never have to think about it as well this particular you know storage is allocated with this particular application at this current time it's up to us to make that happen as applications are running from your direction you feel you know absolutely another thing that's happening in IT in the in the space of compute is the upper limit of this pool is being hidden right so for example in the old days those discs then there was a virtual disc but it had a capacity and you would format it when you look at s3 doesn't have a capacity you don't format it that's what's and that's more to application design when you don't think about the capacity of the pool that you're using that's the direction where we need to go and hide all this right Amina so just-in-time purchase of the next hardware that you need to get but the developer does not see the upper limit well retrieving Binnie thank you so much for sharing all that this Congrats on all the progress and look forward to what were you gonna bring on down lives down the road thanks to you for you piss car I'm Stu minimun lot more coverage here and Nutanix dot next London 2018 thanks for watching

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (digital music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE special coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. We're here at VMware's Radio 2018, its 14th year, its annual, I won't call it a spring fling, I won't call it the burning man. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers as Steve Harod, former CTO said on stage. Rajiv Ramaswami chief operating officer of VMware products, one of the groups here, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here John. >> So Steve Hared kind of coined it, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers, which is like motivating, intoxicating, a lot of energy, a lot of good technical buzz going on. >> [Man] Indeed. >> People are flexing their muscles, stretching their minds. >> [Man] Totally, totally. >> Creating their sparks of innovation. >> Totally, totally. >> [John Furrier] How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, you know, let me take a step back here. Innovation overall at VMware, it's part of the culture. It's not something that is just purely dropped down to it, in fact I don't believe we can simply drive down innovation from the top, it has to come from within. But what we do at VMware is, culturally we have several set of activities that we foster, that create this culture of innovation. Let me lay out a few examples. And of course we will get to radio, and why we're here. But, everything from, you start with this Tech Talks. Anybody can bring a group of people together, we have weekly Tech Talks, to talk about anything. It might be stuff that they're working on that they want to get a broader audience for, or there may be stuff that, you know, is far out, that they just want to get an audience and communicate. So we have Tech Talks. We have our own version of Hackithon, we call them ballithons. We run globally at all our sites you know our 7,000 plus R and D engineers globally. We run these everywhere and out of those by the way, come great ideas. And these are typically one to two day kind of events that groups of people get together, they actually build prototypes. They called prototypes, the expectation is they have to show us something working at the end of those two days. And all kinds of cool things have come out of those. The next step there is, flings. If you have a prototype and you actually want to get customer feedback, and you want to get equal system feedback, it's not a sanctioned product. But you can go out there and release it and have customers support that and test it for you. And finally then we have sort of a more incubation type, what we call like slaps, that it's actually now more of a centrally funded project that moves on and works on a particular topic. And last, but not least, this event, Radio. >> So the Radio encapsulates the big tent event but you're talking about a specific process for innovation. >> Yep, exactly. >> So, it's organic so I gotta ask you, one of the things I've observed over my 19 years living in Palo Alto and nine years covering VMware, seeing from founding principles to now is, there's two things that jump out at me. Engineering culture, and community. >> [Man] Yes. >> These have always been kind of like the, you know, the nine lives for VMware. You guys always been leveraging those two things. >> [Man] That's right. >> How do you guys do that going forward because as it becomes more competitive you're bigger now, you got a process, so that's cool, I get that. How do you guys drive the process without sacrificing the engineering and the community? >> So let me tell you one thing that you should keep in mind. All of this is done on people's spare time. This is not their day job. Every one of these people, engineers who are here are doing this separate from their day jobs. And so they are motivated and what prompts people to come to VMware in the first place is the ability to work on interesting, difficult problems. Particularly when it comes to infrastructure related. Our motto and our mission is around how software can really change the world. So there's a fundamental driven culture. >> The passion is you want to work on hard problems, changing the world kind of thing. >> That's right, they want to work on hard problems and we foster that, we encourage them to do that and you know, they like it. And also the fact that in most cases these are not individuals. In fact almost every people that you see here is actually a small group of people. And what I'm amazed at as I look through the work that people do, a lot of the stuff, some of it may be a derivative of what they're actually doing in their day jobs and that there's some substance but a lot of it is actually stuff that is actually done completely different from what they do in their day job. >> In the X labs, is it just because you have two tracks as we heard earlier, there's kind of like, continue to incubate it further with some funding while you do your day job, then it's like, oh my god, you know, functions is a service. Let's fast track that, take a break, find someone else to fill your job, or we'll do it and you work it full time. >> [Rajiv] That's right, that is a full time job. Once we get to an X lab, that is a funded incubation project that you are dedicated to. And we allow people to go out and go off and do that, and sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it won't and then they can come back. >> Rajiv, I gotta ask you the engineering question because all my engineering friends, we always talk about this and you hit it the first one which was, we want to work for a company that solves hard problems. >> Yeah. >> You guys, check. And you've been voted a great place to work across the board so great culture, I can attest the culture is great. The second problem is all the engineers, you know, oh I didn't get picked, or who made this selection, there's also self governance going on so you have to manage the typical engineering reaction because everyone loves their baby. So it might not get picked for Radio. >> [Rajiv] But you know what, I mean. >> [John] How do you manage that dynamic? >> So, yeah it's a competitive process by the way. And we run Radio, let me talk a little bit about Radio. We run Radio much like any world class technical conference that Ithiam would run or I typically would run. We encourage an open process where people can submit papers, we have a committee that's actually sitting and reviewing these papers. Just like any other technical conference, some of them are gonna make it, some of them won't. >> It's not a black box though, it's transparent. >> It's not a black box. It's a pretty open, transparent feedback. Okay, it's not like, hey you submit something and we throw it over the fence. We actually give feedback. In fact there's a whole process here. So first of all, this year for example, we had over 1,200 submissions and we picked 200. That's all we can afford. Think about the acceptance rate right there. That is on par, if not better than most top notch technical conferences. So there is a very high bar, okay. And by the way, the stuff that doesn't get picked can still continue. If not, maybe refine it and do better next year, maybe they'll continue some of it, >> [John] Or join in someone else in the team. >> Yeah, exactly, yeah. >> You allow for people to come together. >> Of course, people can come together and it's completely informal, we don't mandate who comes together, they can come together. And once they get selected by the way, the other part of this is actually helping the engineers double up as public speakers and presenters also. You know, a lot of us engineers particularly like to sit in their black box, they're sitting up their coding on a daily basis. Here's an opportunity for them to actually go out and present their ideas to a broad forum. And we actually, part of it is we help coach them and build them into good presenters as well as part of this process. So for them it's a personal development experience. This competitive dynamic by the way is what actually holds up the bottom quality for Radio. It actually has no negative value. It's not like if you don't get selected this year there is a bad feeling or anything. You can try again next year, and to new people every year. >> It's a pride just to be a part of it. >> Exactly. >> And succeeding the bar is a big accomplishment internally. >> Yes, yes, and frankly by the way out of these 1,200 submissions or so in addition to the papers that get accepted here about 200 of these actually are invention disclosures that eventually find their way into patents over time too. So there's other ways that these things get moved forward. >> There's a social benefit also a personal benefit to grow. >> Absolutely. >> And you have the patent option. >> And the networking that comes here, the most important part. I don't know if you saw the poster session yesterday, I mean, the energy in the room is just phenomenal. The people are there who are really passionate about talking about their work, and people are there wandering and you meet new people. In fact, for me in my world, what I enjoy the most is of course getting to hear what these guys are doing but also helping to make connections. Because I sort of look at all of R and D and then somebody here is doing something, in fact I will give you an example. There was somebody who was figuring out how to do, the topic was called teleportation, but it was really about fast data movement. So this was a team in our core virtualization platform. And then I said hey, there's this other team that is focused on hyper-connectivity, you guys should connect because they're actually building a product that could leverage what you do. So you make those informal connections here and then off they run. >> You know it's interesting. Ray Alferil and I were talking about the confluence of these markets coming together. You guys started out in a data center, you got cloud, AI now, which is big data, and now block chain, really interesting stuff you guys are doing with block chain. We were talking off camera and I talked with some of your folks, you guys are already eyeing that way pretty heavily and I know there's work going on there. But in the intersection of infrastructure, AI, cloud, block chain and decentralized applications is a lot of really important stuff. This is the confluence, this where it all has to mash together, the mash up of security, IOT and data. Not big data, or AI. Data hits everything, security hits everything, IOT is hitting everything. So do you have to tweak your R and D focus? How do you guys manage these changing confluences? >> Yes, we are constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It's never static. I will give you an example from recent times. When we call it networking we find we constantly find software to find networking. And we came on initially, it was all about data center. It was about how to, you know, connect and secure applications inside data centers. Then we saw the world changing. Applications are moving out to the public cloud and then more recently applications are moving to the edge to your earlier point. So what did we do? We took that networking mission, we expanded it to now include public clouds, include the edge, and that's what we just launched recently. So that's an area where things are dynamic, our innovation moves on. As I do believe the edge is gonna be one of the next big areas of investment and opportunity. And security is pervasive across the board. So our vision now encompasses security everywhere. All the way from your mobile device, to the edge, to branch offices, to the public cloud, and to your data centers. Anywhere where you have applications running data sitting, and users, you gotta secure that. >> What's the big waves? Pat Gelser's gonna come on soon and he always talks about the waves of innovation. If you're not out in front of the next wave you're driftwood, his famous quote on theCUBE years ago. You gotta pick the big waves obviously, you see block chain as a great call, cloud, no brainer, you're there. Data center, you've been there entrenched. You got AI, I know you guys are working on stuff. Are those the waves you're on, is there a new wave that no one's seeing, and how do you guys look at that? >> Of course it's all adjacent right? Edge computing is adjacent to what we do, and IOT so that's obviously a big area for us. Telcos, for us, you may not necessarily think of it as innovation but they are actually redoing how they do their entire infrastructure. And that's a great opportunity for us. At the end of the day, there's two things. We have innovation and innovation is correlated to also to what markets we can go after that are new and driving committal business for us. So the edge and Telco in our view are two big big opportunities for us. >> You guys are doing a great job. World class organization, it's fun to watch. It's a pleasure to interview such great smart people here. Rajiv you're one leading the team. My final question I want to ask you for the folks watching who don't work at VMware describe what it's like to work here. What's the DNA of the culture? Explain the dynamic, 'cause it's like a kid in a candy store in here if you're an engineer. Explain what's goin on. >> Look, the things that I continue to be impressed by here, and I have been here about two and a half years is the quality and depth of the engineering talent we have and the willingness to work on difficult and interesting problems. And also share that across the board. There is no, very rarely do we have people sitting isolated that go off and do something. People are willing to share. We work as a community together. That really really stands out. I worked at many companies and I have to say, no other company really creates this kind of culture of innovation where we bring all these people together. This event, Radio is absolutely unique. I have not really seen it at this scale anywhere else. >> It's a great use case of world class in a modern era. I think you guys have the secret, engineering and community focus has been a key backbone for you guys. >> The other thing, by the way, I will say is, engineers feel that their ideas are valued, and they are actually used. Something that starts out, you know, in a very small way actually could end up getting a lot of visibility. I will give you an example. Out of our Ballithon last year or so somebody came up with the idea of using a virtual reality headset to figure out how you can actually manage your entire data center using virtual reality and pick and place. >> [John] That's great for working at home. >> Cool, right? This just came out of a two day hackathon session. And what did we do with that? Well, we did that, I took that and made it a demo center stage at VM world and all our VM forums across the world And all of us by the way, Pat, myself, we were all sitting out there doing virtual reality demos built on what a couple of engineers had done in two days. Great visibility. Now that's not gonna go into a product anytime soon I think but it's a cultural thing. >> It's a cultural example of grassroots innovations sparks of innovation can come from anywhere. >> That's right. >> Rajiv, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. This is theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for Radio 2018, its 14th year annual event it's turning into quite the showcase for flexing and also stretching the minds of the smartest people in VMware. Of course theCUBE's here on the ground. I'm John Furrier. Back with more coverage after this break. Stay with us. (digital music)

>> Announcer: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman, with my cohost Keith Townsend, who is the CTO advisor, and this is the CTO segment. Happy to welcome back to the program, we have Binny Gill and Rajiv Mirani. Both of them are CTOs. Binny, you've got cloud services, and Rajiv, you have cloud platforms. Let's start there, when we talk about, you know, there was a survey when you registered for the event and said, what do you think of Nutanix as? Am I your server vendor, am I your HCI vendor, am I your cloud vendor, am I your mega, uber platform of everything? You've got platforms and services, help us understand a little bit how this fits and how you look at the portfolio, and we'll arm wrestle if you guys can't agree. >> Rajiv: That sounds good. >> Binny: Yeah, go ahead. >> You want to go ahead? So both of us obviously work very closely together, but broadly speaking, I look after the core stack, the storage, networking, hypervisor, including Prism, and then Binny looks more at the services we're building on top, Era, Calm, things like that, so Binny, can you explain that a bit? >> Given the breadth of the ambition that we have, right, I mean, it's good to focus on the two layers separately in some sense, build a platform that is capable of hosting a whole bunch of services. As you can see in what Amazon and others have evolved, they've spent a lot of time building platform, and if you think about it, even Nutanix, for the last seven, eight years, has done a really good job. And once you have a solid foundation, and building cloud requires some new capabilities as well, as Rajiv has said, networking and security on top, now you can start building services, and services themselves have a stack, right? Because there will be higher-level services that use some lower-level services and this. So that's, you know, that's a long journey ahead of us. >> Yeah, I mean, that's a great point, 'cause every time, it seems like we have, you know, oh, this next-generation thing, I'm not going to have to worry about the underlying thing. Virtualization's going to totally abstract it. We've spent a decade fixing the storage and networking challenges there. Containerization, once again, it's like the application done there. Serverless, of course, will take care of all this, but you know, everything underneath it, it still needs work. How do you balance and give us some of that, you know, what's the glue versus abstracting and going to developers? Maybe let's start with platform. >> Well, the platform's always going to be there, right, and as we look at things like containers, that's actually where things get messy. How do containers work with storage, is one of the bigger issues right now with Kubernetes and other frameworks. So we have to start with a platform, we build on top of that and hopefully abstract enough that, you know, the services themselves don't have to deal with the messiness of the platform. >> Yeah, if you look at how technology is evolving, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The platform used to be Linux, Windows, I mean, that's the operating system on which I build my applications, right? Now, the new platform is cloud. AWS is a platform, is an OS, and Azure is one OS, and how do you build applications that can run on these new, next-generation platforms? But the kind of problems to solve are still the same. I want to snapshot my application, back it up, I want to move my application one place to the other, I want to scale it out, scale it in. So the problems are identical to what we had, but it's just that solving it with the new tools that we have, Kubernetes, containers, and so on. >> Yeah, and sometimes birds just fly right through our studio. >> Yeah, I mean, we worry about bugs, and now we have birds flying in. >> So, Rajiv, talk to us about, you basically have two different types of cloud clusters. You have to serve Binny's organization, you also have to serve your external clients. Storage, network, compute, has to have APIs, has to have capabilities, basic capabilities that both your customers who want to build their own overlay, and then Nutanix services on top. Talk to me about, how do you make sure that you're building the best cloud platform to be consumed by cloud services, whether they're Nutanix cloud services or someone else's. >> I think, just comes out of the core principles that we have built the company around, right, that we will always build things around web-scale design, so it has to scale to very large deployments, it has to be completely distributed, it has to go through a certain amount of vetting, in terms of having APIs exposed. Nothing we do internally is through secret APIs, everything is public APIs, so you're pretty stringent on some of these things. And then of course, layering on the simplicity of Nutanix is another thing that we take very, very seriously, so when we do all that, nice patterns emerge. I think it lends itself to an elegance that the platform provides for the rest of the stack. >> So, then we get to a confusing abstraction, which is, you mentioned it earlier, containers. Who gets containers? Is that your organization, is that your organization? Is it a fundamental part of the foundation, or is it a cloud service? >> I think the trick is to not necessarily worry too much about the boundary here, because frankly, this is something that the industry is still figuring out, you know, what layer is this new Kubernetes thing at? And is it just at containers, but actually, now it's going into all the way, application provisioning, load balancing, distributed routing, all sorts of things, so that's, I mean, we work as a team essentially, and there's a whole bunch of engineers that are looking at the whole picture, it's always very important to look at the entire picture and then figure out what are the right layers to go solve the problem, and when you're looking at containers, the bigger problem that our customers are talking about is, how do you deal with the legacy plus the containers in one environment? Now, I have my application, it's a three-tier application. The database, I still want to run in a VM, right? But I want to start tasting this Kubernetes thing, so I want to go with my app, the web tier with containers, but it needs to be in one view, and that's what Calm demonstrated. Through Calm, you can orchestrate an application that's part VM, part containers with Kubernetes and help our customers transition. So which layer these things are, it's going to be an evolving answer. >> So Binny, I love that you started the conversation around Calm. Is Calm the first interaction that most customers will experience when it comes to Nutanix cloud services, or is there a different, one of the other services, the more likely first experience of cloud services versus the trivial compute, storage, network. >> Right, so the first cloud service that we have announced, that we'll deliver, is DR, right? I mean, that's the first one with Xi. Once DR is available, very quickly we'll add more services. Beam is another one that has to fold in to the Xi cloud services. When I say fold in, it essentially means you have the same identity, and you have the same billing mechanisms, and the same experience. You know, similar to when you go to a public cloud, you'll see, there's a host of services, and they're sort of equals, and you can pick whichever one you want to use. What we want to provide with Xi cloud services is that, the same experience, except that these services are now hybrid. You can have them on-prem, you can have it in the cloud. And our teams are building this hybrid view, some of which, the preview of it, what you already saw in the demo there, you saw availability zones on both sides, shown on one screen, now you'll see the service footprint on both sides, on one screen. >> Stu: Yeah, Rajiv-- >> From an experience point of view, I think, Calm will be how people who see this for the first time, that's going to be the center marketplace that we will have, that's where people will launch services from. >> Right, so when you, where's the portal for cloud services, and as I understand, Calm is that portal. >> Calm is a lot more than that, it'll have not just services but applications and workloads as well. But yes, the experience will start with Calm. >> When you talk about a hybrid cloud world in the platform, people are trying to understand what exactly lives where. When we hear kind of Xi, wonder if you might be able to give us kind of a compare-contrast of, say, that you look at VMware, and VMware and Amazon is kind of an easy one to understand, as it's relatively the same stack, just living in a different data center. >> So we're doing things a little bit differently. While we are building our own cloud data centers today, we're architecting it in a way that we're not tying it down to any single stack, that it has to be only a Nutanix-oriented stack. We absolutely intend to scale this out by partnering with service providers, with cloud vendors, and so on. You saw something in the keynote yesterday about running nested on GCP. You can imagine where that will go in the future, but the cloud's also on the radar. Much like we did with our HCI stack, we ship them Supermicro, but we're conscious of the fact that it's software that we can move anywhere. We are building Xi exactly the same. >> Yeah, and what I'd add is, while we are doing it in our own data centers right now, we are learning a lot, and as we are learning the things that are truly needed to make running a cloud easy, from an operational perspective, that allows us to build a product that is an honest product to give to our partners and service providers, say, now you go run it, and you won't be spending too much. For example, the experience that they've had with OpenStack, it cannot be repeated again, right? So that's what we want to do. >> So let's talk about the relationship with Google as a model going forward. Is that prototypical of what you're looking to do with other public cloud providers? And first, give us some color around that announcement, we have anyone on theCUBE talk about Xi and Google, and then kind of the strategy moving forward. >> A lot of the public cloud vendors are actually realizing that hybrid cloud is important, and as part of that, they're providing bare-metal services, and Google has its nested service, to enable others to bring their own stack, you know, virtualization stack, to run there. Amazon has done it VMware, Amazon has also announced their intention to gear bare-metal services. So we see a future where a lot of these public cloud vendors will offer bare metal, and that's where our Xi stack will run, and also giving customers choice to go from one cloud to the other seamlessly. Today, we know that Nutanix can move from public Xi cloud to on-prem and back, but once you have Xi cloud running on multiple cloud vendors and you can move between cloud vendors seamlessly as well. And that's a really compelling message for our customers. >> Great. One of the challenges for some of us watching is, you've got a pretty big portfolio now, and some of the things out in the future, it's like, okay, where does Nutanix fit, how do they have the right to participate in this? Wonder if you can talk a little bit about Era, and maybe Sherlock is a little bit further out. >> Era is about managing copies of your databases. Again, if you look at where a lot of cost is sunk in enterprises, running my database, a production database, for every single production database, there'll be maybe tens of test copies of it. What Era does is minimizes the cost of managing the copies, and also, it's thinly-provisioned copies. That's something that our customers have said that's a real pain point for them that nobody solves really well. So we decided to work on that, that's just a starting point of what we can do in this PaaS layer and also, helps us learn this space as well. We are reaching out to not the infrastructure admin, but actually to the database admin. It gives us a new audience to talk to as well. So from an audience perspective, we are broadening the scope, we are reaching closer to their lines of businesses and the decision-makers, which is good. Now, going to Sherlock-- >> Actually, if I could just, one quick followup on the database piece. Database migration's really hard. You know, talk to any customer and you say database migration, it's one of the things that strikes fear in them. Talk just for a second if you could about the expertise that your team has and why you believe you can really deliver that push-bus and simplicity that Nutanix is known for. >> Oh, so yeah, the team that's building Era are hardcore Oracle folks who have decades of experience doing those kind of hard problems, and they've come here with a mission, into Nutanix, that we are going to solve it. Using the Nutanix platform that we have built, there are so many things that can be done in a better way, and since we have a clean slate, we can start afresh and do it the right way. From our capability to do it in the right way, making it simple for our customers, we don't have a doubt. In fact, a lot of customers who have tested this in alpha, they have raving reviews on that, and they just want it as soon as possible. >> And on the database migration subject, we also have a group called SQL Xtract that we've been shipping for some time that helps you migrate your databases from existing three-tier or even hyperconverged stacks, onto Nutanix. So we have some expertise in the area already. >> So, a little bit on the, I heard the term copy data management. Is this mainly copy data management, or is this actually database migration to a new, to ability to move from one database to another one, or is it all of the above? >> So, it's doing management of copies, it's also allowing you to clone databases. So you can go to a snapshot and clone another one. Migration is not yet there, but it's a natural consequence of the capabilities that we have, because once you have snapshots, we have the capability of moving snapshots from one data center to the other using our DR capabilities. So that's on the roadmap. Further down the roadmap is database provisioning itself. If you want to provision a brand-new database, you can also do that, so these are the natural transitions of work, but what we wanted to do, just like what we did with Xi, start with the hardest, thorniest problem, and then work backwards into the simple things. >> Alright, so unfortunately, we're running short on time. Give us a closing word, I want, Rajiv and Binny, maybe you can talk a quick second about project Sherlock and give us some things that we should look for down the road from Nutanix. >> Yeah, so we believe that the world needs an enterprise cloud operating system. What that means is it can run on the private cloud, in the public cloud, and on the edge, and Sherlock comes there, I mean, it's taking our stack and creating a mini-PaaS version, as you saw in the demo, and running it at the edge in a way that all of your footprint appears like one dispersed cloud. And that's a pretty exciting space, and we think that is the key differentiator that we'll have going forward. >> Any final words, Rajiv? >> I think he covered quite a fair amount of ground, so yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Alright, well, it goes back to really that distributed architecture, the core. Appreciate having the conversation, the CTO roundtable, as it were. Binny, Rajiv, always a pleasure to catch up. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more here. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana it's the Cube, covering Dot Next Conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here at the Cube in New Orleans, the Nutanix Dot Next Conference. Joining me is Keith Townsend, going wall-to-wall with interviews for two days. And going to dig into some really geeky techy stuff, Micro segmentation and the like. Happy to welcome to the program two first-time guests, Harjot Gill, who is the Senior Director of product and engineering at Nutanix and Rajiv Mirani, who's the CTO of Cloud Platform. Thank you both for joining us. >> Both: Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rajiv you've been with Nutanix for a bit, so we're going to get Harjot first. So we beat four acquisitions that Nutanix has made in the software space in the last year or so. One of them was Netsil. >> Harjot: Yes. >> So bring us back. You were and are the CEO of the Netsil Group. Tell us, kind of, a why of the company, size of the team, things like that. >> That's good yeah, so previously, as I was co-founder and CEO of Netsil, which I don't know whether you noticed, is listen spelled backwards. And, essentially, it was like microservices analytics platform and the core technology of Nexus was, where designers at University of Pennsylvania in the research group. That's where most of my team came from. It's a really small team, like just 10 engineers, who took on this like very interesting challenge in the industry as micro services were taking off, applications were, like, ported to modern platforms, like kubernetes. We saw an opportunity to take, like, a network centric approach in doing performance analysis and liability analysis. And the product that we built is very interesting. It can be thought of as, like, Google Maps for your cloud applications just like Splunk, in the past, was Google search for data center. So we came up with this concept where you can, like, visualize different abstractions and different virtualization layers of your application delivery. And that was our product. >> Alright, Rajiv, we've been talking about the, really, expansion of services that you're offering. You know, security and networking, obviously a big space. So first of all, not not a Stanford team that you brought in but University of Pennsylvania. Explain a little bit for us justification, how Netsil fits in with the Nutanix portfolio. >> Yeah, the Netsil Technology is unique in many different ways and we actually see a lot of different applications for it. The core product that they have today, the way they do performance monitoring by staying just on the network, not installing any host agents. It's pretty unusual. It's something that we really liked about the technology. The fact that they can do this at layer seven can actually look at application data to deep packet inspection at line speed. It's even more impressive. And they really build at the scale out architecture based on Harjot's research work. We looked at that and we said, "hey look, this can be used for performance monitoring, it can be used for application discovery, it can be used for security operations." There's just so many different directions we can take this in. And it's a great team that's built it with a relatively small number of people. We want these guys to be working with us not not as a separate company. And it moved very quickly. The acquisition happened quite quickly. We talked a little bit this morning about how they're going to use it for micro segmentation but there's many other use cases we see coming down the pike. >> So let's talk a little bit about the enterprise of applicability. You know, when you guys looked at it, you mainly looked at containers and the challenges of a micro, i'm sorry, of multi services and basically twelve fact applications. >> Harjot: Yeah. >> How is that applicable to the typical enterprise, which 90% of their applications are modern lifts. Same capability? What what capabilities are you bringing to Bear for traditional application? >> It's pretty applicable everywhere because network is a very stable source of truth, like what remains constant in the legacy as well as in the new world is your TCP/IP stack. And it's a very stable source of truth to tap into. So one of the value proposition that Netsil had with an offer very, like, the early enterprise customers that we signed up, was helping them migrate from this monolithic architectures to micro services. And their existing tools on the market, if you look at APM tools or even the logging tools, were inadequate when taking them on this journey. And you can think of Netsil as a very pervasive solution. I mean, the analogy that I usually give people is, like drones versus troops on the ground. Where Netsil can quickly set up, like a breadth of coverage in any environment, whether it's like Legacy or micro services, you are covered. And and then once you find issues in your environment with security issues or performance issues, you can systematically drill in. Either add more instrumentation creating or add policies with micro segmentation. That was the whole idea. So there was a gap in the market for this kind of a tool. >> So let's talk about integration of Nutanix. One of the, what I'm calling, first principles for Nutanix is, push button one click easy. >> [Harjot And Rajiv] Yes. >> What does the Netsil application look like in a Nutanix environment to the Nutanix administrator? >> So let's take the micro segmentation example again, right. So today, if you were to micro segment an existing application, it's pretty hard to know where to begin. So Netsil described it as a hairy problem but we know he likes hair. But what Netsil does is it takes all the data it's gathering from the network and it gives you all this visibility into how every part of your application is interacting with each other. You can group it in different ways, so it's not just about VMs talking to Vms. If you have a micro services based application, that's actually very little value. You really want, which services are talking to each service or even more, which service tiers are talking to which service tiers. But gathering all that data, we can actually fully automate the creation of micro segmentation policies for existing applications. So today what we saw was more of a manual thing. We've set it up previously. It's just that we haven't enough time to do integration yet. You expect that to become completely automated. Similarly with the remediation stuff, the troubleshooting stuff. We have it integrated with the Netsil technology, with the machine learning things that we have been working on. Once we do that, we can explain a lot more automated insights into your applications, integrated alert system, integrated with our metrics and stat systems. So a lot of work to do but a lot of potential for this technology, I think. >> So yeah, so it actually does solve this chicken and an egg problem, as Rajiv said, with actually making micro segmentation operational by first discovering these ground field apps and then suggesting policies, right? And all the goodness of Netsil will be brought on to, like, products like Prism, where out-of-the-box, Netsil can provide visibility and metrics for workloads such as VDI and all the packaged applications and all the Mongo Db and all of the stuff that is hosted on top of Nutanix platform and selling it to the same ID ops. >> Harjot, the space you're playing in is really changing so so fast. >> Harjot: Yes it is. >> Talk about micro segmentation and containers and serverless and the like. What, at its core, will allow your product to be able to stay up with the pace of change? >> So the code of the product, as I mentioned, I mean, it's network based, so one of the things, like, you get with that is, like, it's a very stable source of truth. So your languages keep evolving. So in if you look at the, I mean, this mind-boggling introduction of, like, open source technologies into enterprise environments, which you don't control what languages they are written in. And your developers are like picking up the latest and greatest tools. So in that world the core of the technology, which is like network based, still works the same and that allows us to be ,like, really future-proof this thing here. >> Languages of frameworks change. The network protocols are much more stable. >> Yet, to some people's chagrin, the protocols don't change. So let's talk a little bit about products and overlap of products. One of the, I think, confusing points, or can be confusing, is where Netsil fits in when it comes to Comm and overall to Zai. Where, where's the interaction and overlap or what's the relative? >> Yeah, so you can think of every workload in the cloud as a coup de loop, observe, orient, decide, and act. Now what Comm helps the customer is to like act faster, right. Whereas Netsil comes in and provides the observe and the orient piece. So it's all part of the same workload workflow. If you are an IT ops person, you need tools to observe and help orient, so you can decide faster. And tools like Comm and kubernetes, in the future, with one click, just a few clicks, you can make massive changes to your cloud infrastructure. But without observability you are just flying blind. That's where Netsil comes in. So that's why, as you've said, as Rajiv said, like it's going to enhance a lot of areas within Nutanix and, possibly like, even continue selling as a multi cloud monitoring solution. >> Just as we do brownfield input for micro segmentation, you can imagine that it would be a great great product for Comm as well. Being able to do brownfield import of applications and making them into Comm blueprints. >> Yeah, Rajiv, you've had some pent up demand from customers for the micro segmentation piece but give us a little bit.. You said there's other applications, what should we be expecting to see from the Netsil product line? >> So as CTU I can talk future, so let me tell you some stuff on the kubernete timelines. One great area for us to explore is around security operations. Since since Netsil is already in the net world looking at all traffic, it can easily establish a baseline, of which Vms, which containers normally talk to each other. What kind of requests to make. And it's registered at layer seven, so it can even go and look into what kind of API endpoints are normally called. And once it's base-lined this, detecting variation, selecting violations is going to be relatively simple. So we can alert on security violations, unusual behavior, services making calls to services that shouldn't be making calls to. All that kind of stuff. So that's one area for us to explore. We talked about Comm, so Comm can benefit greatly by being able to import brownfield applications into the Comm umbrella, making blueprints out of them. There's integrations with Prism Pro, which will enable the kind of metrics that Netsil is collecting and integrating it to what Prism Pro already does, putting into one single framework, adding it to capacity planning, adding in all the Prism Pro features that we have. So there's a lot of stuff we can do. >> So that's an awful lot of data. Where's this stored and what's the engine behind it? >> That's a great question. Actually, Netsil not only innovated in this unique way of collecting, we also invented a lot in-time series databases. So the back end of Netsil is powered by a database called Apache Druid, which is an OLAP time series database. So it can ingest that scale and you can run complex queries in sub-second latency XQ. So it can like summarize billions of data points at sub-second latencies. And the third thing that Netsil innovated is, in the visualizations. We are talking about, like, visualizing this complex data that is coming from these modern transforming environments. That's another area where Netsil innovated with this Maps interface to summarize and build easy-to-understand visualizations on your complex infrastructure. >> Now I'm scared that my head would explode but I would love to get you guys on with Satyam and talk through what additional data and when it comes to IOT machine learning, what additional insights. Quick question, are you guys working with Satyam at all at this point? >> We've started, like, understanding the lay of the land, so we're, like, still getting introduced to a lot of teams. As you guys know, these Nutanix is now growing very rapidly, there's so many areas to, like, learn about. And we are primarily working with a micro segmentation team right now but going forward, you will see Netsil's goodness being brought into other areas at Nutanix. >> Yeah, Rajiv one question I have from a software standpoint in general, where does AI fit into, you know, what you're doing with Zai and Comm? >> Yes, so for all of them, you know, we're using machine learning fairly extensively today to even do basic things like capacity planning, the what-if modeling that we've been doing. But to go beyond machine learning, if we actually invest in building an AI platform, I feel we can do a lot more in terms of root cause analysis and mediation, troubleshooting of applications, finding performance bottlenecks automatically. Essentially, really making that invisible infrastructure dream come true. We're close, we're not quite there yet. >> Yeah, and it's really about, like, getting quality data in without friction. So you have, like, AI is now being commoditized in the industry like all the algorithms are now like mainstream. So the biggest challenge has always been how do you go and capture the data at low friction? That's what Netsil brings onboard. >> Yeah, I'm super excited for the micro segmentation. Let's talk about what if customers... What has been the customer reaction to Netsil and just the new capability? >> We see a lot of excitement. This is micro segmentation barely been out, what, a couple of months at this point? And we already have fairly large customers deploying it out there, and a lot of demand for proof of concepts and so on at this point. It was very clear to us from the beginning that when people were looking at other SDN solutions, the number one use case they were using in the enterprise was for micro segmentation. So we took that, we made it as simple as we could. In true Nutanix fashion we said, "okay, let's make micro segmentation as one-click as we can." And it's been gratifying, I think, to see the initial reaction. In fact, some of the initial feedback we've gotten has been along the lines of, this is almost too simple. >> So one of the challenges that we've had in Enterprise is hybrid cloud. When you look at a EC2 instance and you have an internal database and the two communicate, that EC2 instance is ephemeral, we don't know how to handle that. Does Netsil address that challenge at all? >> It does, in fact, it's been designed for even a faster moving world of containers. I'll give you an example of kubernetes, it is, I mean, a similar example. So next Hill installs as a daemon set on kubernetes experiencing structure insertion. You are, like, independently inserting without developers. And as soon as it is installed, it's not just looking at packets, it's also like tapping into docker socket for metadata. So as soon as containers go up and down, new ones brought up, it actually pulls the metadata, the container IDs, the service IDs, kubernetes, pod names and whatnot. And then measures that to the metrics that we are collecting. So that in the UI, as you saw in the demo today, you're not so much slicing and dicing by IP addresses. You're slicing and dicing by that service tax, so your BMS can come and go, containers can come and go. But we are looking at the behavior of this group of cattle, and you know the cattle versus pets analogy, the whole idea in the new world is, to like, create these services as the new pets and your cattle are ephemeral, and the whole idea that Netsil can discover micro-services, discover the boundary of micro services by looking at layer 7 behavior and by smartly grouping things based on the behavior. So we know exactly what a MySQL database and different installations of MySQL look like based on the behavior and the query behavior, and group them together. >> So enforcement. And is that at the bot level or is that at the container level? >> So on the enforcement side, Netsil is mostly on the visibility. So on the micro segmentation side there is... >> Today micro-segmentation, of which for Vms as we build out our next version of container services, we are looking into building a micro segmentation for kubernetes as well, and that will be at the bot level. >> Alright Kieth, I'm looking forward to this is CTO advisor podcast, digging a little bit more into micro-segmentation. It may be Rajiv and.. >> We'll have them on for sure. >> ...and Harjot can stop by so time. But thank you gentlemen so much for coming. Congratulations on the update. Looking forward to hearing more. Keith and I have a little bit more here left of day one of Nutanix dot next 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, Kieth Townsend. Thank you for watching the Cube. (Electronic Music)

(gentle upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone, to "theCUBE"'s live stage performance here in Palo Alto, California at "theCUBE" Studios. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, kicking off our first inaugural Supercloud event. It's an editorial event, we wanted to bring together the best in the business, the smartest, the biggest, the up-and-coming startups, venture capitalists, everybody, to weigh in on this new Supercloud trend, this structural change in the cloud computing business. We're about to run the Ecosystem Speaks, which is a bunch of pre-recorded companies that wanted to get their voices on the record, so stay tuned for the rest of the day. We'll be replaying all that content and they're going to be having some really good commentary and hear what they have to say. I had a chance to interview and so did Dave. Dave, this is our closing segment where we kind of unpack everything or kind of digest and report. So much to kind of digest from the conversations today, a wide range of commentary from Supercloud operating system to developers who are in charge to maybe it's an ops problem or maybe Oracle's a Supercloud. I mean, that was debated. So so much discussion, lot to unpack. What was your favorite moments? >> Well, before I get to that, I think, I go back to something that happened at re:Invent last year. Nick Sturiale came up, Steve Mullaney from Aviatrix; we're going to hear from him shortly in the Ecosystem Speaks. Nick Sturiale's VC said "it's happening"! And what he was talking about is this ecosystem is exploding. They're building infrastructure or capabilities on top of the CapEx infrastructure. So, I think it is happening. I think we confirmed today that Supercloud is a thing. It's a very immature thing. And I think the other thing, John is that, it seems to me that the further you go up the stack, the weaker the business case gets for doing Supercloud. We heard from Marianna Tessel, it's like, "Eh, you know, we can- it was easier to just do it all on one cloud." This is a point that, Adrian Cockcroft just made on the panel and so I think that when you break out the pieces of the stack, I think very clearly the infrastructure layer, what we heard from Confluent and HashiCorp, and certainly VMware, there's a real problem there. There's a real need at the infrastructure layer and then even at the data layer, I think Benoit Dageville did a great job of- You know, I was peppering him with all my questions, which I basically was going through, the Supercloud definition and they ticked the box on pretty much every one of 'em as did, by the way Ali Ghodsi you know, the big difference there is the philosophy of Republicans and Democrats- got open versus closed, not to apply that to either one side, but you know what I mean! >> And the similarities are probably greater than differences. >> Berkely, I would probably put them on the- >> Yeah, we'll put them on the Democrat side we'll make Snowflake the Republicans. But so- but as we say there's a lot of similarities as well in terms of what their objectives are. So, I mean, I thought it was a great program and a really good start to, you know, an industry- You brought up the point about the industry consortium, asked Kit Colbert- >> Yep. >> If he thought that was something that was viable and what'd they say? That hyperscale should lead it? >> Yeah, they said hyperscale should lead it and there also should be an industry consortium to get the voices out there. And I think VMware is very humble in how they're putting out their white paper because I think they know that they can't do it all and that they do not have a great track record relative to cloud. And I think, but they have a great track record of loyal installed base ops people using VMware vSphere all the time. >> Yeah. >> So I think they need a catapult moment where they can catapult to the cloud native which they've been working on for years under Raghu and the team. So the question on VMware is in the light of Broadcom, okay, acquisition of VMware, this is an opportunity or it might not be an opportunity or it might be a spin-out or something, I just think VMware's got way too much engineering culture to be ignored, Dave. And I think- well, I'm going to watch this very closely because they can pull off some sort of rallying moment. I think they could. And then you hear the upstarts like Platform9, Rafay Systems and others they're all like, "Yes, we need to unify behind something. There needs to be some sort of standard". You know, we heard the argument of you know, more standards bodies type thing. So, it's interesting, maybe "theCUBE" could be that but we're going to certainly keep the conversation going. >> I thought one of the most memorable statements was Vittorio who said we- for VMware, we want our cake, we want to eat it too and we want to lose weight. So they have a lot of that aspirations there! (John laughs) >> And then I thought, Adrian Cockcroft said you know, the devs, they want to get married. They were marrying everybody, and then the ops team, they have to deal with the divorce. >> Yeah. >> And I thought that was poignant. It's like, they want consistency, they want standards, they got to be able to scale And Lori MacVittie, I'm not sure you agree with this, I'd have to think about it, but she was basically saying, all we've talked about is devs devs devs for the last 10 years, going forward we're going to be talking about ops. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things I learned from this day and looking back, and some kind of- I've been sauteing through all the interviews. If you zoom out, for me it was the epiphany of developers are still in charge. And I've said, you know, the developers are doing great, it's an ops security thing. Not sure I see that the way I was seeing before. I think what I learned was the refactoring pattern that's emerging, In Sik Rhee brought this up from Vertex Ventures with Marianna Tessel, it's a nuanced point but I think he's right on which is the pattern that's emerging is developers want ease-of-use tooling, they're driving the change and I think the developers in the devs ops ethos- it's never going to be separate. It's going to be DevOps. That means developers are driving operations and then security. So what I learned was it's not ops teams leveling up, it's devs redefining what ops is. >> Mm. And I think that to me is where Supercloud's going to be interesting- >> Forcing that. >> Yeah. >> Forcing the change because the structural change is open sources thriving, devs are still in charge and they still want more developers, Vittorio "we need more developers", right? So the developers are in charge and that's clear. Now, if that happens- if you believe that to be true the domino effect of that is going to be amazing because then everyone who gets on the wrong side of history, on the ops and security side, is going to be fighting a trend that may not be fight-able, you know, it might be inevitable. And so the winners are the ones that are refactoring their business like Snowflake. Snowflake is a data warehouse that had nothing to do with Amazon at first. It was the developers who said "I'm going to refactor data warehouse on AWS". That is a developer-driven refactorization and a business model. So I think that's the pattern I'm seeing is that this concept refactoring, patterns and the developer trajectory is critical. >> I thought there was another great comment. Maribel Lopez, her Lord of the Rings comment: "there will be no one ring to rule them all". Now at the same time, Kit Colbert, you know what we asked him straight out, "are you the- do you want to be the, the Supercloud OS?" and he basically said, "yeah, we do". Now, of course they're confined to their world, which is a pretty substantial world. I think, John, the reason why Maribel is so correct is security. I think security's a really hard problem to solve. You've got cloud as the first layer of defense and now you've got multiple clouds, multiple layers of defense, multiple shared responsibility models. You've got different tools for XDR, for identity, for governance, for privacy all within those different clouds. I mean, that really is a confusing picture. And I think the hardest- one of the hardest parts of Supercloud to solve. >> Yeah, and I thought the security founder Gee Rittenhouse, Piyush Sharrma from Accurics, which sold to Tenable, and Tony Kueh, former head of product at VMware. >> Right. >> Who's now an investor kind of looking for his next gig or what he is going to do next. He's obviously been extremely successful. They brought up the, the OS factor. Another point that they made I thought was interesting is that a lot of the things to do to solve the complexity is not doable. >> Yeah. >> It's too much work. So managed services might field the bit. So, and Chris Hoff mentioned on the Clouderati segment that the higher level services being a managed service and differentiating around the service could be the key competitive advantage for whoever does it. >> I think the other thing is Chris Hoff said "yeah, well, Web 3, metaverse, you know, DAO, Superclouds" you know, "Stupercloud" he called it and this bring up- It resonates because one of the criticisms that Charles Fitzgerald laid on us was, well, it doesn't help to throw out another term. I actually think it does help. And I think the reason it does help is because it's getting people to think. When you ask people about Supercloud, they automatically- it resonates with them. They play back what they think is the future of cloud. So Supercloud really talks to the future of cloud. There's a lot of aspects to it that need to be further defined, further thought out and we're getting to the point now where we- we can start- begin to say, okay that is Supercloud or that isn't Supercloud. >> I think that's really right on. I think Supercloud at the end of the day, for me from the simplest way to describe it is making sure that the developer experience is so good that the operations just happen. And Marianna Tessel said, she's investing in making their developer experience high velocity, very easy. So if you do that, you have to run on premise and on the cloud. So hybrid really is where Supercloud is going right now. It's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud was- that was debunked on this session today. I thought that was clear. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean I think- >> It's not about multi-cloud. It's about operationally seamless operations across environments, public cloud to on-premise, basically. >> I think we got consensus across the board that multi-cloud, you know, is a symptom Chuck Whitten's thing of multi-cloud by default versus multi- multi-cloud has not been a strategy, Kit Colbert said, up until the last couple of years. Yeah, because people said, "oh we got all these multiple clouds, what do we do with it?" and we got this mess that we have to solve. Whereas, I think Supercloud is something that is a strategy and then the other nuance that I keep bringing up is it's industries that are- as part of their digital transformation, are building clouds. Now, whether or not they become superclouds, I'm not convinced. I mean, what Goldman Sachs is doing, you know, with AWS, what Walmart's doing with Azure connecting their on-prem tools to those public clouds, you know, is that a supercloud? I mean, we're going to have to go back and really look at that definition. Or is it just kind of a SAS that spans on-prem and cloud. So, as I said, the further you go up the stack, the business case seems to wane a little bit but there's no question in my mind that from an infrastructure standpoint, to your point about operations, there's a real requirement for super- what we call Supercloud. >> Well, we're going to keep the conversation going, Dave. I want to put a shout out to our founding supporters of this initiative. Again, we put this together really fast kind of like a pilot series, an inaugural event. We want to have a face-to-face event as an industry event. Want to thank the founding supporters. These are the people who donated their time, their resource to contribute content, ideas and some cash, not everyone has committed some financial contribution but we want to recognize the names here. VMware, Intuit, Red Hat, Snowflake, Aisera, Alteryx, Confluent, Couchbase, Nutanix, Rafay Systems, Skyhigh Security, Aviatrix, Zscaler, Platform9, HashiCorp, F5 and all the media partners. Without their support, this wouldn't have happened. And there are more people that wanted to weigh in. There was more demand than we could pull off. We'll certainly continue the Supercloud conversation series here on "theCUBE" and we'll add more people in. And now, after this session, the Ecosystem Speaks session, we're going to run all the videos of the big name companies. We have the Nutanix CEOs weighing in, Aviatrix to name a few. >> Yeah. Let me, let me chime in, I mean you got Couchbase talking about Edge, Platform 9's going to be on, you know, everybody, you know Insig was poopoo-ing Oracle, but you know, Oracle and Azure, what they did, two technical guys, developers are coming on, we dig into what they did. Howie Xu from Zscaler, Paula Hansen is going to talk about going to market in the multi-cloud world. You mentioned Rajiv, the CEO of Nutanix, Ramesh is going to talk about multi-cloud infrastructure. So that's going to run now for, you know, quite some time here and some of the pre-record so super excited about that and I just want to thank the crew. I hope guys, I hope you have a list of credits there's too many of you to mention, but you know, awesome jobs really appreciate the work that you did in a very short amount of time. >> Well, I'm excited. I learned a lot and my takeaway was that Supercloud's a thing, there's a kind of sense that people want to talk about it and have real conversations, not BS or FUD. They want to have real substantive conversations and we're going to enable that on "theCUBE". Dave, final thoughts for you. >> Well, I mean, as I say, we put this together very quickly. It was really a phenomenal, you know, enlightening experience. I think it confirmed a lot of the concepts and the premises that we've put forth, that David Floyer helped evolve, that a lot of these analysts have helped evolve, that even Charles Fitzgerald with his antagonism helped to really sharpen our knives. So, you know, thank you Charles. And- >> I like his blog, by the I'm a reader- >> Yeah, absolutely. And it was great to be back in Palo Alto. It was my first time back since pre-COVID, so, you know, great job. >> All right. I want to thank all the crew and everyone. Thanks for watching this first, inaugural Supercloud event. We are definitely going to be doing more of these. So stay tuned, maybe face-to-face in person. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante now for the Ecosystem chiming in, and they're going to speak and share their thoughts here with "theCUBE" our first live stage performance event in our studio. Thanks for watching. (gentle upbeat music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022. Brought to you by HPE. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante here bringing you day one of theCUBE's coverage of HPE Discover 22. We've had a lot of great conversations so far. Just a few hours in. We have two of our alumni back with us. Powerhouses, two powerhouses from Nutanix. Two for the price of one. Mandy Dhaliwal joins us. The CMO of 90 days at Nutanix. It's great to see you. Congratulations on the gig. >> Thanks Lisa. It's great to be here and great to be at Nutanix. >> Isn't it? And Tarkan Maner, the Chief Commercial Officer at Nutanix. Welcome back Tarkan. >> Great to see you guys. >> So this is only day one of the the main show Tarkan. We've been hearing a lot about cloud as an operating model. We've heard your CEO Rajiv talking about it. Break that down from Nutanix's point of view. >> Yeah, look at the end, the tech conference we are talking a lot technology but at the end it is all about outcomes. I saw Keith was here earlier, you know, GreenLake's story. We were on a session earlier. Everything is about business outcomes for the customers. And obviously our partner Ecosystems, NBC all these double technologies come together and become an open model. And our customers are moving from a CAPEX model, old school model, what I call dinosaur model, into an OPEX model, subscription model. Which Nutanix basically the category creator for this, in a hybrid multi-cloud fashion. One platform, one experience, any app, any user, anytime, and make it count. Let the customers focus on business outcomes. Let us deal with infrastructure for you. >> What are some of the key outcomes that you're seeing customers achieve? We've seen so much change in the last couple of years. >> Tarkan: Right. >> A lot of acceleration. >> Tarkan: Right. >> Every company has to be a data company today to compete. >> Right. >> What are some of the outcomes that you're really proud of? >> So look, at the end of the, day's it's all about digital transformation and it's a big loaded word. But at the end of the day every company is trying to get digitized. And hybrid multicloud is the only way to get there in a cost effective way. So that cost is a big story. Highly secure. Manageable, available, reliable, total cost ownership definitely depressed and take the complexity out. Let us deal with the infrastructure for you. You focus on your time to market, and the best applications for the best users. >> So Mandy, I remember, you know you talked about your category creator Tarkan, and I remember Stu Miniman and I, were in the Wikibon offices. We were just getting started and he said, "Dave you got to come in here." And Dhiraj was on the phone. They were describing this new category and I was blown away. I'm like, wow, that's like the cloud but you know, for on-prem. So what does the, what does the cloud operating model mean to Nutanix Mandy? >> Really, what we're trying to do is become this common cloud platform across Core, Edge and Cloud. We're known for our strength in HCI on premise. We have capability across. So it's really important for us to share this story with the market. Now, also one of the reasons I joined. You know this story needs to be told in a bigger fashion. So I'm here to really help evolve this category. We've won HCI, right? What's next? So stay tuned. >> So we call that super cloud. I call it. >> Yes, I love that name. >> So it, but it needs has meaning, right? >> Right. >> It's a new layer. It's not just, oh, I run on Azure. I run an Aw or running green. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's actually a common infrastructure. >> Yes. >> Common experience across maybe and even out to the edge. >> Mandy: Right. >> Right. So is, is that, do you guys see that or do you think this is just a little buzzword that Dave made up? >> No, I think it has legs. And I think at the core of it, it's simplicity and elegance. And if you look, and, and again, I'm drinking the the champagne, right? We have that we architected for that. We've solved that problem. So we now can extend it to become ubiquitous in the market. So it's, it's an amazing place to be because we've got the the scale, frankly, and the breadth now of the technology platform to be able to go deliver that super cloud. >> And you have to do the work, right? You, you, you have to hide all the complexity- >> Mandy: Yeah. >> Of whether it's AWS, Azure, Google, GreenLake wherever you go on prem. >> Mandy: Right. >> And not only that, as you know Dave, many people think about cloud, they automatically think about public cloud. AWS, Azure, or Google. Guess what? We have customers. Some of the workloads and apps running on a local country. If you're in Singapore, on Singtel, and your, if you're in Switzerland on Swisscom, if you're in Japan on NTT, guess what? Our cloud runs also on those clouds. For those customers who want the data, gravity, local issues with the security and privacy laws in the local country then all this SI you have HCI, Emphasis VIDPro, Accenture, CAPS, JAM, and ITCS. They have also cloud services. What we build as Mandy said as the creator, make the platform run anywhere. So the customers can move data, apps, workloads from cloud to cloud. From private to public and within public, from public to public. From AWS to Singtel. From Singtel to Swisscom to Azure, doesn't matter. We want to make sure one platform one experience, any app, any user. >> And at least a lot of those guys are building on OpenStack. We don't talk about OpenStack anymore. But a lot of the local telcos they actually it's alive and well and actually growing. >> So you, you make it sound simple. So I got to ask you as the chief marketing officer how do you message that simplicity and actually make it tangible for customers? >> That's a great question. It's really about the customer story, right? How do we share that we're able to take something that took months to deploy and have it done in in days, minutes, right? So there's a lot of those kinds of stories that you'll see across the platform coming. We're getting a lot more messaging around that. We're also tightening up the message to be more easily conveyed. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm working on right now and really super excited. You know, we've got leading retailers, financial services institutions, public sector agencies that are running on our platform. So we've got this amazing cadre of customers and their stories just need to be told. >> That voice of the customer is so powerful. >> Mandy: Yep. >> As you well know Tarkan. That's, that's the objective voice right? That is ideally articulating your value proposition. >> Yeah. >> Validating that helping other customers understand this, these are the outcomes we are achieving. >> Mandy: Right? >> You can do the same. >> Mandy: Right. >> And, and different personas. >> Mandy: Right. >> It's not one customer fits all right. You heard Home Depot, Daniel with Antonio on the keynote. The stores, the distribution center, the warehousing and their service department, their mobile app all that data has to move from place to place. And we want to make sure it's cost effective. It's secure. And not only for the system, people like Daniel but also for application developers. Dave, you talked about, you know, Open Source, OpenStack, a lot of new application development is all open source. >> Mandy: Yep. >> And we need to also gear toward them and give them a platform, a hybrid multicloud platform. So they can build applications and then run applications and manage lifecycle applications anywhere in simple ways securely. So this platform is not only for running applications but also build a new set of digital transformation driven applications. >> So what are you doing with GreenLake especially in that context, right? 'Cause that's what we're looking for. Is like are people going to build applications on top. Maybe it's the incumbents. It might not be startups, but what what are you doing there? >> Right. So look, I'll give you the highlights on this. I know you talked to Keith again we had the session earlier. We have about 2000 plus customers. Customers are moving from a CapEx model to an OPEX model. They like the subscription side of the business and basically our strategy and many is leading this globally making cloud on your terms. So you have the control, you move from CapEx to OPEX and we bring the data in cloud to you. So you can manage the data securely, privately build your applications, and then they're ready. You can move applications based on microservices capabilities we deliver to different cloud as, as you wish. >> So then what are you hearing from customers? What are they most excited about right now given the massive potential that you're about to unleash? >> It it's really about best in class, right? So you get these these amazing technologies to come together. We abstract the complexity away for the customer. So HP GreenLake brings economic benefit. Nutanix brings experience. So you couple those two. And all of a sudden they've got time to value. Like they've never had before. Add on top of that the skills gap that we've got in the market, right? The new breed of folks that are deploying and managing these applications just don't have an appetite for complexity like they did in the old world. So we've got elegance, that's underpinning our architecture and simplicity and ease of use that learn that really translates into customer delight. So that's our secret sauce. >> You talk about time to value. Sorry, Dave. Time to value is no joke as a marketer. Talk to me about what does that mean from a translation perspective? Because these days, one of the things we learned in the pandemic, other than everyone had no patience and still probably doesn't is that access to realtime data no longer a, oh, it's awesome. It's Fanta, it's, it's table stakes. It is it's, what's going to help companies succeed. And those not. So from a time to value perspective, talk a little bit more about that as really impactful to every industry. >> Right, And, and, and underpin underpinning, all of it is that simplicity and ease of use, right? So if I can pick up and have portability across all aspects of my platform, guess what? I've got a single pane of glass that's that I'm able to manage my entire infrastructure through. That's really powerful. So I don't have to waste time doing an undifferentiated heavy lifting, all of a sudden there's huge value there in simplicity and ease of use, right? So it translates for things that would take months and you know, hundreds of developers all of a sudden you can vend out infrastructure in a way that's performant, reliable, scalable and all of a sudden, right? Everybody's happy. People are not losing sleep anymore because they know they've got a reliable way of deploying and managing and running their infrastructure. >> Perfect example for you very quick. Just is very exciting. Mandy and I, were in the session, Texas Children's Hospital. >> Yeah. >> Theresa Montag. I mean, Tonthat, she's the head of infrastructure, with Keith, with us you should listen to the patient care Pediatric, you know, oncology, realtime data. Hip regulation, highly regulated industry data. Gravity is super important. State laws, city laws, healthcare laws. The data cannot go to a public cloud service but has to be cloud driven, cloud enabled and data driven and eccentric on the site. But cloud operating model, Nutanix again with GreenLake, delivers a subscription methodology, a you know, OPEX model and delivers desktop service cloud native applications, supporting all these tools like epic all happening in healthcare. >> You guys have a high net promoter score. What, what got you there? And what's going to keep you there in the future. >> It's underpinned by the technology itself and also our outstanding support team right. We hear our competitors' customers call us for support first, before they call our competitors. If you can't take that to the bank, what can you, right. It's crazy. They, our customers tell us this >> Dave: Really? >> Really. >> It's pretty validating. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, help us with has help us with this XYZ stuff. Yeah. >> And it becomes even more important with this new cloud era. >> Yes. >> As you're moving the data, the applications to different places, they want the same experience. And look as a company, we spent the investment. It's not free. >> Mandy: Yeah. >> It costs us a lot of money to make that happen. One of the best support organizations I've been in industry for 30 years, I've never seen this kind of a maniacal focus on customer service. And without that success will not come. >> Yeah, I mean, I've met a lot of Nutanix customers at the various shows over the years. Ridden in taxis bus rides, you know, cocktail parties. They're, they're an interesting bunch, right. They, they were kind of leading edge early on. They saw the light bulb went off, they adopted. >> Right. >> Right, so, and think about thinking about aligning with where they're going where are they going and how is Nutanix aligning with them? >> There's, there's so much complexity in the world, right? So we're abstracting away the complexity. Not all workloads are meant to run in an either or situation. >> Right. >> Right, and we're hearing from IDC as well in, in, by 2026, 75% of workloads are going to be misplaced. How do they have a strategic partner? That's going to help them run their organization effectively and efficiently. We become that open and neutral player in the market. That can be the trusted advisor for them to help with workload placement optimization. They're standardizing, they're consolidating they're modernizing, they're transforming. There's a lot going on right. And so how do they come to somebody? That's voice of reason that also is well networked across the ecosystem. And that interoperability is key and yes, I'm still drinking the Kool-Aid, but it, I see it. It's, it's a tremendous story. >> Switzerland with weapons. (everyone laughing) >> You said it, you said it, Dave. >> And also one other thing it's important competition makes us better not bitter. >> Yeah. >> We have the best best partner network, 10,000 plus partners but more than numbers, quality, constantly working theater. And some of our partners also are competitors. We compete with them and we deliver solutions this way. Customers don't have to forklift out forklift in Nutanix. We leverage their past investment, current investment so they can tie Nutanix in different ways for different workloads, not one size fits all. We have multiple solutions, multiple ways you know, small, medium, large, extra large D in terms of scale and different workloads from the, you know Edge to the Cloud. And to at the end of the day to data as a whole, as you heard from HP today, our strategy, our roadmaps super aligned. That's why we were having a lot of success with GreenLake as well. >> Mandy, can you talk a last question about the partner ecosystem that Tarkan mentioned? How were you leveraging that to, to modify the messaging that you talked about? You've only been here almost 90 days. >> Mandy: Right. >> How is the partner ecosystem going to be a facilitator of the Nutanix brand and messaging and the reach? >> They're, they're tremendous, right? Because we're able to now, like we're doing here, right. Be able to reach into their customer base, and showcase our stories in a purpose built way right. This is, this is reality and solutions that we're driving for the customers with like-minded problems, like-minded people so they can see that. And so we do that across the, the ecosystem and all of a sudden, we've got this rolling thunder if you will. So it's up to us to, to, to really hone in on the right narrative and hand it to them and have them run with it that there's going to be practices built on this, even in a deeper way, moving forward. I see it, you know, we've done, I've done this before in my career. And so I've got conviction that we're on the right track and, you know, watch the space. >> Dot, dot, dot, to be continued. Watch the space. You heard it here on theCUBE. Mandy, Tarkan, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about the power of Nutanix with HPE, what you're doing and what you're enabling customers to achieve. It's transformative and, and best of luck. You'll have to come back in the next 90 days so we can see some of those customer stories. >> Absolutely. Absolutely, would love to, thank you. >> Thanks guys. >> Mandy: Yeah. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from the show floor of HPE Discover 22. Day one coverage continues after a short break.

(upbeat music) >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Live from the Bellagio, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here all day today and tomorrow. We're going to talk about process mining next. We've got two guests here. Mike Engel is here, intelligent automation and process intelligence leader at PWC. And Ryan McMahon, the SVP of growth at UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> So Ryan, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about process mining. How does UiPath do it differently and what are some of the things being unveiled at this event? >> So look, I would tell you it's actually more than process mining and hopefully, not only you but others saw this this morning with Param. It's really about the full capabilities of that discovery suite. In which, obviously, process mining is part of. But it starts with task capture. So, going out and actually working with subject matter experts on a process. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, order to cash, digitally capturing that process or how they believe it should work or execute across one's environment. Right Mike? And then from there, actually validating or verifying with things or capabilities like process mining. Giving you a full digital x-ray of actually how that process is being executed in the enterprise. Showing you process bottlenecks. For things like accounts payable, showing you days outstanding, maverick buying, so you can actually pin point and do a few things. Fix your process, right? Where process should be fixed. Fix your application because it's probably not doing what you think it is, and then third, and where the value comes, is in our platform of which process mining is a capability, our PA platform. Really moving directly to automations, right? And then, having the ability with even task mining to drill into a specific bottleneck. Capturing keystrokes, clicks, and then moving to, with both of those, process mining and task mining, into Automation Hub, as part of our discovery platform as well. Being able to crowdsource, prioritize, all of those potential, if you will, just capabilities of automations, and saying, "Okay, let's go and prioritize these. These deliver to the greatest value," and executing across them. So, as much as it is about process mining, it's actually the whole entire discovery suite of capabilities that differentiates UiPath from other RPA vendors, as the only RPA vendor that delivers process mining, task mining and this discovery suite as part of our enterprise automation platform. >> Such a critical point, Ryan. I mean, it's multi-dimensional. It's not just one component. It's not just process mining or task mining, it's the combination that's really impactful. Agree with you a hundred percent. >> So, one of the things that people who watch our shows know, I'm like a broken record on this, the early days of RPA, I called it paving the cow path. And that was good because somebody knew the process, they just repeat it. But the problem was, the process wasn't necessarily the best process. As you just described. So, when you guys made the acquisition of ProcessGold, I said, "Okay, now I'm starting to connect the dots," and now a couple years on, we're starting to see that come together. This is what I think is most misunderstood about UiPath, and I wonder, from a practitioner's perspective, if you can sort of fill in some of those gaps. It's that, it's different from a point tool, it's different from a productivity tool. Like Power Automate, I'll just say it, that's running in Azure Cloud, that's cool or a vertically integrated part of some ERP Stack. This is a horizontal play that is end to end. Which is a bigger automation agenda, it's bold but it's potentially huge. $60 billion dollar TAM, I think that's understated. Maybe you could, from a practitioner's perspective, share with us the old way, >> Yeah. >> And kind of, the new way. >> Well obviously, we all made a lot of investments in this space, early on, to determine what should we be automating in the first place? We even went so far as, we have platforms that will transcribe these kind of surveys and discussions that we're having with our clients, right. But at the end of the day all we're learning is what they know about the process. What they as individuals know about the process. And that's problematic. Once we get into the next phase of actually developing something, we miss something, right? Because we're trying to do this rapidly. So, I think what we have now is really this opportunity to have data driven insights and our clients are really grabbing onto that idea, that it's good to have a sense of what they think they do but it's more important to have a sense of what they actually do. >> Are you seeing, in the last year in a half we've seen the acceleration of a lot of things, there's some silver linings but we've also seen the acceleration in automation as a mandate. Where is it? In terms of a priority, that you're seeing with customers, and are there any industries that you're seeing that are really leading the edge here? >> Well I do see it as a priority and of course, in the role that I have, obviously everybody I talk to, it's a priority for them. But I think it's kind of changing. People are understanding that it's not just a sense of, as Ryan was pointing out, it's not just a sense of getting an understanding of what we do today, it's really driving it to that next step of actually getting something impactful out the other end. Clients are starting to understand that. I like to categorize them, there's three types of clients, there's starters, there's stall-ers and those that want to scale. >> Right? So we're seeing a lot more on the other ends of this now, where clients are really getting started and they're getting a good sense that this is important for them because they know that identifying the opportunities in the first place is the most difficult part of automation. That's what's stalling the programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got these clients that are saying, "Hey, I want to do this really at scale, can you help us do that?" >> (Ryan) Right. >> And it's quite a challenge. >> How do I build a pipeline of automations? So I've had success in finance and accounting, fantastic. How do I take this to operations? How do I take this this to supply chain? How do I take this to HR? And when I do that, it all starts with, as Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer at VMware, would say and as a customer, "It starts with data but more importantly, process." So focusing on process and where we can actually deliver automation. So it's not just about those insights, it's about moving from insights to actionable next steps. >> Right. >> And that is where we're seeing this convergence, if you will, take place. As we've seen it many times before. I mentioned I worked at Cisco in the past, we saw this with Voice Over IP converging on the network. We saw this at VMware, who I know you guys have spoken to multiple times. When a move from a hypervisor to including NSX with the network, to including cloud management and also VSAN for storage, and converging in software. We're seeing it too with process, really. Instead of kids and clipboards, as they used to call it, and many Six Sigma and Lean workshops, with whiteboards and sticky papers, to actually showing people within, really, days how a process is being executed within their organization. And then, suggesting here's where there's automation capabilities, go execute against them. >> So Ryan, this is why sometimes I scoff at the TAM analysis. I get you've got to do the TAM analysis, you've got to communicate to Wall Street. But basically what you do is you pull out IDC or Gartner data, which is very stovepipe, and you kind of say, "Okay we're in this market." It's the convergence of these markets. It's cloud, it's containers, it's IS, it's PaaS, it's Saas, it's blockchain, it's automation. They're all coming together to form this, it sound like a buzzword but this digital matrix, if you will. And it's how well you leverage that digital matrix, which defines your digital business. So, talk about the role that automation, generally, RPA specifically, process mining specifically, play in a digital business. >> Do you want to take that Mike or do you want me to take it? >> We can both do it? How about that? >> Yeah, perfect. >> So I'll start with it. I mean all this is about convergence at this point, right? There are a number of platform providers out there, including UiPath, that are kind of teaching us that. Often times led by the software vendors in terms of how we think of it but what we know is that there's no one solution. We went down the RPA path, lots of clients and got a lot of excitement and a lot of impact but if you really want to drive it broader, what clients are looking at now, is what is the ecosystem of tools that we need to have in place to make that happen? And from our perspective, it's got to start with really, process intelligence. >> What I would say too, if you look at digital transformation, it was usually driven from an application. Right? Really. And what I think customers found was that, "Hey," I'm going to name some folks here, "Put everything in SAP and we'll solve all your problems." Larry Ellison will tell you, "Put everything into Oracle and we'll solve all your problems." Salesforce, now, I'm a salesperson, I've never used an out of the box Salesforce dashboard in my life, to run my business because I want to run it the way I want to run it. Having said that though, they would say the same thing, "Put everything into our platform and we'll make sure that we can access it and you can use it everywhere and we'll solve all of your problems." I think what customers found is that that's not the case. So they said, "Okay, where are there other ways. Yes, I've got my application doing what it's doing, I've improved my process but hang on. There's things that are repeatable here that I can remove to actually focus on higher level orders." And that's where UiPath comes in. We've kind of had a bottom up swell but I would tell you that as we deliver ROI within days or weeks, versus potentially years and with a heavy, heavy investment up front. We're able to do it. We're able to then work with our partners like PWC, to then demonstrate with business process modeling, the ability to do it across all those, as I call, Silo's of excellence in an organization, to deliver true value, in a timeline, with integrated services from our partner, to execute and deliver on ROI. >> You mentioned some of the great software companies that have been created over the years. One you didn't mention but I want you to comment on it is Service Now. Because essentially McDermott's trying to create the platform of platforms. All about workflow and service management. They bought an RPA company, "Hey we got this too." But it's still a walled garden. It's still the same concept is put everything in here. My question is, how are you different? Yeah look, we're going to integrate with customers who want to integrate because we're an open platform and that's the right approach. We believe there will be some overlap and there'll be some choices to be made. Instead of that top down different approach, which may be a little bit heavy and a large investment up front, with varied results, as far as what that looks like, ours is really a bottoms up. I would tell you too, if you look at our community, which is a million and a half, I believe, strong now and growing, it's really about that practitioner and those people that have embraced it from the bottom up that really change how it gets implemented. And you don't have what I used to call the white blood cells, pushing back when you're trying to say, "Hey, let's take it from this finance and accounting to HR, to the supply chain, to the other sides of the organization," saying, "Hey look, be part of this," instead of, "No, you will do." >> Yeah, there's no, at least that I know of, there's no SAP or Salesforce freemium. You can't try it before you buy. And the entry price is way higher. I mean generally. I guess Salesforce not necessarily but I could taste automation for well under $100,000. I could get in for, I bet you most of your customers started at 25 of $50,000 departmental deployments. >> It's a bottoms up ground swell, that's exactly right. And it's really that approach. Which is much more like an Atlassian, I will tell you and it's really getting to the point where we obviously, and I'm saying this, I work at UiPath, we make really good software. And so, out of the box, it's getting easier and easier to use. It all integrates. Which makes it seamless. The reason people move to RPA first was because they got tired of bouncing between applications to do a task. Now we deliver this enterprise automation platform where you can go from process discovery to crowd sourcing and prioritizing your automations with your pipeline of automations, into Studio, into creating those automations, into testing them and back again, right? We give you the opportunity not to leave the platform and extract the most value out of our, what we call enterprise automation platform. Inclusive of process mining. Inclusive of testing and all those capabilities, document understanding, which is also mine, and it's fantastic. It's very differentiated from others that are out there. >> Well it's about having the right framework in place. >> That's it. From an automation perspective. I think that's a little bit different from what you would expect from the SAP's of the world. Mike, where are you seeing, in the large organizations that you work with, we think of what you describe as the automation pipeline, where are some of the key priorities that you're finding in large organizations? What's in that pipeline and in what order? >> It's interesting because every time we have a conversation whether it's internal or with our clients, we come up with another use case for this type of technology. Obviously, when we're having the initial conversations, what we're talking about is really automation. How do we stuff that pipe with automation. But you know, we have clients that are saying, "Hey listen, I'm trying to carve out of a parent company and what I need to do is document all of my processes in a meaningful way, that I can, at some point, take action on, so there's meaningful outcomes." Whether it be a shared services organization that's looking to outsource, all different types of use cases. So, prioritizing is, I think, it's about impact and the quickest way to impact seems to be automation. >> Is it fair to say, can I look at you UiPath as automation infrastructure? Is that okay or do you guys want to say, "Oh, we're an application." The reason I ask, so then you can answer, is if you look at the great infrastructure plays, they all had a role. The DBA, the CCIE from Cisco, the Cloud Architect, the VMware admin, you've been at all of them, Ryan. So, is there a role emerging here and if it's not plumbing or infrastructure, I know, okay that's cool but course correct me on the infrastructure comment and then, is there a role emerging? >> You know, I think the difference between UiPath and some of the infrastructure companies is, it used to take, Dave, years to give an ROI, really. You'd invest in infrastructure and it's like, if we build it they will come. In fact, we've seen this with Cloud, where we kind of started doing some of that on prem, right? We can do this but then you had Amazon, Azure and others kind of take it and say, "Look, we can do it better, faster and cheaper." It's that simple. So, I would say that we are an application and that we reference it as an enterprise automation platform. It's more than infrastructure. Now, are we going to, as I mentioned, integrate to an open platform, to other capabilities? Absolutely. I think, as you see with our investments and as we continue to build this out, starting in core RPA, buying ProcessGold and getting into our discovery suite of capabilities I covered, getting into, what I see next is, as you start launching many bots into your organization, you're touching multiple applications, so you got to test it. Any time you would launch an application you're going to test it before you go live, right? We see another convergence with testing and I know you had Garrett on and Matt, earlier, with testing, application testing, which has been a legacy, kind of dinosaur market, converging with RPA, where you can deliver automations to do it better, faster and cheaper. >> Thank you for that clarification but now Mike, is that role, I know roles are emerging in RPA and automation but is there, I mean, we're seeing centers of excellence pop up, is there an analogy there or sort of a similar- >> Yeah, I think the new role, if you will, it's not super new but it's really that sense of an automation solution architect. It's a whole different thing. We're talking about now more about recombinant innovation. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Than we are about build it from scratch. Because of the convergence of these low-code, no-code types of solutions. It's a different skill set. >> And we see it at PWC. You have somebody who is potentially a process expert but then also somebody who understands automations. It's the convergences of those two, as well, that's a different skill set. It really is. And it's actually bringing those together to get the most value. And we see this across multiple organizations. It starts with a COE. We've done great with our community, so we have that upswell going and then people are saying, "Hang on, I understand process but I also understand automations. let me put the two together," and that's where we get our true value. >> Bringing in the education and training. >> No question. >> That's a huge thing. >> The traditional components of it still need to exist but I think there are new roles that are emerging, for sure. >> It's a big cultural shift. >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> How do you guys, how does PWC and UiPath, and maybe you each can answer this in the last minute or so, how do you help facilitate that cultural shift in a business that's growing at warp speed, in a market that is very tumultuous? How do you do that? >> Want to go first or I can go? >> I'll go ahead and go first. It's working with great partners like Mike because they see it and they're converging two different practices within their organization to actually bring this value to customers and also that executive relevance. But even on our side, when we're meeting with customers, just in general, we're actually talking about, how do we deal with, there's what? 13 and a half million job openings, I guess, right now and there's 8500 people that are unemployed, is the last number that I heard. We couldn't even fill all of those jobs if we wanted to. So it's like, okay, what is it that we could potentially automate so maybe we don't need all those jobs. And that's not a negative, it's just saying, we couldn't fill them anyway. So let's focus on where we can and where, there again, can extract the most value in working with our partners but create this new domain that's not networking or virtualization but it's actually, potentially, process and automation. It's testing and automation. It might even be security and automation. Which, I will tell you, is probably coming next, having come out of the security space. You know, I sit there and listen to all these threats and I see these people chasing, really, automated threats. It's like, guys a threat hunter that's really good goes through the same 15 steps that they would when they're chasing a false positive, as if a bot would do that for them. >> I mean, I've written about the productivity declines over the past several decades in western countries, it's not universal around the world and maybe we have a productivity boost because of Covid but it's like this perpetual workday now. That's not sustainable. So we're not going to be able to solve the worlds great problems. Whether it's climate change, diversity, massive deaths, on and on and on, unless we deal with that labor gap. >> That's right. >> And the only way to do that is automation. It's so clear to me that that's the answer. Part of the answer. >> It is part of the answer and I think, to your point Lisa, it's a cultural shift that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. When you think about people that are coming into the work force, it's an expectation now. So if you want to retain or you know, attract and retain the right people, you'd better be prepared for it as an organization. >> Yeah, remember the old, proficient in Word and Excel. Makes it almost trivial. It's trivial compared to that. I think if you don't have automation chops, going forward, it's going to be an issue. Hey, we have whatever, 5000 bots running at our company, how could you help? Huh? What's a bot? >> That's right. You're right. We see this too. I'll give you an example at Cisco. One of their financial analysts, junior starter, he says, "Part of our training program, is creating automations. Why? Because it's not just about finance anymore. It's about what can I automate in my role to actually focus on higher level orders and this for me, is just amazing." And you know, it's Rajiv Ramaswamy's son who's over there at Cisco now as a financial analyst. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday, no kidding, right Dave? And I get a text from Rajiv, who's now CEO at Nutanix, and he says, "I can't believe I just created a bot." And I said, "I'm at the right place." Really. >> That's cool, I mean hey, you're right too. You want to work for Amazon, you got to know how to provision a EC2 instance or you don't get the job. >> Yeah. >> You got to train for that. And these are the types of skills that are expected- >> That's right. >> For the future. >> Awesome. Guys- >> I'm glad I'm older. >> Are you no longer proficient in Word is the question. >> Guys, thanks for joining us, talking about what you guys are doing together, how you're really facilitating this massive growth trajectory. It's great to be back in person and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers later today. >> Terrific. >> Great. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath FORWARD IV. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(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)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem >>partners. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Special coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for host of the Cube were stupid men Day volonte all doing interviews covering the virtual version of VM World. First time it's ever happened. We've been covering VM World for over 10 years, our 11th season with Cube at VM World. And of course, it's difference virtual. But we're doing our part. We're getting in the programs. We need to get the stories out and we got a great guest here. Submit to on who's the chief customer officer of the M where, uh, back to VM, where he ran the end user computing of which we covered air. Watch a lot of great announcements Submit. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on to the Q. Virtual >>John. Great to see you again. And great to be back on the Cube. >>So great to see you. And again I know you. You came in your back into the wheelhouse of VM ware. But as the theme of this show is putting the digital foundation for an unpredictable world. Also, with Covidien going virtual makes a lot of sense. However, VM Ware has been doing extremely well on the business performance side and making all the right tech moves we've been covering them to Cuba is well documented, the business models evolving. The performance is there. You are in a new role for VM, where its newly created chief customer officer tell us why you're back. Why this role? Why is it important? >>Yeah, great question, John. You know, I I joined the anywhere because we end where I look at sort of what bm where is trying to do all aligned with what customers want If you think about customers, they have been up until now, dabbling with cloud building sort of strategies on how to embrace Cloud, which applications will go to which parts off the cloud. And it has been something that has been more off slow RL strategy and with the multi cloud transition plan. Now, VM Ware provides to some extent this, you know, started out with operating system for the hardware, and it has evolved to provide operating system for the cloud it truly runs applications across multiple clouds. And with our partnerships with AWS Azure, Microsoft Google, we're able to sort of give our customers this multi cloud platform for them to run any application, whether that's traditional or modern, in a sort of unified operational fashion. Now this is a different subscription world for customers, right and customers in the world of cloud, especially when they're going into this kind of a transformational journey. Um, you know, it requires we anywhere to think slightly differently. It's not just the traditional cell implement support kind of customer model. You have really help them achieve their out, come over a period of time and then make them successful as they continue to sort of face the uncertainties off the multi cloud world. So So So Pat and Sanjay decided to create this new customer experience office and all different functions from success support digital engagement as well a czar insulting professional services. Tam's were put together so that we can offer integrated experiences to the customer. And that sounded exciting and, you know, we're making tons off interesting innovations there. Some announced that GM World and, uh, very much aligned with an objective to help our customers. >>E. I want to dig into the news and the announcement because I think there's a specific thing I'd like to drill into. But I want to get your thoughts submit because I think VM Ware and I thought to Sanjay about this as well as Pat. Clearly. Cooper Days is the dial tone of the Internet investment cloud Native Project. Monterey speaks to Multi cloud, totally get it. But Cove it has accelerated not only VM where every company, whether they're on the delivery side of it selling side or even consuming of the technology cloud, for instance, has forced the digital transformation. And it's catching some people off guard, right? So what are your thoughts? Because, you know, you have a value projects, you sell it to customers, you implement it, you support it. I mean, that >>was a >>nice grew swing for enterprise vendors like VM Ware. But now, with cove, it and all the digital transformation acceleration, it's causing a lot of people to be ready faster. How >>do you get >>that readiness? What do you bring to the table? What's your view on this? What's your reaction? Because people >>try to >>figure this out. It's confusing. >>I mean, I You know what it's it's very interesting. For example, I will give you an example. There's like, two extremes, and both of them are dealing with a very similar situation, all caused because of prove it. Okay, On one end of the spectrum, there are customers who are saying, Listen, our business is doing extremely well because of digital, and all of a sudden, uh, business needs this rapid agility, which can only be achieved through modern applications, and they're able to sort of move these applications because of elasticity of the cloud and leveraging multiple clouds. To do so is extremely important. If you're on one side of the spectrum on your business, where the business is doing extremely well, you have a percentage of the business that was coming from e commerce. All of a sudden that e commerce has accelerated. You know you can think off certain retailers, you know. Large scale retailers in that segment, and their their multi cloud journeys are accelerated, mostly because off just this surge in demand and change in capabilities that are needed to perform digital engagement with customers at a much much rapid pace, which are very difficult to do without leveraging multiple clouds. That's one extreme. The other extreme is, you know, I'll give you an example from large scale airlines and we all know in the travel hospitality airline business, this is extremely slow business for them, right at this point of time, and they're using the opportunity off this sort of time when things are slower to say, Okay, why don't we take this opportunity to fundamentally change our distilling it and truly embraced multi cloud while doing so? Because there is an opportunity to do so. The workload on the application than the infrastructure does not high little more technology reasons. A little bit more sort of a for downtime reason sort of go through the transformation faster. In other words, both ends of the spectrum. I'm seeing customers move the words sort of this destination fast it. And guess what? There is really no one at this stage outside of VM ware who can help them achieve that because otherwise you set a single voice. You know, there are their players who died. You tow their singular cloud solution and running. You know what I what I tell customers is multi cloud doesn't mean you are running two different architectures on two different clouds, right? That's not multi cloud. Multi cloud means running a singular architectures on multiple clouds, because that's when you get through governance and true operational scale and true experience and elasticity and control. And that's what we, um, where is all about? So we are now engaged with those conversations and helping customers at both the front end right when they're engaged with us at this stage. But we have also down tailored our service delivery and our success off offerings and are how we engage with customers digitally and sort of technically and through people. Uh, in once they start their journey with us, Um, and they sort of embark on leveraging the technology into multi cloud I want. So So that's the sort of shift that has occurred. >>Yeah, I want to unpack the offering in a second, but I want to stay in the customer experience for a minute. We've heard that cliche a customer experience. So digital transmission. Okay, it's actually happening now, and I totally agree with you, by the way there's there's the modernization trend. You just basically spoke to the spectrums. But it's about modernization. Okay, if you think modernization, you think business model business model is Hey, it's pretty light right now. I'm not a lot of people traveling. Let's retool, Let's modernize, Let's use our resource is and modernize our business, which is a lot of applications. It's everything up and down the stack. And then the companies that have a tailwind with Covic, who have had the epiphany and saying, If we don't building modern app or have modern APS in market, we're out of business. So there's a critical urgency to, uh, coming out of it with a growth strategy that's a business model transformation. Totally get that. That's where the customers are. So the question for you is okay. How do you talk to the customer that is saying, Hey, I'm building a modern app. We have to pivot, were forced to pivot whatever word you want to use force to survive. They're now they have to build a modern app. How do you guys support that customer? How does that customer? What does that customer need to be successful? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an architectural approach right. We bring to the customers and architectural approach across multiple clouds that helped them when they go for their existing applications or new modern applications conforming toe, one operating model and one architectures. Because in this in this time, you know, customers have many critical line of business applications. This airline customer I was talking about, they have 600 applications that are quite critical. They sort of segment them out on which one they will truly modernize because of the business model modernization like you mentioned and which ones they will live with, the way they are for multiple reasons and how it starts with connecting them with a unified architect chair and a unified operating model is how we start with customers. Okay. And that is where the power off the younger comes in. Because, like I said, it becomes this architectural operating system for for the customers to run and adopt multiple clouds. >>You gotta be the chief customer officer. You're the quarterback. You're the one in charge of making sure customers were happy. Okay? And they get what they need. And again, there's different aspects of it. What do you guys announcing it? VM World 2020 virtual, um, that people should pay attention thio around servicing customers in this new subscription and SAS world. >>Yeah, I think besides the technology announcements in terms off modern, sort off, multi cloud platform, the architectural with Project Monterey from the customer experience side, we did announcement to announcements. One was for customers embarking on a journey. We want to make sure that customers get everything they need to be successful on the journey on an ongoing basis. Some off these journeys for large customers, John can take not just sort of three months, but three years because they're dealing with various applications. So for that we announced two pretty simple and easy to embrace offerings. One is AP navigator. AP Navigator enables customers to quickly assess which applications I have to be, you know, on one end, you know, rewritten, completely rewritten and on the other end simply sort of re hosted. Okay, and there are multiple options in between, and we call them as a five, our model with customers, and we guide customers through our own assessment and working with customers on how to sort of segment their applications and use a common architectures across all of them that we can then help and it and secondly, toe help them with. We announced something called Success 3 60 Success 3 60 is Our Mechanism Toe guide and help customers on an ongoing basis for a success plan with continuous, sort off adoption guidance designed workshops as well as providing they're dedicated support that customers need for embracing multiple cloud across all the cloud. With this architectural this way, customers get assured that they're able to get the right up front sort of assessment on applications and ongoing success. Okay, And that's sort of what we announced within customer experience side. And we have been able all of this available two people you know there are critical for large scale engagements, but also digital, you know, just like our customers are innovating with digital. We innovated with our own digital environment, and we brought it all together with something called customer Connect, all available with one single digital experience that's mobile friendly, alert driven, search driven. You know, all the AI that's needed at this point of time in terms of engaging with customers with proactive notifications and guidance in terms of how they're doing with success built into a singular experience so that they can engage with us, and we can engage with them to make them successful. >>And so it's people in technology you guys are bringing to the table. What can customers expect? Because, you know, as they've worked with the M where you've always had great technical support outside its have been a technology driven company. Um, but as you start getting into SAS, you're starting to get into the business model transformation. How do you guys impacting the customers and how you go to market and how you, uh, service your customer base? >>Yeah, I think there are two elements What customers can expect one. They don't have to stand up and engagement and experience mortal completely separate for a small set of applications on a completely different you know, cloud architectures. They could just fit and build a single experience off dealing with the M, where, as a mechanism to enable all of their applications to be hosted, regardless of which cloud there in Uh huh Sandvik they do it at their own pace, right? As then when they're ready for applications. Secondly, and more importantly, for the business model transformation side. We have a model where we continue to show them the value realization. Okay, because these are true business model transformations. At this stage, there is lot off investment that's coming into I P while at the same time, the rest off the business is doing belt type. So there is a continuous pressure on Earth. Customers are I t. That is the champion for the customers, and they're working with developers in line of business teams, and they have to continue to show how what they're investing into as a singular platform or in architecture is going to deliver some kind of a value on an ongoing basis. So we have delivered on an ongoing basis rip boards and feed back and continuous sort of information back to the customers so that they can take back to their businesses on all the investments they're making now are ongoing basis what value the business is getting, because at the end of the day in this, this is probably the first time in the where I I t is probably getting the least belt tightening in the case off sort of an economic downturn, and in fact, it is being looked at as a way to invest out off the downturn. Right? So they're going to be, in a way where there sometimes even going into the boardroom and showing not just governance, but also sort of the investments they made, what kind of value they they got. So those are the two things were providing seamless and at at pace move toe multi cloud with a common experience and second, ongoing value realization that they can communicate whoever they need. Toe >>submit. You know, we've been following VM where for many me personally of persons that was founded. But with the Cube since 2010 star 11th year, You know, we've been critical of times and pointing out the obvious and in some cases, not so obvious successes and challenges. Um and so we've seen the completeness of vision evolved and pat, certainly. You know, he he held the line and he did the right things. And then he executed. So, you know, as you look at the emerald, we're now been complimentary on some of the moves. Certainly on the technology side that you guys have made and then we again we've talked about this many times on the Cube. So complete in this, uh, vision check. Okay, this is wholesome. Michael Dell issues, but gave talks about that. So good vision complete executed business performance is there. But as you talk about sass and subscription, your ability to execute is going to be a key variable and things like the Gartner Magic quadrant for the areas you're competing in. Multi cloud talk about how you guys just set up financially to support that personnel. What is your organization gonna do? Can you share your vision? How you going to be able to execute customers success programs as this uncertainty around multi cloud continues to become reality and things are changing. >>Yeah, I think a couple of things firstly, you know, to be absolutely candid, you know, the pace at which the customers are going to the new multi cloud models is faster now than it was nine months ago. We just discussed that. Okay, so I wouldn't I would be misrepresenting if I said we always were ready for this kind of the case. We're also adjusting and innovating at this stage as fast as possible. The good news is that we were headed in the right direction. Okay, if we were headed in the wrong direction, it would have been much, much harder. Okay. Secondly, I think there is a very strong leadership, the leadership team. I mean, at the end of the day, it's vision, leadership, team investment, the components and, of course, diligence to execute that comes in for the execution. To me vision and the direction was always very, very strong. It motivated me to join the anywhere for this important mission. Second and many other exact. If second the leadership team is as strong as they get, the four team is extremely strong. We have strong leadership team leadership from Pat Michael, of course, as well as Sanjay Rgu Rajiv. Everyone provides strong leadership and then third, you asked about sort of the financial element. You know, they're The company continues to perform quite well, right? We have core businesses that some critical for customers to use as technologies to enable them, you know, to come out off this sort off economic issue we're facing and they're facing. So as a result, you know, financially, we're in a good position to be able to invest back into the business and Secondly, we have made now we've always, always been extremely strong on the technology front. Okay, now with Sanjay and packed sort of saying that we're going to be extremely strong in terms of customer experience front because the world of subscription, the world of cloud, the world off the SAS requires not just great technology but also a great customer experience. So we're seeing tremendous in a continued sort of support financially in terms of investing into the customer experience, from both getting the right set of people offerings as well as technology. So I believe we have all three things. Having said that, you know, some of these things that we're investing in. They need a lot of work, and I'm. While I'm proud of what we have accomplished, I truly believe you know the best is yet to come, and the right investments that we're making are going to continue to sort of enhance our offerings both through people as well as technology. But there's work to be done. You >>know, it's all about, you know, having the consume ability of the technology thio, the value proposition of VM ware and also also is a company being um, open and easy to work with and consumable that way. So I think this is a great time. Certainly. Product wise. Business wise, You guys do extremely well. Congratulations on your new role on the senior leadership is the chief customer officer of VM Ware will be following the stories of your customers. So I really appreciate you taking the time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much, John. Excited to be back. Great >>to have you back on the queue here. VM world coverage of 2020 virtual. I'm John for this. The host of Cube Virtual. Check us out cube dot Net. And also our new cube 3 65 where it's our new modern application for virtual events. Of course, we want to continue to tell the most important stories and cover all the key people making it happen. Submit. Thank you for coming on. This is the Cube. Thanks for watching