(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. It's the Cube. Covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to .NEXT in D.C. everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Stewart Miniman. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract a signal from the know as we hear it. .NEXT, Nutanix's customer event. Two days of wall to wall coverage. Julia Palmer is here. She's a research director at Gartner. My new best friend. (laughs) Great to see you again. We had a great dinner last night. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. >> So, it's a good little event here. Lot of excitement. But what's your take? You are a former practitioner, now an analyist. You were in the heart of technology at GoDaddy. You really know the market, the products. What do you make of what's going on here at .NEXT? >> You know when hyper convergence first emerged it was all about saving money. It was all about going from infrastructure that was maybe too complex and too expensive to something that maybe, based on commodity will bring lower acquisition costs. But this not the story today at all. That's what, I think my IT leaders are telling me. They're not going after acquisition costs. They're not looking at things and just comparing by the capex. They're looking at the bigger picture and how will this technology will help them to enable business. So that's I think a the biggest difference now. Going from something as simple as, is it going to to be more expensive? Less expensive? To how will it move the needle to my enterprise, to my organization? >> Dave: So that's certainly the messaging that you're hearing from, from Nutanix. As a practitioner, do you buy that? Do you believe that they're more than just an infrastructure company? That they are a transformative force in the industry. >> Julia: Yeah, I hear a lot, you know. I moderated a panel today with three customers and one of them said, you know, I'm in the health care business. I'm here to save lives. I'm not here to reinvent my own hyper converge infrastructures. So, he wants to focus on what's important for his end users. And he wants to stop manage (mumbles). That's just not a focus. And I hear it over and over again from different types of customers. >> Dave: Hmm, now you were not a Nutanix customer previously, correct? >> No. But you did see a lot of different infrastructure products? >> Julia: Absolutely. >> As a practitioner what bothered you about what the vendor community did. What were your likes and dislikes? >> Julia: Everything. Everything bothered me. >> Everything bothered you. I was part of pretty large organization and when you have a big footprint you have big problems. And one of them, for example, was that we would have an outage and we reach out to the vendor and they would tell us, you know, you hit a bug and we have a fix and we will give you the fix and you will be good to go tomorrow. Nevermind the outage that you had and impacted end users. So now a lot of vendors are using predictive analytics. Cloud based analytics, >> Right. to see if there's anything in your existing environment that's susceptible to existing bugs and proactively reach out to you to provide a fix. So I was just thinking, looking back, how many outages I could have prevented if this technology was available when I was running it. >> Stewart: Yeah, Julia, I mean we know that companies for so long, you know, infrastructure, they spent so much of their time, you know, running around, patching it, fixing it, worrying about that. Hyper converge now is trying to talk about, you know, where it fits into the whole cloud picture, which is mostly about an operational model. Where do you see along those trends. Do you believe that hyper converge really fits into a cloud strategy or is it cloud washing from a bunch of infrastructure people? You know? >> I think it has a potential. I don't think it's there today. But I think it has a great potential because when I talked to Gartner end users about, like, why hyper converge? And I actually did some total cost of ownership research, what they all told me that looking back they realized how much OpEx it saved them. And they say it was very difficult. You kind of had to take our chance on it because upfront you can't predict the outcome. Is it really going to be more simple? What does simple mean? What's key performance indicator and simple you can put. So, but looking back, the guys that implemented, they all told me that 60 percent of OpEx they saved. Meaning they didn't last with infrastructure (mumbles). How do they do this? They stop manage components. They start managing VM's. So next step is stop manage VM's, start managing applications and that's what cloud management is all about. Getting out of infrastructure management all together and deliver a business what they want. And usually, they want support for their applications. >> Dave: So, my understanding is that Gartner has analysts that service the vendor community, the executive community, and the practitioner community. You are a direct practitioner, >> Yes. Advisor. >> I deal with IT leaders. Okay, your peeps. (laughs) I think you mentioned to me last night that you've had hundreds of conversations and you've only been at Gartner, what, six months? >> Two years. >> Oh, two years, sorry. I apologize for that. Okay, so in the two years, hundreds of conversations. Is that fair? What kinds of conversations are you having with clients around infrastructure? What are the challenges that they're having? And what are you advising them? I know there are many, many, but maybe you can summarize the top ones. >> That's a very good question. I actually want to write research about it. Top five questions about hyper converse people asking so I've been thinking about it for a while. So, different types of customers, new customers are asking questions about, is it ready? Should I go for it? Why would I go for it? Why can't I keep my (mumbles) infrastructure design? What should I look for as a new key performance indicators? It's not the same way, how would you judge it here. Then existing hyper converge customer are looking for what's next step in hyper convergence. Is it ready for prime time? Is it ready for mission critical applications? Because they're looking at the boxes and they look at the commodity hardware and they still feel uncertain. Can it really run something that they're a proprietary hardware used to run. So we explore the advantages of software defined, software defined storage. Value is in the software. You know, being backed up by software defined storage, my favorite subject, is a, is a, you know abstracting and distributing data that you don't worry about us anymore. So scale out storage replacing proprietary architecture can provide you same level of uptime and performance especially with new, you know, flash options. So that's a popular question. Number three is just the, you know, we leave it to in the age of a compressed differentiation I believe my colleague Dave Russell calls it, and there's a small differences between the vendors and end users are not aware of this. And they can be critical for particular use case. So they always ask strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats on each and every one them. Because we have a lot of solutions on hyper converge now. A lot of vendors, prominent vendors now join the market. So end users are a little bit confused. How do I navigate through this ocean of different hyper converge solutions. >> Stewart: Yeah, so Julia, Nutanix helped really drive a lot of this awareness for the hyper converge market. Now, every company, you know, all the big players have at least one, if not multiple solutions out there. How do you see Nutanix? Are they differentiating themselves? Are they, I know they're trying move beyond kind of the hyper converge label, ya know. What are the doing good? What would you like to see them do more? >> Julia: Yeah, Nutanix is a, you know, was one of the leaders from the very beginning. And, you know, remains the leader. They obviously succeed in at least in a lot a features. And a very fast release cycle of new features. It's easy when you have one focus, you know. Other companies have so many different areas they need to focus or protect and Nutanix doesn't have this problem. And also being able to mix different hardware, I think it's an advantage, you know. Being able, the customer needs to make a choice, you know. I think the structure of the future is going to be all about choice. It's less about, ya know, this is a lock in. I want to pick my hyper visor. I want to pick my hardware and move on. >> Stewart: So one of the things I think Nutanix does best when they're not positioning themselves as a storage solution, however, cause the storage market is tremendously competitive and there's always the, you know, there's the next technology, the next wave. There's so many competitors out there. I mean, do you think things like NVMe over Fabric are going to just, you know, have the potential to disrupt everything that Nutanix is doing? You know, what are some of the big threats to, ya know, their current position? >> Actually, I just wrote a research about how NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics is going to disrupt and improve integrated and hyper converge systems. I think those technologies and it's like NVMe without NVMe over Fabric. It's like, I call it, it's like barbecue without barbecue sauce, right? So the NVMe and NVMe over Fabric has potential to boost performance of hyper converge systems on par with what a solid state, erase today do. So I think a, and it's commodity hardware, right? We're not talking about anything proprietary. So when a we going to move towards this territory when NVMe and NVME over Fabrics become mainstream maybe two years from now, three maybe years from now. I think everybody can enjoy shared distributed storage performance. And, but honestly, your question about storage, like do you need to position yourself as a storage company or not, the major difference about different hyper converge products, in my opinion, is how they do storage. Other than this, it's the same flavors of hyper visor, it's the same commodity hardware. So what do we have different? The ways you did data services. The ways you position your storage. You, you deliver the storage services. >> Stewart: So, you know what, I'm curious. When I read Wall Street stuff about Nutanix they seem to overreact to every bit of news so, you know, the Dell relationship, ya know, is challenging there for that to head win. Oh wait, the Google announcement seems to be a great tailwind, ya know, the big bump in the stock today. Do you see those partnerships as critically important or is it the vision and execution of Nutanix and what they're doing with their customers? >> I think so. I think we live in the age when a ecosystem support is everything, ya know. People not necessarily today go to the public cloud to save money. They go for ecosystem support. To expand their services and their capabilities. That's why, ya know, embracing the cloud and not trying to position yourself against is the right way to go. I think we all need to embrace cloud and find the way that will benefit the end users. >> Dave: Um hmm, so you were sharing with, you spend a fair amount of time, all Gartner analysts who do these things do on magic quadrants. They, we put a lot of effort into them. A lot of people criticize magic quadrants. I think they're unfairly criticized. I know how much work goes into them. >> Thank you. And they are fact based opinions if I could categorize them like that, right? Is that fair? So, do you do one on hyper converged infrastructure or converged? Do you separate converged from hyper converged? How do you look at the market? >> Julia: So last year magic quadrant was integrated systems, which is converged and hyper converged. But what Gartner does is actually, every year we look at the market and we adjust our inclusion criteria. We adjust market definition. So, I don't think it's a big secret that hyper conversion is leading this market right now. And, honestly, in conversion infrastructure, if you look at conversion infrastructure, it's very similar. The only difference in conversion infrastructure is how you do storage. Which storage area you are using. So it becomes less strategic to even analyze conversion infrastructure. So you will see this year, I cannot break all of the news here, but much more emphasis on software driven, hyper converged infrastructure. Not services. Not the appliances, but more software. >> Stewart: I love to hear that cause at Wikimon when we called the category "server sand" so like VM ware, major player both as a partner in Nutanix. A competitor in Nutanix. Ya know, I know there like, they don't show up on the Gartner magic quadrant because they don't fit into that environment. Also the lines between converge, hyper converge, and software defined storage seem to be blurring a lot. I mean, in some ways they're just different ways of packaging. Some of the others, they, hyper converged is a, ya know, delivery option for what they're doing, so. >> Julia: Exactly. >> Where do you see it going, ya know, it's, ya know, obviously beyond the appliance but, ya know. Say there's the Google announcement today. Where do you see, ya know, a company like Nutanix fitting into this hybrid or multi-cloud world? >> Differentiating on software, this is the name of the game, right? So, if you can have a portable software you can run on any hardware, you obviously can continue and run on any cloud as well. And this is an idea. You said it absolutely right. Like software defines storage. It's not a technology. It's a delivery option. So customer needs to be in charge of their options. Do I want to deploy on premises? Do I want to go on cloud? Do I want to have an appliance? Do I want to buy a software, bring your own hardware? All of those choices need to be given to the end user. They need to decide which way they want to go. >> Dave: So, we're going to have Chad Saccage on tomorrow and it's obviously interesting, we see Nutanix selling through Dell. We were there two years ago when that announcement was made. Great, ya know, business. Terrific. But as you were saying, converged and hyper converged and software defined, they're all coming together now. What do you expect is going to happen with EMC and Nutanix? Do you have any... I don't want to use the prediction, but any scenarios that you can see developing there? >> I think, you know I hate to speculate, but I think both of those companies are extremely user oriented. So, if there will be demand for Nutanix that will continue to support Nutanix because they will do it right by the customers. And same with Nutanix, ya know, they never want to turn someone down saying it's not their problem. Both support them in parallel as long as demand is there. >> Dave: So let me ask the question differently, cause I agree with you. EMC, customer centric. Michael Dell, there's nobody more customer centric on the planet. Clearly Nutanix is customer focused. Having said that, if the three of us were advising Dell, EMC on what to do, we would say keep doing what the customers want. Great, check. But from a product roadmap standpoint, I don't know about you Stew, but I know I would push them to look at doing more of a hyper converge, software defined, like roadmap, as opposed to kind of bolted on V-blocks. Which got it all started. Would you agree with that? Or, do you think that's a waste of R&D? Just outsource it or OEM it? >> Software defined storage is hard to do. It's hard to do it from the ground up, ya know. Products need to mature, ya know, VMware, VSEN. It's a mature product. It's a good foundation for software defined storage and for hyper converged. Building something from the ground up, just to separated from VMware, it will be very difficult. >> Dave: Okay, well okay, right. Well then double down on VMware maybe is the advice there. Or maybe they're not really inquisitive right now because they have the debt service but over time maybe bring in startups to innovate there. Or maybe not because when you look at the Dell EMC deal from previous generations, there's a very successful deal. One of the most, probably the most successful storage deal in the history >> Stewart: Talking about the partnership? >> of storage. The partnership. >> Sure. Before Dell bought Compellent, then remember, Dell buys Compellent. I would look back on that and say Dell probably would have been better off just staying with EMC. Reselling EMC. I mean you were there during those days. I don't know. Was Compellent and EqualLogic, >> EqualLogic were those successful acquisitions in your view? In retrospect. >> Stewart: In retrospect they did pretty well but you're right Dave, the EMC partnership was way more money. I think by the time Dell bought EMC the internal Dell storage, ya know, revenue had grown to almost, or a, ya know, order of magnitude, the same size of EMC and they had to put a lot more emphasis into it. So, you know, better margins, ya know, just if they continue to partner. >> Dave: So maybe it's better for Dell to continue to partner is kind of your point. >> Stewart: Yeah. >> Julia: Absolutely. >> Uh huh, okay. Very diplomatic. (laughs) >> Julia: Would you expect anything else? (laughs) >> Julia, thanks so much for coming on the Cube >> Oh, thank you guys it was a pleasure having you. >> it was my pleasure >> Julia: Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back to wrap right after this short break. This is the Cube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix .NEXT. Be right back. (electronic music) >> Narrator: Robert Hershev.