>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France It's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe Brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and here with SiliconANGLE Media's exclusive coverage of theCUBE live from Nutanix's .NEXT conference here in Nice, France. It's the fifth Nutanix conference. theCUBE has had the pleasure of broadcasting from all five of them. It's the second annual European show. Over 2,200 in attendance here. We're in the Acropolis, which is a little ironic because, of course, Acropolis is one of the product names of Nutanix. To help me with the introduction today, happy to have Martin Veitch... Is the Contributing Editor of IDG Connect. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. >> My pleasure. >> Alright, so, Nutanix. It's a year after they IPO'd. I've been tracking them since they were a very small company. I think a friend of mine was somewhere between the number 20 and 30 employee in there. They now have 2,800 employees worldwide. Talked about, they have, you know, thousands of Nutanix certified, you know, people just in Europe alone between the employees, the partners, and the customers. You know, what's the vibe been for you so much? Tell us, you know, bring us in for the Nutanix show. >> Yeah, like you, I followed them from pretty much the early days. I always thought they were a hot-to-trot, you know. They were an exciting company back in the day. The narrative made a lot of sense. It looked like they were a company very capable of executing. They seemed to have great management. What really surprises me is, if anything, you know, in this business we have a habit of, you know, overdoing it and praising these people to the skies and saying "this is the next big thing." I think these guys really undersell themselves sometimes. To me, you know, the Goldman Sachs line that Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO, used earlier on when he was talking about the Goldman Sachs comment that it was a once-in-a-decade opportunity, to me, the company they remind me of a lot these days is VMware. I think, you know, that's a company they're going to work with, go up against, and they remind me a lot of that infrastructure revolution kind of play, you know. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think Nutanix would like that analogy, because number one, >> I hope so. >> I love the line, they did a little song at the intro with the clapping and everything. >> Yeah that was pretty wacky, wasn't it? >> They have a little fun, they've got a fun culture. Dheeraj always says they try to be humble. From a marketing, from a sales, sometimes a little aggressive, but you need that to kind of break in to the enterprise space. But they said, in the song, they said "We used to sell boxes, now it's all about the software you know" You know, so what they've been pounding on is, it's one OS, one click, any cloud. So the question I've been asking at all of these events I go to this year is, you talk to customers, it's a choose your pick, hybrid or multi-cloud world, but how do you live in that environment? You're absolutely, you know, customers, they doing lots of SASS, they're doing Amazon, they're doing things with Microsoft or Google, and if you just live in the data center you're limiting where you're going to play. If you're just, you know, the public cloud is obviously lots of growth. Nutanix is trying to fit in all these other environments, as they said many people when they first saw them, was like, "Oh, well they sell you an appliance that goes into your data center? That's not all that interesting." They positioned themselves as enterprise cloud. What do you take, the message in, you know, they said, you know, hyper-converge was kind of the baseline, but I don't think I even heard that word in the keynote this morning. >> I was going to say the same thing >> It's now clouds, so... >> Yeah, enterprise cloud, which isn't a tag I'm particularly fond of, I must admit, but you can see what the appeal is, right? I mean, people are going to build these, they're going to have these data canters on premise. They're going to have private clouds, going to have public clouds. They're going to go for data center co-location, and what you really need is a layer of management, a layer that sits over there. So I think what they're building is something analogous to the systems management frameworks that we saw back in the day for the multi-cloud era, and really, that adds such another arrow to the quiver, and that's why I say, you know, you look at the stock price on this one and you kind of wonder whether they're under-priced in a way, you know, or whether people realize quite what the power they potentially yield is, you know. Obviously they're going to go up against some of the world's largest organizations, but I think it's going to be an extraordinarily ambitious and bullish play. Yeah, absolutely, I think it's a really fascinating story. >> Yeah, well, top line revenue Nutanix now sitting right around a billion dollars on an annual basis and from a market cap, talk about the stocks undervalued, they're still over four billion dollars in revenue. Kind of, you know, if you look at the similar compare company that, you know, Pure Storage, Nutanix now has about the same revenue but, you know, higher marker cap, so, you know, they're doing okay. But as they are trying to emphasize, and I think your point, I would agree with you, it is early still. This is not the final Nutanix. CloudPlay at the DC show made a big announcement with Google, and starting to see some of that come to fruition here at the show, and a big push of theirs is their Calm. Calm really is that layer that's going to live in the multi-cloud. It's still, most customers haven't touched it or really seen more than kind of some slides and demo. I did talk to a couple of customers already that have used it, and at least the early customers, of course heavily involved, it's a little bit self-selecting when you come to an event like this, but excited about how that is, you know, can be that layer that spans between my various environments, whether that be my core, the public cloud, or potentially even the edge. They did an example in the keynote of an oil and gas going out to the rigs. So, you know, you think the Nutanix, you know, if we look to a year from now, when I think multi-cloud is Nutanix a company that comes to mind? >> Absolutely, I've just thought of this, so tell me if you like it or not, but they've kind of gone from stack to PAC, okay. So, hyper-convergence was the play where you would conflate compute networking storage et cetera, and really this combination of Prism, Acropolis and Calm is a whole other level. And you know, again, they didn't really hammer it with the audience today, but they're moving to also a very much a software-centric view of the world. You know, and that was always the question that people like me would ask of them, "Hey, why do you bother having the appliances? Why do you have the hardware cell when, you know, software is the high-margin kind of business in technology?" And "software is eating the world" as Marc Andreessen said. And now I think they're really pivoting towards being very much a software-centric company and flying the flag for that, you know, and I think that whole combination of management layers, of virtualization, of orchestration that they have is exactly what the sweet spot is in the future of enterprise software management. >> Yeah, I've heard some companies talk about the "new stack" and you took their products and P, A, C >> See what I did? >> I do, I think maybe the marketing organization, you know, give you a call, see if they can leverage that. >> 500 bucks. >> So, you know, we've got two days of the show coming up here. Absolutely the kind of cloud story is one that I'm looking to tease apart and talk to the customers. Since I've already had a chance to talk to some customers and it's very much a spectrum. You talk to some customers, especially here in Europe, you go to Germany and it's like well, you know governage, regulation, yeah a public cloud might not be something that they can do because we have to dig into it. >> Yeah >> As opposed to, there's a customer giving a presentation today that, very much, they said everything was going to be public cloud, but they found even when they tried to put everything either in SASS or, like, infrastructures of service with Amazon, there were certain things that, well, in certain countries I just don't have the networking or it was going to be too expensive. >> Yeah. >> So I need to put something in my own data center, and that's where Nutanix has been a fit for them, so it's that good story, as they said, "Where is the center?" and Nutanix being a softer play, it's not about, "Oh I have to sell, you know, thousands and millions of boxes", and even, I've read financial reports that there have been hints from Nutanix that you've said, "Why do they offer the appliances?" Well maybe in the future they won't. It will be through a partner and they'll do that. You need to qualify it, but, you know, absolutely position themselves. They are the, you know, enterprise, you know, software company is what they want to play. Infrastructure is a piece of it. >> Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, you've, we've both been around the block a few times. When I started writing about this business, people used to say, "Well, mainframes, they're the dinosaurs who are about to fall off the edge of a cliff." People are still buying a lot of mainframes now. Look at IBM's revenue sheet, a lot of that's mainframe-centric. So I think you're absolutely right. People are going to persist putting stuff close their vest in internal data centers, and they're going to selectively source in various different types of cloud. And you're right, governance is a big one over here in Europe, you know GDPR is a thing that scares all the CIO's and CEO's, for that matter, witless, you know. So they're all terrified of that one PSD2 and payments. So when you have these regulatory landscapes, you know, there's a tendency to be very cautious, very calm, and keep it behind the firewall, and you know, I think probably as long as I live, God willing, you know, we're going to see this combination of deployment models. >> Yeah, GDPR absolutely something we're going to be talking about. Nutanix actually has a couple of experts here talking to customers >> Good. >> As to how they play into it, because that's a question I've had for Nutanix, is, okay, they have kind of their core focus but as they start to go in adjacencies, you know we see companies all the time, alright, I've reached a certain level and then how do I get a little bit further, and how do I have a reason to play into those environments. You know, Nutanix says push into IOT. Nutanix is not the first company that I think of, you know, they don't make sensors, they're not a GE, even Hitachi Vantara has arms that play there so, you know, Satcham Vigani, they've got a small team working on that. So, you want a company of Nutanix' size to start, right, poking out, but where will they be successful and where will they gain traction? Anything catching your eye or interest from Nutanix as they go kind of beyond, you know, kind of the core kind of infrastructure status? >> I think it's a management layer. You know, very similar, I guess, VMware initially was known for their hypervisor and then later on they were really tooling around that to become the control pane, you know, the command center of the data center. That's where I see them. You know, frankly Stu, I'd be pretty worried if they'd made a lot of noise on, I don't know, virtual reality, augmented reality in the net of things, you know. I think they, to a certain extent, can be still have to stick to the netting, and this is a company that's very much geared around being the 21st century data center nexus, and for me, that's where the real value is, and that is a multi multi multi billion dollar segment in its own right. >> Yeah, a big question I have this week, as always, is, you know, what are the relationships that are going to help Nutanix, you know, move further. One that we always look at is the Dell relationship. >> Sure. >> Dell is their largest partner, but also their largest competitor between the VXrail that they're doing, all the Vsan pieces. I'm interested to see IBM up on stage. The power announcement is one that I don't think a lot of people really understand, how that fits. You know, Bumpage Yano was talking about, you know, AI and all of those pieces. Of course, you know, Lenovo, another hardware partner, so, you know. What are the partners that are going to drive them? Which are they, you know, what's the headwinds, what are the tailwinds as they go. Anything from the partner standpoint that you're looking into? >> Well one of the ways, you know, I guess we all try to judge companies is by the company they keep. >> Yes. >> And they've got some nice partners, as you said. The complicated one is a lot of co-optition and frenemy-type stuff going on. It's a bit like Game of Thrones-type complexity of scenario there, you know? Behind the scenes is Dell telling it's sales guys to sell this rather than this and what do they do to objection handling and are they going to eventually try and stitch up Nutanix? I don't know, I think, my feeling is now companies are mature enough that if they can get significant revenues and please the customer, then that's probably the way to go. And you know, those are big, big names and those are companies that you might think would have a history of wanting to do their own thing and go their own way, but they're not. They're going with Nutanix because, you know, it's a USP. That's a unique selling point, and it's a high-quality product, and the customers are very happy. Very high net promoter score, which was an interesting little aspect, you know, a 90+ year after year, clocking at that. You speak to the customers here, they're a happy crowd. You know, you can't say that at every enterprise IT conference, I promise you. >> Yeah, absolutely, it's the channel partners and the customers. Every single one of these events I've come to, this one's a little bit self-selecting, but the people are super excited, digging into it. Alright, Martin, why don't I give you the final word. Things you're looking into, any kind of undercurrent, you know, that we should be aware of. What should Nutanix be concerned about, or people that are looking at it? >> The one thing I would say that would be kind of a risk factor, if you are saying you're reporting into the financial markets and so on is, you know, as I said, they're really up against some of the world's largest organizations here. You know, there's a lot of very, very big companies with skin in the game. And, you know, it depends. They could flip and get much more aggressive. They could decide to go their own way. They could make strategic acquisitions. We saw HPE buying Simplivity, and maybe that would be an interesting turn in the market, but I think they're sat fair for quite a while. Now, I think they've become part of the data center landscape rather than the disruptor. I think they're now part of the status quo in a good way, anyway. >> Yeah, last year they made, you know, it was one or two small software acquisitions >> Yeah. >> That's where we would expect, you know, Nutanix to make those. Alright, well, Martin Veitche, really appreciate you helping me kick off. >> Pleasure, Stu. >> We've got two days of coverage here at the Acropolis in Nice, France. Be sure to stay with us. I have the executives on, customers, and the partners. I'm Stu Miniman here with Martin. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE.