>> Live from London England, it's The Cube, covering .Next Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to The Cube, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host Joep Piscaer. And you're watching The Cube, and actually Bear Grylls is going to be on the keynote shortly, but we're gonna talk a little bit more tech first. First of all I wanna welcome back to the program Chris Kaddaras is the senior vice president and general manager for EMEA with Nutanix, and welcome to the program for the first time, Sylvain Siou, senior director of Systems Engineering, also for EMEA with Nutanix. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Alright so Chris, we were thinking back, two years ago, the first European show in Vienna, I had you on the program, and you were fresh on, I always loved getting people when they're fresh into the company because they have the why they're joining in, why they think they're doing things. So, bring us up to speed. Two years, couple things have changed in Nutanix, couple things have changed in the industry, but why don't you bring us up to speed? >> Sure, no I'm happy to do that. First I'll tell you that some of the things I told you on the show two years ago actually proved true. I could see the energy in Vienna at that time in regards to what I call kind of a religious following in Nutanix because of the compelling-ness of the technology and the solution, and that hasn't stopped. One thing that I wasn't quite prepared for is just the rate of growth of this company, and how our customers really embraced us in the market. Now in the EMEA market we've had some success I would say. The team's done a really good job. When I started we had less than a thousand customers, now we have over 3,000 customers. When I started with Nutanix, in the region we had about 200 employees, now we have almost 800 employees in the region. So collectively as a region we're growing a bit faster than the rest of the world which is a good thing for us, and customers are showing their appreciation for us, so it's been a really good experience, but something like the hyper-growth that we have at Nutanix takes some getting used to when you come from other companies, but it's been a really good thing for our customers. The thing that I think I'm the most proud of is we've done that hyper-growth and we've still kept our NPS score above 90 for our customers, so our customers are getting a really good experience both from our sales teams, our product, our implementation teams, and our support teams, that it's kept everything in check for our customers which I'm really proud of. >> Well congratulations on that. Sylvain I have to think that your team has something to do with that NPS score. In my career, I have great respect for the SEs, they're the one that have to not only know the product inside and out, but they need to be working closely with the customers, have a good viewpoint on the customers. Being here at a European show, I wanna get your viewpoint. Tell us, what's different here compared to what you hear from people back at Corporate, what are some of the differences here your team sees? >> So we have a very good relationship with Corporate, so we're really aligned and we're involved in the project in same way as any other region. I think we were faster on some very big accounts, and that was really surprising and also the, I think the timing for the need of the customer to solve situation after virtualization was the exact timing when we start in EMEA, the product was mature enough so that was exactly the right timing, it's five years ago when I joined, so really we solved this first situation and after that everything we promised in term of making this platform a true cloud platform for enterprise is there, I think all these services on top of it, who have the same kind of services you can see on public cloud, is there, we show it this morning, and now giving the ability to the customer to manage situation with this cloud from different providers and what is on premise is there, so I think all the control, the costs on the compliance and so on have done a lot to manage the situation and take you through the control everyday. >> So, what is the adoption maybe compared to the US for the core products that you have now versus the additional services? Is there a big change or a big difference between the US and Europe or, what are you seeing with your customers? >> So, we follow the same path. There is some region and maybe I will relay on Chris, some region that we invest later than the others so, of course France, Germany, UK, Northern Europe was really the beginning and after that we have more southern regions or eastern region that come after, but we are surprised sometimes because people can jump to the last technology faster than the others, so I don't think there are really rules, there is really people who is painpoint, we have the solution, and when it fits, they go faster. >> Yeah I think from a solution perspective we are thriving at the same rate our emerging technologies into the market as our other regions in the world. In some cases we're ahead, things like IoT, what was originally called Sherlock, we're ahead, we have like first customer, second customer to start coming to adopt, so we do have markets within the EMEA region that are much earlier adopters compared to other regions. Think of places like the Middle East, the Nordics, France, adopting much quicker than some other regions of the world. So we see our new products starting to roll, we're really excited about Xi Leap, I know that the first instantiation went live, I think yesterday or today within the Americas, we're looking forward to going live within London, and then moving in to mainland Europe from there, and I think that will be a huge difference-maker for us in the markets as well. >> So looking at those regions specifically, I know there's a couple of markets in Europe, especially Germany, that have such strict data sovereignty laws that it makes it really difficult to actually do business from a DR or cloud perspective. How's Nutanix dealing with that? >> I think that's where we... When we have our SAS-based products, that's a challenge. When we have our cloud-based products, that's a challenge.` So, for our cloud-based products we have a plan really quickly to go into places that have data sovereignty compliance regulations that they have to adhere to. So Germany, we have a plan to go into Germany really quickly; we obviously have a plan to go into some other markets, Amsterdam, we have a plan to go into London for cloud. For SAS, a lot of customers are consuming SAS and they're okay if there's a good security problem, parameter around SAS, and they're consuming Salesforce.com without data centers, they're consuming other products that way so, as long as we put the right security parameters in place, then their consumption model around SAS is typically gonna work, I don't see us distributing SAS data centers all throughout every market in the world to do that. Our core product right now consumption is mostly local, and it's consumed either in an appliance way or it's consumed in a software way, so that's not something that we have to worry about. >> Yeah it's interesting, you wonder if North America has a greater adoption of public cloud, if that actually gets you an advantage in the EMEA region here to get deeper with some of the core and essential offerings. >> It does; customers will adopt a private cloud because of those data sovereignty regulations. But a lot of the uber-clouds have come in and solved that, they've come in into country, they've created gov clouds, they've done it in Germany, they've done it in the UK, so they're starting to solve that, but they have to put out a lot of investment to do that. But it has given us a lead in the marketplace, but there are certain markets that are very much like the US market, so the UK, it's very similar to the US market with regards to uber-cloud or public cloud adoptions so in that market we have a lot of opportunities with somebody like Beam, because they've consumed a lot of the other uber-clouds, whether it's AWS, UCP, or... And we have that opportunity to sit down and provide them with solutions. >> Sylvain, what else are you hearing from your customers, what are some of the pain points that they're feeling that your team's able to help with? >> Clearly in the past we saw the proliferation of the VM, and we find a way to control that, but with the cloud the proliferation is without any limits. So really this is something important for the customer to take back control, take control of the shuttle IT and so on, and it's very lowly. And also I want to take a specific point really the R&D are really taken care of when we see in the field, I will take just an example, the synchronus replication, metro-culturing and stuff like this to high availability, between (inaudible) and so on, it's typically European, because we have fiber, we are really city close to each other and so on, in America, that makes no sense, and really at really early stage of the company we get the R&D taking care of that, developing specifically for our market what is needed for our market, and it means that we're a really global company and not really American company, we have also R&D in different places, we have in Serbia with Frame, we have in India, and so on, so really to be really taking care of each issue or pain point of the customer is really our main driver. >> So one of those other differences I see a lot is the scale of the organization, the size. So what is an SMB in the Americas might be an enterprise in Europe. So what are the solutions you have for those types of customers, for that problem? >> So definitely we need, so we are talking to customers we have a critical science, they need to have a minimum of VM to face the issue of the bottom neck of the storage or the management part and so on, but also we have example of small customers just need a platform that works, and don't want to have anyone taking care of it. And so now it's like you phone, you don't take care of the storage and CPU, it's just your application and that's it, could be internal, external, and so on, so really the SMB of course is not the main market for us, it's more the big account and so on, but we have all kinds of customers in any verticals, there is no specific one that we cover, and it's really because the platform is something that has become just normal to be invisible. >> Yeah I would add on that, if you don't mind, I'd say that the nice thing about the product is it's in a form factor in a pricing mechanism that can be consumed from SMB all the way up to global accounts. That's the nice thing. Now, maybe we spend a lot of our field resource on mid-market up, because that's where we get larger transactions from customers, and it's just a value conversation with regards to return on investment, but the nice thing is our product can be consumed at the smallest customer. We have just released new pricing mechanisms that allow our customers to now consume at much smaller levels, so we're not allow for SMB but for ROBO, because if you think about it if you just have a one size fits all pricing structure how does that work in the data center, that same price doesn't work in the ROBO area, so you have to give the customers the ability to look at the same experience in the remote office or the small sites compared to a data center, and that's something that we've just kinda brought to the market in the last three to four months, and I think that's a real advantage of not only the product but the pricing structure. >> Chris, we wanna give you the final word. If EMEA customers, what do you want them taking away from this week? >> Sure. I think, they've already told me, and I'll tell you, which is good, 'cause it's what I want them to take away, is just the credibility that Nutanix is here for the enterprise work load, they can look at their entire data center delivery mechanism on a Nutanix platform. But also Nutanix is a company they should be looking for for their cloud-based platform. There is a decision in the marketplace to be had right now around what do you use for your cloud, lack of a better word, orchestration layout, cloud automation layout? And there's only a few choices in the market today, some of them are more open source, some of them are specific vendors, and what I want them to take way is Nutanix is an option for that, leave it up to me and my team to prove why we think we're the best option for it, but that's really what I want them to take away, the credibIlity of tier one platforms running Nutanix in their data center, and then two, Nutanix for the cloud-based platform. >> Congratulations on the progress. I wanna say some feedback I've heard from customers is despite how fast Nutanix has been growing, they still feel that they're getting the personal touch, don't feel like just a number for some fast-growing company so congrats on that, I know a lot of effort goes into that. Alright so we're at the end of the Day 1 for Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Minimn, be sure to join us tomorrow for a full day of wall-to-wall coverage. Of course go to theCube.net for all the websites to watch us live and on demand for all the shows we're doing and once again thank you for watching the cube. (digital music)

>> Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE at Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London with Joep Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman, happy to welcome you back to the program multi-time guest, Satyam Vaghani, who's the Vice President and GM of IoT and AI at Nutanix. Satyam, great to see you. >> And likewise too, thanks for having me back. >> All right, so IoT and AI are two of the fastest moving spaces in IT today. I remember, we had you on the program a little over a year ago to talk about Project Sherlock. That was where, Nutanix was starting with IoT. I remember asking you, I'm like, Nutanix and IoT, come on, I don't understand. Nutanix for the most part was like two products at that point, in where they're going. Fast forward to today, it's now called Xi IoT. That's X-I and then I-O-T, because Nutanix makes the product simple, but not necessarily the name. (chuckling) But you know, Satyam help bring us up to speed as to what your team has been working on, and what's the state of the product today? >> All right, so like you said we started way back around a year and a half ago from now, We were working on Project Sherlock. The idea was the fact that a lot of analysts were projecting that a lot of enterprise data is going to be produced at the edge. It was equally important to process it at the edge for many different reasons, autonomy, security, cost, compliance. So that was the genesis. We thought we were very well-suited to do it because this was yet another problem, where you needed to provide a very elegant system, a very well-contained system, just like what HCI is for your primary data center in an extremely remote and extremely hostile environment. So that was why we thought we should take a crack at it. Along the way of course, then our ambitions broaden to being a multi-cloud company. That fit in very well as well because IoT is never an edge only problem or a cloud only problem. Every IoT app kind of spans the edge in the cloud. This was a perfect way to showcase the multi-cloud data plane, multi-cloud control plane capability. >> I love that. It was one of my rants this year is oh, edge kills the cloud. I'm like, no, it doesn't kill the cloud. Edge actually will help increase a lot of the stuff in the cloud. It just means that it all won't be in this mystical the cloud in the central, which we know everything is being built really as it should be in architecture today. So there's a lot of nuance and understanding how some of those pieces together. I was excited to hear as you actually, if I remember right, you have a customer talking publicly about using this today. >> Ah that as well. >> So there's nothing better than hearing a real world example. So maybe help walk us through that briefly. >> That's the most fulfilling part of our edge. That's the plan for tomorrow's keynote. It's very fulfilling because when we started IoT, one of the other concerns other than the why Nutanix was why IoT? It's not a mature space. Nobody quite knows what to do about it. That was the point as we thought we had an opinion about the edge being a kind of key piece of IoT. The edge plus cloud convergence being a key piece of our data, centralized management being a key piece of IoT. Then we are able to validate it, not just with PoCs but with people who have put us in production, in very fantastic and remarkable use cases. So yeah, that was the journey. This one use case was around smart retail. But it kind of embedded all the elements that we kind of hold dear to our hearts. It's can we instantiate AI inferencing, complex AI inferencing logic at the edge? Can we instantiate control applications at the edge? Can we do interesting data management between the edge and the cloud? >> So looking at this from a technical perspective, what does this look like? So if I look at this from that technical perspective, I still see a data center, I still see the cloud, I still see data going back and forth. >> Yeah. >> What makes Xi IoT different? >> Different, so one is the focus on edge computing. So a lot of IoT solutions were either made at a time when there was kind of vertically integrated IoT application. That vendor said okay, now let me get broader. So that's one category of IoT solutions out in the market. There were some IoT kind of offers, which were cloud first, right. So there's a IoT offering in the cloud, potentially for doing consumer IoT projects, and now that offering once you expand into enterprise, we said let's go from the edge outwards. Because in an enterprise context, like I said, data processing, the amount of data, the volume is pretty overwhelming. So that's one difference, which is the richness of services that we provide at the edge. The stack is pretty deep but at the same time, pretty miniaturized to Dheeraj's point from the keynote in the morning. It's these environments need to run in pretty compact form factors in terms of computing. So that's one difference. The other difference is the pipeline all the way to the cloud, we don't consider this as an edge only problem. To that end, we not only do a pipeline to the cloud but we allow the customers to have a choice of cloud. So we don't dictate the choice of cloud just because we are providing a solution to the edge. Another key difference is the ease of use both for deployment and operations of the edge device itself. So think about deploying this thing on a thousand stores. We made it zero touch provisioning process. So the only requirement to deploy the Xi edge is that you plug in the internet cable. That is very core to the Nutanix philosophy right, simplicity, one-click simplicity. The last thing is APIs. It's the programmer APIs that whole system exposes. It's Apache class APIs, open source class APIs. So that people who are already used to various programming frameworks can immediately jump on this. >> Yeah, I mean you bring up one of what we saw as, in our research, one of the biggest hurdles for this. Say go back to when we first look at industrial internet, we actually did some research with GE. It's the OT really doesn't play with IT. You've got very specific gear and it plays certain ways, and it doesn't talk, and it doesn't have APIs, and doesn't have networking. It's all going to have centers and connectivity and things like that. These worlds just don't talk today. >> They don't, yeah. >> So is it, it sounds like this is a more IT friendly solution. How do you hope to bridge that gap? >> That's a great observation. So first of all, I would say indeed, we are coming IT inwards right, IT outwards into OT. But at the same time, the only way to make OT appreciate such a solution is to show them a path that look you can adopt Xi IoT without causing disruption to your machine critical setup, OT setup that you already have. So we put in a lot of thoughts around how we can source data from OT systems without having a conversation about throwing out, ripping and replacing every OT data gathering point and device that they have. So that was one thing. The other part is if you're going provide them some extra added benefit, if that OT person wants to do some of that infrastructure on top of this kind of IT-OT converged system. So to that end, we think there are some specific security benefits, some resource management benefits, some user management benefits that we can provide in this new edge that the OT guys would appreciate as well. So it was about having something for the OT guys to appreciate so that there is some buy-in, as opposed to dictating that you got to do it. >> So one of the things I observe in that industrial world is there's quite a lot of developers in that space as well. They are actively developing while gathering data, while figuring out IoT. So how do you let them, let those developers work on that platform as well? For instance, do you use Carbon on that platform? Stuff like that. >> All right, so we have a bunch of services on the platform. Essentially, it's like a PaaS but for the edge. So there is container services functions, there's some data services, AI services. But the developer point is very interesting. So in fact, as we speak, we are going through that journey as a company. Right, how can we be a more developer centric company. It involves literally running a Seven-R Xi IoT lab yesterday. A lot of people showed up, and they stayed throughout the day. So I think it's awareness thing. It looks like, at least from an interest point of view, once people see the platform, the APIs, there is true interest. So now, it is up to Nutanix to have enough events to have enough kind of awareness campaigns to make sure that this word spreads out. Unfortunately, I don't have a silver bullet for this but it's literally going to be a work in progress. Next year same time, maybe when we talk, probably we should talk about whether we made progress on this or not. >> Speaking of areas that don't have silver bullets. You mentioned security. A lot of concern around, there's already been breaches and hacks, and things like that. Security as we know, it just, the surface area goes up, in order of magnitude or more. How does Nutanix look at the security aspect? >> All right, so there's various things. But I'll give you one example, concrete example of what we did that is making a dramatic change, right, moving the needle so to speak. You can always argue that your platform is secure, but at the end of it, how do you prove it? So one proof point we have is from a security point of view, the Xi IoT edge is locked down. Even administrator cannot login. So the idea was that if you ever let the administrator have a user name and password to an edge device, that is bound to be a point of compromise, no matter how secure you are. So the only way to eliminate that is to just eliminate the need to have a user name and password to an edge device. So those are some of the things that we kind of thought and that's actually tightly ingrained in how the system is designed. 'Cause you can't test the edge. You can deploy all the applications you want but you can't touch it. You can't touch the, we provide containers as a service to the edge but you don't configure containerized solution on the edge. The system does it for you. So these are some of the things, the more automation we do, the more we remove humans from some of these very machine, security critical points, the better off we are in terms of reduced chances of hacks. >> Okay, so you've got a customer up on stage tomorrow. Is Xi IoT, is that now GA today? >> Oh right, sorry, I forgot to mention, it is indeed it's GA. >> Okay. >> And the press release went out today. >> Okay, give us what should we looking going forward? We understand, we're still as an industry early on this journey. Your teams have been working on it for a while but what should we be looking for? What is some of the key things down the road that you're excited for? >> From Nutanix or industry? >> Well, I'll take both. >> Okay (chuckling). Give me two hours, well anyway, let's see. First from Nutanix, so you know, we want to, IoT is not a single vendor problem right. So as much as we want, we want to make this a platform that is attractive to OT folks that is attractive to IoT vendors who have been creating this very vertical specific IoT apps. You want to prove to them that this is a way better platform for them to deploy their apps at industry scale. We want to, we want to appeal to AI guys, data scientists who are going to create interesting applications around data processing. So some of the next few steps is to provide interesting features and functions in the system, which appeal to all these demographics. From a GTM point of view, go to market point of view, we want to make sure that we get some partnerships right. 'Cause again, this is not just a technology problem. So those are some of the steps you're going to see. You are probably going to see more we are open to bring your own cloud philosophy for our IoT platform. Out of the box, we support Azure, AWS, Google, and private cloud if you bring that in. Maybe we'll expand that portfolio because there are other cloud providers especially if you are looking at regional markets like APAC, and EMEA, and so on. So that's some of the thing. Then last but not the least, you are going to see more and more investment in AI. Because, there's obviously a lot of talk about AI, and it's very easy to do a proof of concept, oh well, kind of easy. But it's very difficult to deploy that proof of concept at the industrial scale. That is a problem we want to really really solve very well. So you'll see a whole bunch of investments, features, announcements around it. >> All right, so I think we're going to have to leave it there, Satyam. >> All right. >> Pleasure is always to catch up with you. Congrats on the progress, and look forward to hearing from your customer on stage. >> Thanks very much, Stu, thanks Joep. >> All right, thanks so much. For you, Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Be back with more coverage here from Nutanix .NEXT 2018 in London England. You're watching theCUBE. (enlightening music) Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. I've been analyst with Wikibon, and a co-host with theCUBE since 2010. Before that, I've worked in the tech industry for many years in a number of different companies. My background really is in networking, virtualization, cloud computing since the early days. I really love the intersections of some of the technology.

>> Live from Washington, DC, it's TheCube, covering AWS Public Sector Summit 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome to TheCube, Silicon Angle Media's Production here at the NWS Public Sector show in Washington DC, I'm Stu Miniman, my host for this week will also be Dave Vellante and John Furrier, doing a day-and-a-half worth of programming, I've covered lots of Amazon ecosystem shows, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest, and first-time on the program Dan Fallon, who's the director of Public Sector Systems Engineers at Nutanix, Dan, great to see ya. >> Thank you, Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so you know, you and I have known each other for a number of years. I've been at every .NEXT actually that Nutanix has has, really most of the time at Nutanix, you know, we're talking about people's data centers, but you know, we've been watching how Nutanix really went from, you know, that hyper-converged term that we through out, but now you know, the messaging is around Enterprise Cloud, the portfolio has definitely expanded, as have the partnerships. Give us, Dan, why Nutanix is at the show, and a little bit about your role at the company. >> Yeah, yeah. So, I lead our public sector technical groups systems engineering, so we have all our government business, state, local, and federal, rolled up into one group. So, local show for me in the DC area, and this is our second year attending the Public Sector Summit, so you know, last year it was after our Calm acquisition, we're really starting to step into the space of, I'd say, solving the cloud problem for organizations, and blending your on-prem environment into your public cloud. So, that was you know, kind of our focus last year when the marketing team and we kind of get together, and figure out what shows we're at, we're like "Let's do, you know, AWS", it was kind of a new one, we're like "Alright, we'll be good." I would say it was a hit last year, and then this year, you know, we made some additional acquisitions, and now it's at our large .NEXT conference, and really focusing on Beam and cost optimization. >> Dan, I remember back a couple of years ago, people would, you know, knock on Nutanix, they're like "Ah, they're just VDI, and really, they only work on the government sector." You know, it's like federal is like a big thing, cause they can get to a certain price point that, you know, some person can sign off on, and we're like "Um, government's pretty, you know, pretty impressive segment." You know, you look at this show, I hear we're expecting about 10,000 people, which is typical for these regional shows, but this is more than that, the Public Sector, so tell us a little bit about your customers, and love to hear you talk about what use cases they are, and how they think about cloud, and look at Amazon, and look at Nutanix and how that fits for them. >> Yeah, and I actually just heard from our director of marketing here that it's approaching 14,000, so they're blowing up the attendance. Yeah, and I mean, definitely government is unique, that's kind of why we have it divided into a vertical, and Nutanix was very early on in the federal, and unlike a lot of startup small companies, instead of running away from the additional security burden, the compliance requirements, the leadership, Dheeraj, leaned into it. They said "Alright, let's build out our federal team, let's go our and do common criteria compliance.", some certifications that cost a lot of money. So they really, you know, leaned into that, and helped the organization grow in federal, and that kind became our beach head, and then obviously Nutanix has just grown around the world since then, but across public sector, really a couple different verticals. They actually combined the government units about a year ago, now, so I'm getting more and more familiar with the state and local business, as well as the education, and you can kind of look at those as three separate verticals, and then my kind of background is federal, I've been here doing contracting consulting work for the federal government, and now Nutanix. So, they all kind of have a different spin. In the federal government, since we're in DC, start there first. Really big focus on data center optimization, and Cloud First mandates, so you know, I get into discussions, cause there's really a larger conversation to be had on, like, what is cloud. A lot of people see it as a destination, but really they have scorecards that they need to close, consolidate data centers, and part of that involves moving to the cloud, part of that involves just refactoring their on-prem, and you know, could be hyper-converged, just really getting to a better optimized state in their on-prem data centers. >> Yeah, and one thing I like is when you talk to customers, they don't get into these arguments over, like, "Well, what is a private cloud? How do I measure these public clouds?" They're like "Yes, I have a cloud strategy", and you're right, the government has certain, here's the criteria we need to follow, here's the services you can buy, you know, I'm sure they've got GSA contracts for lots of different things that they can buy off of, but Nutanix has a tool that you're talking about at the show called Beam, why don't you explain how that fits into helping customers understand, you know, what applications they put where, and how they manage their entire infrastructure. >> Yeah, and I think whenever I get into those conversations with cloud, I always like to understand "Alright, why cloud, why are you moving into cloud?", and a lot of times it is higher-level mandates, you know, that there's a presidential memo, there's a new, you know, so there are laws they have to follow in terms of optimization of the data center, but if you peel it back, there are, you know, agility, and getting rapid time to market, but the cost is a big thing, and a lot of times because of those mandates, the cost kind of has to be a second factor, and so it might end up being more expensive because they're not really taking that into consideration. Cause, they're being told to go, so when Nutanix launched Beam at .NEXT, I really see it as a very good play in the public sector space, because I hear agencies kind of get the bill after the fact, and then they have this shock of like "Well our budget for cloud spend this year is going to be eaten up in our first couple months, you know, based on this first bill." So, with Beam, we have a lot of governance and cost control, but also the budgeting aspect, which I think will be huge in government, cause they have a fixed budget, they're not as used to doing things opex, they're very capex minded, so the cloud spend, they kind of have to change how they're thinking, and beam gives them that budget analysis so they can say "Alright, I'm going to spend this much a month", and do the allocation and break it down. >> Yeah, it's funny, for people that don't work with the government, they always hear like "Oh, well they've spent, you know, $100 for a hammer, they're overspending", and on my career, I've worked with government, and you get the calls at the end of the quarter, which is like "Oh my gosh, I haven't actually used up my budget, and I better use it now or I won't get it next quarter, or next year", so, you know, cost absolutely a key concern. Maybe drill us in one down level as to, you know, what kind of things, how does Beam help them, you said understand, optimize what they have, as well as plan for the future. >> Yeah, yeah, so you know, Beam hooks into the public cloud providers, as well as your on-prem staff. There are a couple different views, we've already refactored it into the nice Nutanix UI, so that you have the same look and feel. But, you have a couple different views, you have the cost visibility view, so your spend per day, per month, per year, and then you have an analyze view. So, there's a spend efficiency view, so you can actually get a quick visualization of "Am I getting the best value out of my cloud contract?", and this is, you know, really common in government. They'll cut some type of ELA or longer-term contract, but if you're not using all those credits, or taking the best benefit, you're not getting your RLI. So the spend efficiency will help in that aspect. You know, Beam goes beyond just visibility, so you have ability to do one-click cost controls. So maybe, you know, change things from spot to reserve instances. You can also drill down into the sub-services, so "Oh, that's costing more than I thought, you know, is it my NAT service or my load balancer service, like which exact spot is taking all that cost?" And then, the budget allows you to build cost centers within your org. So, build out and you know, charge back is hit or miss in government, sometimes it's way up at the top of the command, but you know, we are seeing more and more orgs, and especially on the service provider and fed integrator side, you know, common scenario is government contract awarded to a fed integrator, and they build out a private cloud and need to do charge back. So that's another big aspect. >> Yeah, it's so funny. Remember, you know, just a few years ago it's like "Oh, public cloud, it's super easy and super cheap, and like well, when you actually dig into it, well it's different.", is I guess what they would say. Simple isn't necessarily what I would say, and cost depends on what you're doing with it and how you do it, so we talked a little bit about federal. You were telling me off camera that you were seeing a lot of SLED customers here. Give a little insight as to what are some of the concerns, what are some of the real things that, you know, that segment of public sector are looking for at this show in the ecosystem. >> Yeah, it's one reason we love doing this show, and it's a great spot that brings together, cause state and local is so regionalized, you know, 50 states and then all the different counties, and cities, and a lot of them attend here. I, you know, kind of just gotten into public sector when this show happened last year, and I met a lot of our SLED customers here for the first time, so you know, bring them all to one spot, which is rare in state and local, it's a lot more regional conferences. So, the challenge of staying local is because it's so regionalized, and then you really have four verticals within state and local, you have the state business, which kind of mirrors federal in more large enterprise. Some states are adopting Cloud First strategies, some states are kind of still figuring it out. So, some states are mirroring fed government, and they have this kind of Cloud First, and trying to figure out how to make that work. And then, at the local level, you have the county and cities, and they're very scattered on their approach. We have some significant size counties that are using Nutanix with things like CloudConnect to backup into AWS, and then I would say higher ed is probably the most forward leaning in terms of their cloud usage. A lot of higher ed pushing aggressively in the cloud. Actually, where I used to work, Maryland, University of Maryland, aggressive push there. So, they still have a lot of fragmented IT on-prem though, they have different orgs, business school, engineering school with their own kind of little IT fiefdoms, and then you have central IT trying to standardize and make more public cloud usage. So, they have a lot of the same challenges of a big enterprise, where they need to kind of get that visibility and cost control across, not only, the on-prem, but also as they move into public cloud. >> Yeah Dan, one of the things I've loved when I dig into, you know, whether it's the federal government or even the local government, how technology and IT are helping drive innovation. You know, we often think of, you know, you think about government, you know, just mired in bureaucracy, wonder if you have any, you know, customer stories you can share about, you know, fun and interesting things people are doing, you know, on top of the infrastructure transformational type of activities? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you know kind of the buzzword maybe of this year seems to be a lot around the IOT and machine learning, so it's still a lot in the pilot phases, but Nutanix, we announced Project Sherlock at .NEXT, so kind of our approach to really a PAS IOT at the edge, so PAS machine learning at the edge, and we actually just deployed our first customer on the commercial side a week ago. So, still early days, but I would say the interest at the state and local level is huge, you know, Smart City initiatives, self-driving car initiatives, and just the data is overwhelming. So, they're planning ahead, some of them are pretty far along, but there's obviously starts and stops on where these initiatives are going, but the amount of data, and it's all dispersed, and just how to get their arms around that, how to control that, and then in federal there's a lot of requests for machine learning out at the tactical edge, so we have our, you know, soldiers forward deployed, how do they take their imagery and analyze that, and not have to wait 24 hours for someone to come back from the main data center, and that's real lifesaving, game changing. For them to be able to analyze it right then and there, and also big in disaster relief scenarios, so you know, being able to analyze. I was talking to one customer we had at a CXR round table last week at our local .NEXT event, and they were talking about after the hurricanes in Puerto Rico, just how to analyze like, where's there even power, where's the water good, and overlaying all that on imagery. But, right now, that's like 15 different sources that they were trying to pull together into one system, so a lot of challenges like that, that people are trying to address. >> And I love that, Dan. I think you hit right on it. It's data at the center of it. How can I leverage it? How can I get new value out of it. I've talked to some government agencies that are like, you know "How do I transform how we do parking in a city? I have the data, the have some sensors, oh wait, we can actually make an app." Sometimes it's partnering with the commercial side and business, but other times it's government just driving these. Dan, want to give you the final word, you know, we're just kicking off the event, but you know, give us a final takeaway for Nutanix AWS here at Public Sector Summit, what you want the takeaways to be. >> Yeah, well I mean, we're here both days, I encourage everyone to stop by and talk to Nutanix, and really, Beam was just launched, so the great thing is it's our first SAS offering, which is obviously a mind shift for us, but you can demo it just by signing up. But, it's kind of you know, traditional where we've been in the infrastructure market, where we get customers that are like "Oh, I want to try it out", and you have to ship them a system, or they have to download software. Now, it's just "Oh, go sign up on the SAS offering", so I think that'll be a great new delivery vehicle for Nutanix, and I think as we kind of shape our ecosystem of not only different ways to consume with Xi Cloud Services, Beam being SAS, but also different capital models in terms of way the customers purchase. I think that's another big driver around cloud is how the finance side consumes IT, so I think it's great to see, you know, we're kind of expanding, blending into the AWS ecosystem as well, but tying it all together, so people can manage everything from one spot. >> Alright, well Dan Fallon, pleasure chatting with you this morning helping me kick things up, and absolutely, the diversity of technologies, the how we are going to purchase things changing quite a lot, everything from, you know, modernizing our data center to SAS application. You know, I remember at .NEXT I said "Modernize the platform, then we can modernize the applications on top of it", so working through its customers through changes. Alright we have, just like Dan said, day-and-a-half work of coverage here on TheCube, of course, check TheCube dot net for all the recordings, as well as all the shows we'll be at. I'm Stu Miniman, and thanks so much for watching TheCube. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live, from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCube, covering .NEXT conference 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> It's not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. Or where the doer of deeds, could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Whose face is marked by dust, and sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errors, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error in shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds? Who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end of the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Those words by Theodore Roosevelt were in this morning's keynote by Dr. Brene Brown. Welcome to theCube's coverage of Nutanix.NEXT 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, with Keith Townsend here to break down, give our critiques as well as understand that Nutanix, while they are a public company, been striving and succeeding greatly. 5500 people here at this conference, very enthusiastic, great party last night, so Keith, we talked about it, our show opened yesterday, been your first show, got to talk to a bunch of customers, talked to a bunch of partners. Give us impressions and overall experience. >> So you know, you can't go to a show like this and not get hero numbers. 70,000 people in the Nutanix community program. 61,000 certified individuals. Customers making statements such as, Nutanix, humble company, Nutanix, not feeling entitled to the sale. Needing to work for the dollar. Customers extremely excited about the announcements, the direction of the company for key core areas I saw from a technology perspective, in which they made some really aggressive announcements and bets. So you know what, this has been a very high energy conference. >> Yeah, absolutely, talk about, from a financial standpoint, they're doin' well. Wall Street's been rewarding them greatly for the move to move to software only. Company's over nine billion dollars in market cap. Amazing. Had to go for a thousand customers a quarter. Very good for the space that they're playing in. Things like their file system, AFS, their fastest growing products. Building on that base infrastructure, but then yes, as you said, bold direction, they've got the kind of three axises that they're trying to build on. Build out HyperVage's support, build out cloud support. They're going to talk about how we think, where Nutanix fits in this cloud world. Building out their software portfolio. Where do they have IP, where are they growing? They've done four acquisitions so far in the software space. Some of those are starting to show through. We did interviews with the former CEO of Minjar and it NetSill, and- >> Bot Metric. >> Yeah, yeah that's the Netsill Bot Metric piece there. So products that are now, some of them are shipping. And as well as getting some vision. They had their first SAS product in Beam. Really interesting, something that really was targeted at AWS and Azure. Not the data center, but they're trying to make that hybrid-hybrid message as well as giving some of the vision. Nutanix Era is a big directional piece. Project Sherlock. Of course the big brains here working on that. Really interested in Edge and IOT. So a lot of pieces there, what's your take? >> You know what? I think I'm a bit overwhelmed actually. Which is a great thing, you look at COM was over the past couple of months, their Com platform was evened out by adding micro-segmentation. Which, against their biggest competitor VMware was a essential piece. They've been unabashful with going after it. You know what, AHV can now compete head-to-head with VMware just as long as you don't need memory over commit, and metro clustering that AHV, the term that they use in "game on." So Nutanix is, you know we talked to Duraj, a couple of years on theCube, asked him, you know what, is Nutanix a platform company? He say, you know what, no, (mumbles) too humble to accept that mantle of being a platform company, there's a lot of work to do. You look out onto the show floor, 80 partners and sponsors, who are all offering solutions tied to AHV. Which we talked about a little bit. A lot of adoption, but it doesn't seem like there's much VMware. Market penetration and stealing customers from VMware as much as HyperV. There're a lot of customers we talked to we said, you know we tried HyperV on Nutanix, not so much so we went to AHV. >> Quick point, and I felt a few years ago, the conversation wasn't about HyperV when you talked about Microsoft. It wasn't the, for years it was, when will it catch up to what VMware's doing? VMware's still dominant in the space, customers here, and lots of 'em are usin' Vmware. Yes, there's that tension between Vmware and Nutanix, but Nutanix, do they poke and prod a little bit at some things? Yes, but at the show, very much focusing on what they're doing, and focusing on their customers, not sending pot shots or anything like that. But when it comes to Microsoft, you're right Keith, there were a number of customers I talked to that were like, well in a Microsoft shop, and we know what applications used to live on VMware. Number one thing was always Microsoft. Many of them, I tried HyperV, didn't really like the experience. And therefore it was a smooth path to go over to AHV. Lot's of customers that are doing both VMware and AHV and sorting that out. And it's like oh, well over time, if Nutanix becomes 80, 90, even some of them gettin' towards 100% of heir deployment, AHV becomes a bigger piece of the portfolio. >> And you know, we thought that this whole multi-HyperVisor argument was over. Like, you know what, just go to one HyperVisor. A lot of Nutanix customers are showing that multi-HyperVisor is a legit way to go that we haven't ran with anyone who said, No, we're having management pains, running AHV side-by-side with VM or Vspare. >> I would like to see from Nutanix, more partnerships with Microsoft though. You talk Azure, absolutely huge growth, number two out there. Yes, they support it, but you know, of course they have much more showing at the Amazon show. They've got a strong partnership with Google. Got to highlight that with the Brian Stevens interview. And know that later this year, as Zai really starts to roll out, that we will see much more of that. But Azure, not only in the public cloud piece, but Azure's stack is starting to grow. I've been talking to Lenovo, HP, Adele, Cisco, all of them have pent-up demands, service writers that are starting to roll at Azure's stack. And while Azure's stack really is kind of a closed ecosystem there, I think there is opportunity for Nutanix to play in there, I expect them to hear from the customers who'd love them to do more with Microsoft. We heard from customers that they'd actually love to hear Nutanix do more with Redhat, and in general be a deletega system, yes, show floor, it's growing, it's vibrant but absolutely, it's always, what more? >> OF course, we always, and I think we get our friends at Nutanix always pokes us about staying positive. But it is a positive, they're a software company now. And as a software company, you have to integrate with other software company services. The Azure stack thing, while it's mainly a hardware play for companies like Dale, Lenovo, Fujitsu, there has to be software integration. The folks with the Google and Nutanix partnership, did a really great job of doing push-button, at least showin' us on stage, push-button deployments of VM's, from Zai to Nutanix instances in the cloud. This is Nutanix in the cloud. That won't probably play with Azure and Azure Stack. So Nutanix really needs to figure out a way to get into that relationship with Microsoft. >> Yeah, true simplicity takes genius, is a quote that I had out of this show in the early years. And Nutanix will make a bold claim. Oh, database migration, we're going to make that really easy. Well, show me (laughs) Anybody that's worked with databases- >> That's like sayin' DR is easy. Yeah, gettin' the stores from one point to another one is easy. Processes, not so much. >> Some of that Project Sherlock, oh yeah all that tensor flow, cumbrineties, functions of the service, we're going to make it push-button easy so that we'll make that invisible. How much is a distraction, what's in the weeds? You know, the networking, there's so many pieces in there that love the vision. Of course customers want it simplified, but we want to talk to the customers, and understand what works, what still needs to be tweaked, where do they have to build out some services, partnerships, even more than they've done today to go further, what have you been seeing and hearing? >> So, Nutanix, the enterprise cloud company. I've poked at the whole cloud marketing term. Matter of fact, on Twitter, one of the, I'll read this. Cloud really, no AI, no databases or severs. No server-less, does that even, doesn't even have a presence at Cubrineties events. Fake cloud story for IT, ah! So you know what, let's pick that apart a little bit. DV as a service, they announced basically yesterday, that's there. AI, Satium Gatupum said a really nice story with Sherlock there, absolutely looking at it. Cubrineties integration, ACS, 2.0 will come out the gate as a Cubrineties manage distribution. They announced Zai integration with Cubrineties and push-button. Now you may pick on the cloud part. Nutanix still very much talks to the infrastructure group. Their customers are the infrastructure group, and you can't talk cloud without having a relationship with application developers. So I think the next step as Nutanix matures, these offerings on, their cloud offerings, is that they have to start to have a deeper relationship. They have to go side-by-side with their IT sponsors and organizations to start to have conversations with application developers. >> Yeah, and I love the online, the cloud-eraderie if you will, out there. Well, we understand, this is the architecture of the future. Where it should go, I love hangin' out with the cloud native crew. But for me, it goes back to talking to their customers. And when the customers, if they're like here's what we've done, here's the proof as to how I get faster time to market, how I'm accelerating my development teams insight. I'm creating, one of the interviews we did, IT as business, is how we run things. These are real digital transformation stories. Impressive stuff, and it's cloud. And it's not virtualization with a little layer on top. It's real change inside customers, and Nutanix, I'll say, as a platform to help us get from where I've been, to where I'm going. >> Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, Nutanix customers are not listening to the cloud-eraderie. They absolutely love the platform. You know Stu, I don't think I've run into a negative customer at the show. I haven't run into a customer that says, you know what, Nutanix isn't meeting my need in X or Y area. Home Depot won the innovation award at the show. Then Home Depot is a forward thinking customer, truly embracing parts of the platform. I'm sure there's some cloud native pieces. >> They're a big Google cloud platform customer. One of Pivotal's big one on GCP. So absolutely, and we have, I've talked to a number of customers big on Amazon, developer shops, absolutely public cloud to piece of it. Yeah, if the criticism I should have, I always look and say, if I said public cloud and private cloud, where's your center of gravity? Of course Nutanix is going to go, leaning a little bit more towards the data centers, hosted service providers. That's where they live today. But they're not blind to it, they're embracing it. They have a full SAS product, they're going to be expanding that. They are software at their core, distributed architectures where they're going. >> You know Stu, one of our favorite comments is that, company X likes to move, moves at the pace of the CIO. I think it's safe to say, Nutanix is a little bit faster than the CIO. And they're enabling the old stuff. You know what, let's make that push-button easy, and as we're looking, have a eye to the future, looking at the new stuff, let's see how we can get there, push-button easy. There's a lot of work to do. But I think they're making some really interesting and probably the right moves for their customer base. >> Aright well, Keith, first of all, I want to thank you for all of your help here this week. The CTO advisor, always great to dig in with customers. Really get in, it's been exciting to watch you kind of get to know a little bit more about this. I've had the pleasure of tracking Nutanix in the really early days, been at every one of these shows. It is a great community, kudos to Nutanix. Thank you for sponsoring us, and if not familiar, if you look at the bottom of the videos we're playin' right now, we mention who sponsors, we're tryin' to be transparent. Keith and I though, we're out here in the field. If you have questions for us, or you know, want us to ask something, or question what we're doing, hit us up, we're really easy to reach on Twitter. Always happy for feedback from the community. And as always, check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows, everywhere we're going. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watchin' theCube's presentation from Nutanix.NEXT 2018 in New Orleans, and see you at lots more shows. (futuristic 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 San Francisco, it's The Cube covering DevNet Create 2017 brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back here, we're live here in San Francisco for SiliconANGLE's the Cube's exclusive 2 days of coverage for Cisco's inaugural event DevNet Create, building on their 3 year old successful DevNet program which is Cisco core developer program now foraying out into the world of cloud native developers, open source, great move for Cisco. Our next guest, Wissam Ali-Ahmad, lead solutions architect with Splunk. Good to see you. >> Good to see you too, John. >> Here with Peter Burris of course, my co-host. >> Wissam: Hi, Peter. >> So Splunk being here is an important thing because you guys have been riding the wave for cloud, certainly your relationship with Amazon web service is well known, very successful. Splunk as a company went public, well known. You guys really, really hit a niche around big data and how cloud has helped you guys accelerate your business. So you've been transformed, but continuing to grow, so you're riding that wave, but now Cisco's on the wave, and Cisco's been involved in the wave. But from a relationship standpoint, oh yeah, we're the networking guys, we're going to come in and help Docker with this, we're going to come in and help Splunk with this, so they've been kind of a helper, not the main player. This is a new way to get back in and be really enabled for the cloud world. What's your reaction to this move by Cisco? >> I mean, we have a great partnership with Cisco for many years. And I think, you know, Splunk plays a good, as you said, we're a good player there. We integrate well. I mean, all the initiatives Cisco's involved with, we have integrations with Cisco on many levels with different technology. And also Splunk, the deal is with Splunk is that you need to bring invisibly to everything, and Splunk is that platform where you have access to all that data throughout all, all is like all that machine data so you have access to all that data, not only application data, not only network data. You need to look at everything these days. Especially when there's attacks. You know we heard recently, of course everybody heard about WannaCry, and to the tech, that attack, you need to look at everything, because you could someone bring in a laptop behind the firewall even, and they can be affected already, and if you don't have access to see what they're doing, not just from a network perspective, like what apps in the cloud they're accessing, you know, what other files on the locally, so, because you have access to all that data in Splunk, you should be able to get better visibility. >> And you guys have a unique position in the sense that you're close, again, to the machine. You know, logs and data We had Amanda on from Cisco, who was, in her tribe as a developer, she's not necessarily a network engineer, but she's brought on that mojo in from the developer community. When she was first day on the job, you know, they were doing some Python, some rest API stuff, you know, basic 101 stuff, but she didn't want to do an app that was showing hey, how many Twitter followers do I have? She had to go in and look at the devices. So now the opportunity with IOT is that for Cisco to make and expose the network for programmability >> Wissam: Right. >> And extend it. How are they going to do that? I mean you're closer to those guys in your relationship, but that's what everyone wants. They want the infrastructure to just go, that's DevOps >> Right. Yeah, they want the edge to come to them. They want data to be more accessible to all the users. And then so Cisco's on that path, definitely on that path, to get more infrastructure visibility in the data center and the networks, so they're definitely on that path of doing that. >> And let me build on this, so if we think about the various components associated with some of the things that Splunk does. A leader in the application of machine and AI and big data related technologies, to solving business problems. The algorithms for doing this have been around for a long time. The hardware couldn't do it, so you had to write really tight software to do it, and you were one of the first companies out there to really do that. And then it was, we'll point all that at sources of data, that you can apply these technologies, to create better business value. And there were two places where people did it. Web logs, for online marketing, and IT, since IT technology throws off an enormous amount of data. So as I think about it, the relationship with Cisco is especially interesting, because Cisco is going to be one of those companies that encourages people to create new sources of data and a lot of it, IOT and other places, and bring it back to companies and technologies that have a proven track record for generating value out of that data. So talk a bit about how Splunk intends to, going back to what John said, riding that wave. The algorithms are here, the hardware can do it, now we've got to get access to more of the data, and here comes Cisco being really serious about moving a lot of data around. What do you think? >> I mean, we like when people bring in a lot of data into Splunk. We also have been focusing a lot on the personas. On the, we call the Sherlock, the data Sherlock. Right, so that unique persona is where they need to look at, how do I make sense of my data? Not only just about bringing data, but how do I make sense of that data. What are solutions? What are use case I need to have better impact on the business? So we're actually helping solve real kind of business use cases. This morning, Yelp had a webinar about how they use Splunk driving all the web infrastructure for Yelp, the Yelp back end for all their-- >> Peter: This is still in the IT? >> Yeah. >> Peter: It's not Yelps marketing group, this is still in the IT? >> But they are correlating that with other business use cases, yes. >> Of course, it will start coming together. So where do you see some of these use cases popping up, now that Cisco is helping to create those new sources, and get people to, you know, acculturating people to the idea that these are sources of value, business value. Where do you see some of the new use cases? >> There's a lot of use cases now coming up around business analytics, around IOT as you mentioned. And an added element of machine learning across different data sources. So if I want to look at not just performance of one service, let's say my elevator, I want to see how that's going to affect other areas of my business, too. So you're able to see not only the power of correlating that data, but also be able to apply machine learning on that data. So there's a lot of use cases around business analytics. Security's always there, because security, as you know, attack vectors are getting complex every few months or so, so you need to also chase that, and you need to look at all the data, the behaviors in that data, to get better predictability, to get better prevention detection. >> So Splunk is emerging as a great software company for a lot of IT pros, but it still is more in the op side. How is this conference and the likelihood or the notion that developers are increasingly going to be part of that use case, it's utilizing data and data-related services to better understand operations, but find new ways of creating value out of the capabilities provided by that. What's the developer angle here for Splunk? >> Great question. We actually are focusing a lot on developer tools. So Splunk, being a platform. I always say Splunk is a full-feature platform for machine data and big data. So it's open in the sense that developers can develop their own content on Splunk. They can extend what we have. So an example of that is, the recent project called Mexico Contaro. So that's a project full that's looking at internet usage and coverage on Mexico, in Mexico City and across all the cities. And this was using Splunk to end Meraki API's, and bring all that data together, and network data to try to give exposure to kind of like government analytics. And that's a neat case because not necessarily only IT, but also helping all the goods out there. >> So Cisco, Meraki and other sources, plus Splunk to be able to get deep visibility into a number of ways, you know, a very complex system like Mexico City, which is about as complex as you get, actually operates. >> Wissam: Yes. That's one, yeah. >> Tell about the Splunk direction now, because everyone's been questioning about the public offering, because you're not putting numbers out there, active community, it's not that you guys aren't being transparent, but you've got to go to the next level of growth. Obviously Cisco's coming at the cloud native world. We see the cloud native compute foundation, really with great support of the Linux foundation. New open source stuff's going on all the time. How is Splunk looking at the future right now? What's next? I mean obviously security, we heard that at Dot Conf last year, but you guys have really a good position with the data. You have good account names. You've got great blue chip customers. What's next? What's the product solution look like for you guys? What's the new architecture? What's the new plan? >> I think more listening, looking at all the scale, and cloud and listen to the customers, making the data onboarding easier, making it more scalable, covering more use cases that we talked about. Innovate a lot of areas around machine learning, all that to cover more of the use cases, so we're definitely moving forward to go the next step beyond just-- >> So let's take another example. So DevOps, right, everyone loves the DevOps. It's not like a solution, you can't buy DevOps, you just got to do it, right? So that's pretty clear. You can't just write an Agile manifesto and say, "We're DevOps." You got to have a vision, maybe write a manifesto just to get the people motivated, but put the right people in place, let the things organically develop. So the question is, what is an ideal architecture, and what is a best practice, from your standpoint, where you've seen examples of people who've transformed into this DevOps world, where they really got the ball rolling, got some change happening, and then scaled it. Can you give us a kind of a pattern that you've seen the customers? >> I have not seen personally a lot of that, but definitely there's transformation happening. It's not easy to move into that DevOps switch. You cannot do it overnight. So you need as much as possible tools that would actually give exposure, how am I doing, right? Am I pushing my code at the speed it's expected to be? Do I have bugs addressed early on? So that kind of exposure you need a system that will give you basically to analyze all that data too, and then at Splunk we have a story on DevOps. DevOps and application exposure monitoring and that. And the unique thing about Splunk is that you don't only look at what's inside the application, which was AMP's that do application management, but you should look at everything, so we look outside the black box. Not inside the app, but look at outside too, so we're going to give you exposure of your whole DevOp process You know, from the beginning, the whole condis integration, so I see Splunk helping organizations moving into that kind of new process. >> But there's an interesting relationship between tools and process, or tools and skills, so John, you'll probably laugh at this. Many years ago I found myself sitting in a room with the CEO of a very, very large pharmaceutical, me and a group of other other consultants, and he said, the discussion was, are we going to buy SAP or not? And after two hours of people arguing about it, he finally said, "Screw it, we're doing it, "I'm sick and tired of these process arguments. "We're just going to do what SAP says in the process." There's a relationship between the practices suggested by Splunk and the types of things that a business actually does in a DevOps sense. What is this, how is Splunk changing the notion of DevOps, and how is now as Splunk extends itself, how is DevOps and new practices and new ways of thinking, altering the way that Splunk delivers capability? >> I mean, we always listen to our customers. And then we've actually been looking at addressing use cases, like on DevOps, from a persona aspect. Like as a DevOp engineer, I won't be able to address this kind of issues, and we listen to that, and we try to address those, not only just by a tool, but also by looking at best practices around that. And sometimes we manifest those through apps. So Splunk can actually, you can publish an app as a developer if you're not happy as a customer, you can modify, take one of our existing free apps, and then modify them cue on process, so we're not kind of specific rigid to certain way, and I know DevOps, and Agile Ward, is not even like a religion, you know, you're not supposed to follow, you're supposed to be flexible in certain areas, and even implementing DevOps comes in Agile way too. >> But it's still pedagogical, and John in many respects, there's your manifesto for DevOps, right? Is your choice of tools and how they come together, and degree to which they're integrated kind of take priority. >> Well, you got eight minutes until you have to go up on stage and do your talk. Here we're live in San Francisco. What are you going to be speaking about when you hit the stage in eight minutes? You have seven minutes to explain (laughs). >> (Laughs) Deliver pitch. So I'll be focusing a lot on the integrations that we have with various Cisco products, so we have, with Splunk you're able to bring in a lot of the API, data through API integrations, so I'm going to show how easy that process is to bring that data if you have an API like Meraki or ACI or Ice. And I'll also be focusing more on how the data you can do it from the cloud, easy, without having an agent involved, without having any software you need to install to collect the data, and we'll be talking more about the Mexico Contaro case, and then do some fun live demos also. >> But Cisco's got good API's, people might not know that, but they are API'd up pretty well on the equipment and the gear and the platform. >> Yes, of course. >> Just commentary on that, your reaction to share for people who are not fluent in Cisco, in terms of their enablement of getting data out? >> Yes, Cisco has a lot of good API's, capabilities around sharing that data, the openness of it has been great, and made easy for us, even for our customers to bring that data, the API, that data into Splunk, so it's a matter of a few minutes now to point to that API and bring that data into Splunk, and yeah, that's good. >> Wissam Ali-Ahmad, going on stage in seven minutes, you got it all done, congratulations. Thanks for coming on The Cube. I know you've got your big speech here to the packed house. Inaugural event here, Cisco's DevNet Create. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Thank you, John. >> More live coverage here in San Fransciso. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier, with my co-host Peter Burris. Stay with us as we get down to wrapping up day two. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell, and I'm the senior directory of strategy and plan