>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE SiliconeANGLE Media's independent live broadcast of Nutanix .NEXT here in Nice, France. Happy to have join with me a first-time guest, John McAdam, who is the former CEO of F5 and an independent board member for a number of companies including F5, Tableau, and Nutanix. The show that we're at. So John, thanks so much for joining us. No, thank you, thanks for having me. All right, so let's start, just for people who aren't familiar, I said, you know, you were CEO of F5 for quite a few years, just give us a little bit about your background in business and what brings you here. I graduated from Glasgow University, you probably can tell from the accent, I'm Scottish. >> Stu: Yes. I moved over to the States when I joined a company called Sequent in 1994, and I became president of Sequent in 1995, and I've actually been in the States since then, up until I retired in April this year. So I spent 11 years at Sequent, president and chief operating officer, big server company is what we did at the time. Mainly selling Oracle type databases running on the servers. We were purchased, we were acquired by IBM in '99. I stayed with IBM for a year. I was running the AIX business globally for IBM, and then I was headhunted by F5 Networks, and I joined them in 2000, just as the .com bust was about to happen, and we'll talk about that later maybe. And I was the CEO at F5 for 17 years, and during the last few years I joined the board of Tableau, as you mentioned, and a company called Apptio as well based in Seattle, and of course Nutanix. Yeah, so a lot of our audience are everything from CIOs to people that someday might want to be a CIO, but very much kind of a blend of business and technology, can you tell people, some people are like, I don't understand how somebody becomes an independent board member. You're not the former CEO of that company or you're not one of the people... What does it mean to be an independent board member? You know, it's an interesting story because the independent board members at F5 actually kept encouraging me to join the board, and I kept saying, no I don't need to do that, I'm really busy, focused on the company. And also I've been a board member since 1995 as an executive, as a board member of Sequent and a board member of F5, so why would I want to join a board. And then eventually, I actually got approached, first of all by Tableau, the CEO of Tableau at the time, and seemed a very interesting conversation. So I decided to join the board. It was pre-IPO. And I thought I could add some value there, in terms of growing the company, etc. So I went along to the first board meeting and I went to the second, and I came back to the F5 board and I said, I apologize. I should have done this earlier. I didn't appreciate how much I would realize and learn being at the other side of the table as an independent board member. Because remember, you're turning up once every three months or two months. You don't know the day-to-day what's going on, but you have a very different perspective. And I wish I had done it earlier, but really it's all about trying to give consultancy, support, advice, obviously there's governance things you do as well. And I've really enjoyed being on the boards and especially Nutanix. Okay, your career, you know we've had, I think since about the time you joined F5, there was the .com crash, there was the downturn in '07/'08, so you've seen some boom times, you've seen some down times. What do you take away for those and how do you help advise the companies that you're working with? You're absolutely right. It's been an interesting experience. When I joined, as I mentioned earlier, it was a .com about to crash happening, and the big issue for F5 was it was actually 90% .com business, so the revenue collapsed completely, the stock price dropped, from today's price, from $21 to $1.50. We've run out of cash in certain areas. We ended up selling off 10% of the company to actually Nokia, they took ownership. So it was very much a survival phase. And in that phase you really have to, you need to make quick decisions. There's no time for the coaching that you would normally do. It's not as inspirational. But once you're out of it, once you get the P and L, you know, the profit and loss, and the balance sheet in good shape. Then we moved into, I would call, the stability phase, and the deal there was that we really were building a new architecture of product. We knew it was going to take a couple years. So that's all about making sure that you're in a good environment, you're going to deliver the goods from a market perspective, and we did that. I remember this well, in September 2004, we announced a new version, a new architecture, boom, we jumped into the growth (mumbles). Fifty percent growth, not quite as much as Nutanix today, but 50, 55, 40%. That's different, that's an inspirational world, you know, where you're really trying to inspire the company, it's all about hiring, and it's fun. How much do companies, when you advise them, worry about kind of what's happening to them versus what's happening locally and globally from an economics standpoint? I talked to Dheeraj many times kind of leading up to the IPO, and it was like, well, we have no control over kind of the global economical pieces, so we're building for the long term, and we will just eventually have to be like, okay, we'll go out in the public market. You know, you can't, just like buying and selling stocks, you can't necessarily time it. So, how does that impact, you know, kind of balance some of those things? I mean the best example is 2008, 2009, where we had the financial crisis, and, as I mentioned, we were very much in growth phase in 2004, '05, '06, '07. Interesting enough, as we were moving into 2008, the timing wasn't great because we were doing a product transition, and then along came the financial crisis, and it was pretty mind boggling, And the end of 2008, December 2008, customers stopped buying. And at first we thought oh my God, is this just us? And then of course, pretty soon moving into January 2009 you realize it's not you. So we didn't ignore it, to be honest, we didn't ignore it. But what we did do was we kept hiring. We cut back a little bit on the hiring, and in fact, I wish we hadn't have done that. I wish we would have completely ignored it, and of course this is me now looking back, so I can say that. The reason I'm saying I wish we had ignored it and kept growing was six months after, moving into the second half of 2009, not only did we see our business starting to grow again, but it accelerated because a demand had built up during that time. So bottom line is I don't think you can ignore global issues going on. You certainly can't ignore big global issues like 2008, but you still have to focus on what you know as your business, especially if you know you've got a good market, you know there's a demand, and just see yourself through it. Yeah, you mentioned one of the companies you joined was pre-IPO from an advisor standpoint. Have you been a Nutanix advisor just before the IPO (mumbles)? I have, I've actually had the unique experience of being on Tableau pre-IPO, Nutanix pre-IPO, and also Apptio, all pre-IPO. So I've watched the three of them going through the IPO process. So of course, Dheeraj tries to say, look, you know, I'm not going to let Wall Street kind of dictate anything, but, you know, it has to be a little bit different when you've got kind of the financial people looking at things from the outside, always trying to second guess strategy and the like. How do you give advice through that? Yeah, my advice on this, and it is somewhat different, to say it's not different wouldn't be completely correct, however, you can't let Wall Street run your business, you can't, especially if you've got conviction in terms of what you're doing. The one area where you do need to be a bit careful is that, the thing I've always said when I was CEO of F5 was our business was all about, when I was asked, do you think you could be acquired? The answer has always been from me the following: We're focused on the business, we're focused on growing a company. When you do that you become more strategic and attractive to other companies. But as long as you keep growing, your market cap keeps high, and you keep going. Right. If your market cap drops as well as the stock price there is always a danger that you could become an acquisition target. So you can't ignore it completely. But frankly, both of those messages are win-wins for investors. Absolutely, what can you say about Nutanix? You know, a year after an IPO, 2800 employees, pushing globally, you know, this show's doubled in attendance from last year. Without getting into closed-doors things, what's your take on (mumbles). Yeah, and as an independent director, I have to be more generic, but clearly, fast-growing company in a great market, a leader in the hyperconvergent market. I love their concept of simplicity, invisible infrastructure. I think that's a place that customers want to be right now, so I think they're in really good position. What in the market is interesting you these days? I look across kind of the companies you work with, you know, data is becoming more and more valuable. I spent many years working for a large storage company, used to be it wasn't really about the data, it was about the storing, and now, data from the big data companies, everything else, it's about how do I leverage and get information out, you know, we're hearing Nutanix play into that message. Yeah, and really it's the three main areas, data, you know data in particular, the Cloud, I'm not going to give you anything new here, and security. They're the three hot topics today. And the three of those are twisted in a knot are they not? They're all linked together. We just interviewed a gentleman from a bank, and he said basically, all of our budget gets put on security these days. Yeah, I mean, what concerns you, is it kind of the geopolitical, the hackers and ransomware, security? I think back early in my career, security always got lip service as being important, but today, it absolutely comes to the front of mind and you know most companies I talk to are concern would probably be understating it as to kind of the state of security. No absolutely, I mean, it's touching everybody now, boards, independent board members, it's high up on the list of discussion topics at board meetings. You know, every company is vulnerable, and if you're a technology company that's got customer data and you're in the security business as well, you really have to make sure that you're well protected. How often is security a board-level discussion these days? Most board members, most board discussions, and certainly in the audit committee, it's almost every one now. What has to happen there? Making sure that it's being looked at properly by the executives, that they take it seriously, there's enough investment, making sure that all the tools are in place if there is an attack, all of the above. Do you touch on GDPR at all? I'm curious if that comes up in your conversations. No I haven't been involved in that. I know there's a breakout session on it today, but I've not been involved in that. It just reminds me of a similar thing is that people have said, you need to make sure you're doing your due diligence and doing as much as you can, which feels like the same for security, because nobody's going to say, yes, I'm 100% secure because there's no such thing anymore. There's no such thing and there's so many different attacks, and frankly, most companies have got security solutions from so many different vendors, even sometimes from your competitor. All right, so the last thing I have to say is I don't think we've ever done theCUBE in Scotland, and it's a beautiful country, so we've got to figure out how to do some small event there. I'll help you. (laugh) All right, John, I want to give you the final word, your take, you come, why do you attend? Obviously you're an independent board, you probably have some meetings, talk to us about a show like this, what brings you. Yeah, and this is the first one I've attended. I've actually attended one similar with Tableau and similar with Apptio as well. It's good for an independent board member to see some of the presentations, how the executives and management are talking to customers, so it's actually good to get more of a feel for the business. All right, well John McAdam, appreciate you bringing a different perspective to our programming. We always want to help give a taste of what's happening at these shows out to our audience. So thank you so much for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE.