(bright music) >> Okay, we're back in theCUBE. We said we were signing off for the night, but during the hallway track, we ran into old friend Stu Miniman who was the Director of Market Insights at Red Hat. Stu, friend of theCUBE done the thousands of CUBE interviews. >> Dave, it's great to be here. Thanks for pulling me on, you and I hosted Red Hat Summit before. It's great to see Paul here. I was actually, I was talking to some of the Red Hatters walking around Boston. It's great to have an event here. Boston's got strong presence and I understand, I think was either first or second year, they had it over... What's the building they're tearing down right down the road here. Was that the World Trade Center? I think that's where they actually held it, the first time they were here. We hosted theCUBE >> So they moved up. >> at the Hines Convention Center. We did theCUBE for summit at the BCEC next door. And of course, with the pandemic being what it was, we're a little smaller, nice intimate event here. It's great to be able to room the hall, see a whole bunch of people and lots watching online. >> It's great, it's around the same size as those, remember those Vertica Big Data events that we used to have here. And I like that you were commenting out at the theater and the around this morning for the keynotes, that was good. And the keynotes being compressed, I think, is real value for the attendees, you know? 'Cause people come to these events, they want to see each other, you know? They want to... It's like the band getting back together. And so when you're stuck in the keynote room, it's like, "Oh, it's okay, it's time to go." >> I don't know that any of us used to sitting at home where I could just click to another tab or pause it or run for, do something for the family, or a quick bio break. It's the three-hour keynote I hope has been retired. >> But it's an interesting point though, that the virtual event really is driving the physical and this, the way Red Hat marketed this event was very much around the virtual attendee. Physical was almost an afterthought, so. >> Right, this is an invite only for in-person. So you're absolutely right. It's optimizing the things that are being streamed, the online audience is the big audience. And we just happy to be in here to clap and do some things see around what you're doing. >> Wonderful see that becoming the norm. >> I think like virtual Stu, you know this well when virtual first came in, nobody had a clue with what they were doing. It was really hard. They tried different things, they tried to take the physical and just jam it into the virtual. That didn't work, they tried doing fun things. They would bring in a famous person or a comedian. And that kind of worked, I guess, but everybody showed up for that and then left. And I think they're trying to figure it out what this hybrid thing is. I've seen it both ways. I've seen situations like this, where they're really sensitive to the virtual. I've seen others where that's the FOMO of the physical, people want physical. So, yeah, I think it depends. I mean, reinvent last year was heavy physical. >> Yeah, with 15,000 people there. >> Pretty long keynotes, you know? So maybe Amazon can get away with it, but I think most companies aren't going to be able to. So what is the market telling you? What are these insights? >> So Dave just talking about Amazon, obviously, the world I live in cloud and that discussion of cloud, the journey that customers are going on is where we're spending a lot of the discussions. So, it was great to hear in the keynote, talked about our deep partnerships with the cloud providers and what we're doing to help people with, you like to call it super cloud, some call it hybrid, or multi-cloud... >> New name. (crosstalk) Meta-Cloud, come on. >> All right, you know if Che's my executive, so it's wonderful. >> Love it. >> But we'll see, if I could put on my VR Goggles and that will help me move things. But I love like the partnership announcement with General Motors today because not every company has the needs of software driven electric vehicles all over the place. But the technology that we build for them actually has ramifications everywhere. We've working to take Kubernetes and make it smaller over time. So things that we do at the edge benefit the cloud, benefit what we do in the data center, it's that advancement of science and technology just lifts all boats. >> So what's your take on all this? The EV and software on wheels. I mean, Tesla obviously has a huge lead. It's kind of like the Amazon of vehicles, right? It's sort of inspired a whole new wave of innovation. Now you've got every automobile manufacturer kind of go and after. That is the future of vehicles is something you followed or something you have an opinion on Stu? >> Absolutely. It's driving innovation in some ways, the way the DOS drove innovation on the desktop, if you remember the 64K DOS limit, for years, that was... The software developers came up with some amazing ways to work within that 64K limit. Then when it was gone, we got bloatware, but it actually does enforce a level of discipline on you to try to figure out how to make software run better, run more efficiently. And that has upstream impacts on the enterprise products. >> Well, right. So following your analogy, you talk about the enablement to the desktop, Linux was a huge influence on allowing the individual person to write code and write software, and what's happening in the EV, it's software platform. All of these innovations that we're seeing across industries, it's how is software transforming things. We go back to the mark end reasons, software's eating the world, open source is the way that software is developed. Who's at the intersection of all those? We think we have a nice part to play in that. I loved tha- Dave, I don't know if you caught at the end of the keynote, Matt Hicks basically said, "Our mission isn't just to write enterprise software. "Our mission is based off of open source because open source unlocks innovation for the world." And that's one of the things that drew me to Red Hat, it's not just tech in good places, but allowing underrepresented, different countries to participate in what's happening with software. And we can all move that ball forward. >> Well, can we declare victory for open source because it's not just open source products, but everything that's developed today, whether proprietary or open has open source in it. >> Paul, I agree. Open source is the development model period, today. Are there some places that there's proprietary? Absolutely. But I had a discussion with Deepak Singh who's been on theCUBE many times. He said like, our default is, we start with open source code. I mean, even Amazon when you start talking about that. >> I said this, the $70 billion business on open source. >> Exactly. >> Necessarily give it back, but that say, Hey, this is... All's fair in tech and more. >> It is interesting how the managed service model has sort of rescued open source, open source companies, that were trying to do the Red Hat model. No one's ever really successfully duplicated the Red Hat model. A lot of companies were floundering and failing. And then the managed service option came along. And so now they're all cloud service providers. >> So the only thing I'd say is that there are some other peers we have in the industry that are built off open source they're doing okay. The recent example, GitLab and Hashicorp, both went public. Hashi is doing some managed services, but it's not the majority of their product. Look at a company like Mongo, they've heavily pivoted toward the managed service. It is where we see the largest growth in our area. The products that we have again with Amazon, with Microsoft, huge growth, lots of interest. It's one of the things I spend most of my time talking on. >> I think Databricks is another interesting example 'cause Cloudera was the now company and they had the sort of open core, and then they had the proprietary piece, and they've obviously didn't work. Databricks when they developed Spark out of Berkeley, everybody thought they were going to do kind of a similar model. Instead, they went for all in managed services. And it's really worked well, I think they were ahead of that curve and you're seeing it now is it's what customers want. >> Well, I mean, Dave, you cover the database market pretty heavily. How many different open source database options are there today? And that's one of the things we're solving. When you look at what is Red Hat doing in the cloud? Okay, I've got lots of databases. Well, we have something called, it's Red Hat Open Database Access, which is from a developer, I don't want to have to think about, I've got six different databases, which one, where's the repository? How does all that happen? We give that consistency, it's tied into OpenShift, so it can help abstract some of those pieces. we've got same Kafka streaming and we've got APIs. So it's frameworks and enablers to help bridge that gap between the complexity that's out there, in the cloud and for the developer tool chain. >> That's really important role you guys play though because you had this proliferation, you mentioned Mongo. So many others, Presto and Starbursts, et cetera, so many other open source options out there now. And companies, developers want to work with multiple databases within the same application. And you have a role in making that easy. >> Yeah, so and that is, if you talk about the question I get all the time is, what's next for Kubernetes? Dave, you and I did a preview for KubeCon and it's automation and simplicity that we need to be. It's not enough to just say, "Hey, we've got APIs." It's like Dave, we used to say, "We've got standards? Great." Everybody's implementation was a little bit different. So we have API Sprawl today. So it's building that ecosystem. You've been talking to a number of our partners. We are very active in the community and trying to do things that can lift up the community, help the developers, help that cloud native ecosystem, help our customers move faster. >> Yeah API's better than scripts, but they got to be managed, right? So, and that's really what you guys are doing that's different. You're not trying to own everything, right? It's sort of antithetical to how billions and trillions are made in the IT industry. >> I remember a few years ago we talked here, and you look at the size that Red Hat is. And the question is, could Red Hat have monetized more if the model was a little different? It's like, well maybe, but that's not the why. I love that they actually had Simon Sinek come in and work with Red Hat and that open, unlocks the world. Like that's the core, it's the why. When I join, they're like, here's a book of Red Hat, you can get it online and that why of what we do, so we never have to think of how do we get there. We did an acquisition in the security space a year ago, StackRox, took us a year, it's open source. Stackrox.io, it's community driven, open source project there because we could have said, "Oh, well, yeah, it's kind of open source and there's pieces that are open source, but we want it to be fully open source." You just talked to Gunnar about how he's RHEL nine, based off CentOS stream, and now developing out in the open with that model, so. >> Well, you were always a big fan of Whitehurst culture book, right? It makes a difference. >> The open organization and right, Red Hat? That culture is special. It's definitely interesting. So first of all, most companies are built with the hierarchy in mind. Had a friend of mine that when he joined Red Hat, he's like, I don't understand, it's almost like you have like lots of individual contractors, all doing their things 'cause Red Hat works on thousands of projects. But I remember talking to Rackspace years ago when OpenStack was a thing and they're like, "How do you figure out what to work on?" "Oh, well we hired great people and they work on what's important to them." And I'm like, "That doesn't sound like a business." And he is like, "Well, we struggle sometimes to that balance." Red Hat has found that balance because we work on a lot of different projects and there are people inside Red Hat that are, you know, they care more about the project than they do the business, but there's the overall view as to where we participate and where we productize because we're not creating IP because it's all an open source. So it's the monetizations, the relationships we have our customers, the ecosystems that we build. And so that is special. And I'll tell you that my line has been Red Hat on the inside is even more Red Hat. The debates and the discussions are brutal. I mean, technical people tearing things apart, questioning things and you can't be thin skinned. And the other thing is, what's great is new people. I've talked to so many people that started at Red Hat as interns and will stay for seven, eight years. And they come there and they have as much of a seat at the table, and when I talk to new people, your job, is if you don't understand something or you think we might be able to do it differently, you better speak up because we want your opinion and we'll take that, everybody takes that into consideration. It's not like, does the decision go all the way up to this executive? And it's like, no, it's done more at the team. >> The cultural contrast between that and your parent, IBM, couldn't be more dramatic. And we talked earlier with Paul Cormier about has IBM really walked the walk when it comes to leaving Red Hat alone. Naturally he said, "Yes." Well what's your perspective. >> Yeah, are there some big blue people across the street or something I heard that did this event, but look, do we interact with IBM? Of course. One of the reasons that IBM and IBM Services, both products and services should be able to help get us breadth in the marketplace. There are times that we go arm and arm into customer meetings and there are times that customers tell us, "I like Red Hat, I don't like IBM." And there's other ones that have been like, "Well, I'm a long time IBM, I'm not sure about Red Hat." And we have to be able to meet all of those customers where they are. But from my standpoint, I've got a Red Hat badge, I've got a Red Hat email, I've got Red Hat benefits. So we are fiercely independent. And you know, Paul, we've done blogs and there's lots of articles been written is, Red Hat will stay Red Hat. I didn't happen to catch Arvin I know was on CNBC today and talking at their event, but I'm sure Red Hat got mentioned, but... >> Well, he talks about Red Hat all time. >> But in his call he's talking backwards. >> It's interesting that he's not here, greeting this audience, right? It's again, almost by design, right? >> But maybe that's supposed to be... >> Hundreds of yards away. >> And one of the questions being in the cloud group is I'm not out pitching IBM Cloud, you know? If a customer comes to me and asks about, we have a deep partnership and IBM will be happy to tell you about our integrations, as opposed to, I'm happy to go into a deep discussion of what we're doing with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. So that's how we do it. It's very different Dave, from you and I watch really closely the VMware-EMC, VMware-Dell, and how that relationship. This one is different. We are owned by IBM, but we mostly, it does IBM fund initiatives and have certain strategic things that are done, absolutely. But we maintain Red Hat. >> But there are similarities. I mean, VMware crowd didn't want to talk about EMC, but they had to, they were kind of forced to. Whereas, you're not being forced to. >> And then once Dell came in there, it was joint product development. >> I always thought a spin in. Would've been the more effective, of course, Michael Dell and Egon wouldn't have gotten their $40 billion out. But I think a spin in was more natural based on where they were going. And it would've been, I think, a more dominant position in the marketplace. They would've had more software, but again, financially it wouldn't have made as much sense, but that whole dynamic is different. I mean, but people said they were going to look at VMware as a model and it's been largely different because remember, VMware of course was a separate company, now is a fully separate company. Red Hat was integrated, we thought, okay, are they going to get blue washed? We're watching and watching, and watching, you had said, well, if the Red Hat culture isn't permeating IBM, then it's a failure. And I don't know if that's happening, but it's definitely... >> I think a long time for that. >> It's definitely been preserved. >> I mean, Dave, I know I read one article at the beginning of the year is, can Arvin make IBM, Microsoft Junior? Follow the same turnaround that Satya Nadella drove over there. IBM I think making some progress, I mean, I read and watch what you and the team are all writing about it. And I'll withhold judgment on IBM. Obviously, there's certain financial things that we'd love to see IBM succeed. We worry about our business. We do our thing and IBM shares our results and they've been solid, so. >> Microsoft had such massive cash flow that even bomber couldn't screw it up. Well, I mean, this is true, right? I mean, you think about how were relevant Microsoft was in the conversation during his tenure and yet they never got really... They maintained a position so that when the Nadella came in, they were able to reascend and now are becoming that dominant player. I mean, IBM just doesn't have that cash flow and that luxury, but I mean, if he pulls it off, he'll be the CEO of the decade. >> You mentioned partners earlier, big concern when the acquisition was first announced, was that the Dells and the HP's and the such wouldn't want to work with Red Hat anymore, you've sort of been here through that transition. Is that an issue? >> Not that I've seen, no. I mean, the hardware suppliers, the ISVs, the GSIs are all very important. It was great to see, I think you had Accenture on theCUBE today, obviously very important partner as we go to the cloud. IBM's another important partner, not only for IBM Cloud, but IBM Services, deep partnership with Azure and AWS. So those partners and from a technology standpoint, the cloud native ecosystem, we talked about, it's not just a Red Hat product. I constantly have to talk about, look, we have a lot of pieces, but your developers are going to have other tools that they're going to use and the security space. There is no such thing as a silver bullet. So I've been having some great conversations here already this week with some of our partners that are helping us to round out that whole solution, help our customers because it has to be, it's an ecosystem. And we're one of the drivers to help that move forward. >> Well, I mean, we were at Dell Tech World last week, and there's a lot of talk about DevSecOps and DevOps and Dell being more developer friendly. Obviously they got a long way to go, but you can't have that take that posture and not have a relationship with Red Hat. If all you got is Pivotal and VMware, and Tansu >> I was thrilled to hear the OpenShift mention in the keynote when they talked about what they were doing. >> How could you not, how could you have any credibility if you're just like, Oh, Pivotal, Pivotal, Pivotal, Tansu, Tansu. Tansu is doing its thing. And they smart strategy. >> VMware is also a partner of ours, but that we would hope that with VMware being independent, that does open the door for us to do more with them. >> Yeah, because you guys have had a weird relationship with them, under ownership of EMC and then Dell, right? And then the whole IBM thing. But it's just a different world now. Ecosystems are forming and reforming, and Dell's building out its own cloud and it's got to have... Look at Amazon, I wrote about this. I said, "Can you envision the day where Dell actually offers competitive products in its suite, in its service offering?" I mean, it's hard to see, they're not there yet. They're not even close. And they have this high say/do ratio, or really it's a low say/do, they say high say/do, but look at what they did with Nutanix. You look over- (chuckles) would tell if it's the Cisco relationship. So it's got to get better at that. And it will, I really do believe. That's new thinking and same thing with HPE. And, I don't know about Lenovo that not as much of an ecosystem play, but certainly Dell and HPE. >> Absolutely. Michael Dell would always love to poke at HPE and HP really went very far down the path of their own products. They went away from their services organization that used to be more like IBM, that would offer lots of different offerings and very much, it was HP Invent. Well, if we didn't invent it, you're not getting it from us. So Dell, we'll see, as you said, the ecosystems are definitely forming, converging and going in lots of different directions. >> But your position is, Hey, we're here, we're here to help. >> Yeah, we're here. We have customers, one of the best proof points I have is the solution that we have with Amazon. Amazon doesn't do the engineering work to make us a native offering if they didn't have the customer demand because Amazon's driven off of data. So they came to us, they worked with us. It's a lot of work to be able to make that happen, but you want to make it frictionless for customers so that they can adopt that. That's a long path. >> All right, so evening event, there's a customer event this evening upstairs in the lobby. Microsoft is having a little shin dig, and then serves a lot of customer dinners going on. So Stu, we'll see you out there tonight. >> All right, thanks you. >> Were watching a brewing somewhere. >> Keynotes tomorrow, a lot of good sessions and enablement, and yeah, it's great to be in person to be able to bump some people, meet some people and, Hey, I'm still a year and a half in still meeting a lot of my peers in person for the first time. >> Yeah, and that's kind of weird, isn't it? Imagine. And then we kick off tomorrow at 10:00 AM. Actually, Stephanie Chiras is coming on. There she is in the background. She's always a great guest and maybe do a little kickoff and have some fun tomorrow. So this is Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman, Paul Gillin, who's my co-host. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll see you tomorrow. (bright music)

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short attention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman and really excited to welcome to a special Fireside Chat. CUBE Alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were working on this event. When we first started conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of the brand new technologies, things like flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That of course has had a huge impact, help create a category called hyperconverged infrastructure and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure. So Dheeraj, welcome to the Fireside Chat. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years that we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So bringing HCI from hyperconverged to hybrid cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So looking forward to a great discussion here. >> So talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprise has matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers. Hybrid cloud of course is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So hybrid and multicloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future. But give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today and where are we going down the road here? >> Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .NEXT keynote. And the whole idea of, in every recession, we make things smaller. In '91 we said we're going to go away from mainframes into Unix servers. And we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000 when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from Unix servers to Wintel: Windows and Intel, x86 and eventually Linux as well. Again we made things smaller going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008/2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There is nothing in the physical world that actually went lives. But we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in this coming decade, they're going to make it even smaller, not just in space which is size with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time. So space and time, we're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and a one-year term as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and CapEx. So I think as you make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for as consumers, we have short retention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we know we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl. Like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back in '95 and 2005. Then we have to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers, of consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds. There is a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI, hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression over time. There was a phenomenal Atlantic article. I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post-World War II and projected things out. We're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion. If you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking to Amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone or things that they have. But absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Dheeraj, talk about these changes? We had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions in serverless. Those are tools. But at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how as a leader do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? >> Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take? What's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords, because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years. But there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI. And a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's a culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure, because now you're doing shorter, smaller things. You've got a more agile, you'll have more velocity. Gone are the days of waterfall where you're doing yearly planning and pre-year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect, and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley. And we got to really go and use this more outside the Valley as well in every company out there. Whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company that are outside the U.S. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand, and this is about the why before the how and the what. We quickly jump to the what: containers and functions and databases, servers, and AI, and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors, Simon Sinek and how he thinks about most companies just focusing on the what, while very few actually start with why, then the how, then the what itself. And product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me, that's leadership. When you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result, but start with the why, then the how, then the what. >> Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was, hyperconverge, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job. And we'd always go and say, "Look, no, no, no. We're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that. Helping build new parts of the business. Those things that you can do." It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And Dheeraj, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots and lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people, how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? >> Yeah, I think, as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctor's community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we're talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean if you think about the last 20 years of what had happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean it's 200% growth when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features. Healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden is coming for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kind of black swan moments that really changed the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this. But I feel like we are going to be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because there's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things. But I know it's going to directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where it just become seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it. Speed is going to be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. >> Dheeraj, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast. Higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that, despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, Dheeraj, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace, the large tech players really have emerged in winter so far in 2020. I can't help, but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever, Amazon, Google, all ended up in front of Congress to talk about if they've gotten too big. You've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. They are potentially a threat but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on big tech? >> Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the '90s, Amazon, not Amazon, IBM was big, and Microsoft was big, and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because the consumer effect that they've had as well, I mean. And I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with the partnerships. Like in Amazon and Azure, we're saying look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is, rather than force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-size smaller clouds to where the customer is, where the customer's machines are, where the customers people are, where the customers data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time, we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S, I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty, we're talking about data gravity, we're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics, and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. >> Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Dheeraj, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt the government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft on the other hand might've had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at that and chore felt. The last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to, but you will assess and do new data. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the, bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned black swan that seem to head you brought to one of the European .NEXT shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspiration from, any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending to the audience? >> Yeah, I look at adjacencies, obviously Simon has been great. He was .NEXT, talked about the Infinite Game. And we'll talk about the Infinite Game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brene Brown was been very close to Nutanix. I was just looking at her latest podcast, and she was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Sonnenschein, and it's a fascinating read and a great listen, by the way, I think for worth an hour, talking about scrappiness, and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession, as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brene does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. I'd a love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families, with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with CUBE, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy? And celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness, more so than AI always need more. I think I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. >> John Farinacci talk many times that founder, startup, that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward, overcome obstacles. So Dheeraj, do you tee it up? It sounds like is the next step for you. There's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit, 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future? >> Yeah, it's probably one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go, because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to rethink about what's next for the company and then what's next for me? And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point, this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft, and there's going to be buton zone and you will then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company is built for bigger, better things. And maybe you're built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young. Our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him you're born free. I mean, the word born free which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me, as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal really well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime, the business model transition I speak of. Really three years, I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years. But I think I would not replaced it for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, we need the conviction, knowing what's right, because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement, all this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's a king to change the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal ride last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this, and I figured it's a good time to say figure out a way to let go of this, and think of what's bigger better for Nutanix. And going from zero to a billion six in annual billings, and looking at billion six to 3 billion to four to five, I think it'd be great &to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced to be a part of. So looking forward to make sure that baton doesn't fall, redefine what good to great looks like, both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company, Nutanix, was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I would love to go and read and write more about. >> Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think that there are certain things everybody of course will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself, and really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have and you hit it up a little bit when you talked about developers. Take off your Nutanix hat for a second here, now what do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Yes, we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people, we need more diversity. But there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity, but what do you see and any advice areas that you think are critical for success in the future? >> Yeah, I mean, you hit up on something that I have had a passion for, probably more late in this world, more so than conspicuous, and and you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community: the black developer, the woman developer. The idea of, I mean, we've two girls, they're twins. I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did. Get, embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science. Go solve really hard problems. And we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, you know, they are the maker. And they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them, and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such. But those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix. I think it has been a mind-boggling experience, thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life of, the month in the life of, and thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs at them: productivity, offshoring, remote work, over the zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up. And all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer in rather than developer out. That's really been some of the things that have been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure at many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. >> Well, Dheeraj, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in theCUBE community, almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition. And absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. >> Thank you. And again, a big fan of the tremor rate of John, Dave, and you. Always learn so much from you, folks. Looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us at theCUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats, and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.

>> Hello everyone. On today's panel, the theme is Drug Discovery and how Artificial Intelligence can make a difference. On the panel today, we are honored to have Dr. Ryan Yates, principal scientist at The National Center for Natural Products Research, with a focus on botanicals specifically the pharmacokinetics, which is essentially how the drug changes over time in our body and pharmacodynamics which is essentially how drugs affects our body. And of particular interest to him is the use of AI in preclinical screening models to identify chemical combinations that can target chronic inflammatory processes such as fatty liver disease, cognitive impairment and aging. Welcome, Ryan. Thank you for coming. >> Good morning. Thank you for having me. >> The other distinguished panelist is Dr. Rangan Sukumar, our very own, is a distinguished technologist at the CTO office for High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence with a PHD in AI and 70 publications that can be applied in drug discovery, autonomous vehicles and social network analysis. Hey Rangan, welcome. Thank you for coming, by sparing the time. We have also our distinguished Chris Davidson. He is leader of our HPC and AI Application and Performance Engineering team. His job is to tune and benchmark applications, particularly in the applications of weather, energy, financial services and life sciences. Yes so particular interest is life sciences he spent 10 years in biotech and medical diagnostics. Hi Chris, welcome. Thank you for coming. >> Nice to see you. >> Well let's start with your Chris, yes, you're regularly interfaced with pharmaceutical companies and worked also on the COVID-19 White House Consortium. You know tell us, let's kick this off and tell us a little bit about your engagement in the drug discovery process. >> Right and that's a good question I think really setting the framework for what we're talking about here is to understand what is the drug discovery process. And that can be kind of broken down into I would say four different areas, there's the research and development space, the preclinical studies space, clinical trial and regulatory review. And if you're lucky, hopefully approval. Traditionally this is a slow arduous process it costs a lot of money and there's a high amount of error. Right, however this process by its very nature is highly iterate and has just huge amounts of data, right it's very data intensive, right and it's these characteristics that make this process a great target for kind of new approaches in different ways of doing things. Right, so for the sake of discussion, right, go ahead. >> Oh yes, so you mentioned data intensive brings to mind Artificial Intelligence, you know, so Artificial Intelligence making the difference here in this process, is that so? >> Right, and some of those novel approaches are actually based on Artificial Intelligence whether it's deep learning and machine learning, et cetera, you know, prime example would say, let's just say for the sake of discussion, let's say there's a brand new virus, causes flu-like symptoms, shall not be named if we focus kind of on the R and D phase, right our goal is really to identify target for the treatment and then screen compounds against it see which, you know, which ones we take forward right to this end, technologies like cryo-electron, cryogenic electron microscopy, just a form of microscopy can provide us a near atomic biomolecular map of the samples that we're studying, right whether that's a virus, a microbe, the cell that it's attaching to and so on, right AI, for instance, has been used in the particle picking aspect of this process. When you take all these images, you know, there are only certain particles that we want to take and study, right whether they have good resolution or not whether it's in the field of the frame and image recognition is a huge part of this, it's massive amounts of data in AI can be very easily, you know, used to approach that. Right, so with docking, you can take the biomolecular maps that you achieved from cryo-electron microscopy and you can take those and input that into the docking application and then run multiple iterations to figure out which will give you the best fit. AI again, right, this is iterative process it's extremely data intensive, it's an easy way to just apply AI and get that best fit doing something in a very, you know, analog manner that would just take humans very long time to do or traditional computing a very long time to do. >> Oh, Ryan, Ryan, you work at the NCNPR, you know, very exciting, you know after all, you know, at some point in history just about all drugs were from natural products yeah, so it's great to have you here today. Please tell us a little bit about your work with the pharmaceutical companies, especially when it is often that drug cocktails or what they call Polypharmacology, is the answer to complete drug therapy. Please tell us a bit more with your work there. >> Yeah thank you again for having me here this morning Dr. Goh, it's a pleasure to be here and as you said, I'm from the National Center for Natural Products Research you'll hear me refer to it as the NCNPR here in Oxford, Mississippi on the Ole Miss Campus, beautiful setting here in the South and so, what, as you said historically, what the drug discovery process has been, and it's really not a drug discovery process is really a therapy process, traditional medicine is we've looked at natural products from medicinal plants okay, in these extracts and so where I'd like to begin is really sort of talking about the assets that we have here at the NCNPR one of those prime assets, unique assets is our medicinal plant repository which comprises approximately 15,000 different medicinal plants. And what that allows us to do, right is to screen mine, that repository for activities so whether you have a disease of interest or whether you have a target of interest then you can use this medicinal plant repository to look for actives, in this case active plants. It's really important in today's environment of drug discovery to really understand what are the actives in these different medicinal plants which leads me to the second unique asset here at the NCNPR and that is our what I'll call a plant deconstruction laboratory so without going into great detail, but what that allows us to do is through a how to put workstation, right, is to facilitate rapid isolation and identification of phytochemicals in these different medicinal plants right, and so things that have historically taken us weeks and sometimes months, think acetylsalicylic acid from salicylic acid as a pain reliever in the willow bark or Taxol, right as an anti-cancer drug, right now we can do that with this system on the matter of days or weeks so now we're talking about activity from a plant and extract down to phytochemical characterization on a timescale, which starts to make sense in modern drug discovery, alright and so now if you look at these phytochemicals, right, and you ask yourself, well sort of who is interested in that and why, right what are traditional pharmaceutical companies, right which I've been working with for 20, over 25 years now, right, typically uses these natural products where historically has used these natural products as starting points for new drugs. Right, so in other words, take this phytochemical and make chemicals synthetic modifications in order to achieve a potential drug. But in the context of natural products, unlike the pharmaceutical realm, there is often times a big knowledge gap between a disease and a plant in other words I have a plant that has activity, but how to connect those dots has been really laborious time consuming so it took us probably 50 years to go from salicylic acid and willow bark to synthesize acetylsalicylic acid or aspirin it just doesn't work in today's environment. So casting about trying to figure out how we expedite that process that's when about four years ago, I read a really fascinating article in the Los Angeles Times about my colleague and business partner, Dr. Rangan Sukumar, describing all the interesting things that he was doing in the area of Artificial Intelligence. And one of my favorite parts of this story is basically, unannounced, I arrived at his doorstep in Oak Ridge, he was working Oak Ridge National Labs at the time, and I introduced myself to him didn't know what was coming, didn't know who I was, right and I said, hey, you don't know me you don't know why I'm here, I said, but let me tell you what I want to do with your system, right and so that kicked off a very fruitful collaboration and friendship over the last four years using Artificial Intelligence and it's culminated most recently in our COVID-19 project collaborative research between the NCNPR and HP in this case. >> From what I can understand also as Chris has mentioned highly iterative, especially with these combination mixture of chemicals right, in plants that could affect a disease. We need to put in effort to figure out what are the active components in that, that affects it yeah, the combination and given the layman's way of understanding it you know and therefore iterative and highly data intensive. And I can see why Rangan can play a huge significant role here, Rangan, thank you for joining us So it's just a nice segue to bring you in here, you know, given your work with Ryan over so many years now, tell I think I'm also quite interested in knowing a little about how it developed the first time you met and the process and the things you all work together on that culminated into the progress at the advanced level today. Please tell us a little bit about that history and also the current work. Rangan. >> So, Ryan, like he mentioned, walked into my office about four years ago and he was like hey, I'm working on this Omega-3 fatty acid, what can your system tell me about this Omega-3 fatty acid and I didn't even know how to spell Omega-3 fatty acids that's the disconnect between the technologist and the pharmacologist, they have terms of their own right since then we've come a long way I think I understand his terminologies now and he understands that I throw words like knowledge graphs and page rank and then all kinds of weird stuff that he's probably never heard in his life before right, so it's been on my mind off to different domains and terminologies in trying to accept each other's expertise in trying to work together on a collaborative project. I think the core of what Ryan's work and collaboration has led me to understanding is what happens with the drug discovery process, right so when we think about the discovery itself, we're looking at companies that are trying to accelerate the process to market, right an average drug is taking 12 years to get to market the process that Chris just mentioned, Right and so companies are trying to adopt what's called the in silico simulation techniques and in silico modeling techniques into what was predominantly an in vitro, in silico, in vivo environment, right. And so the in silico techniques could include things like molecular docking, could include Artificial Intelligence, could include other data-driven discovery methods and so forth, and the essential component of all the things that you know the discovery workflows have is the ability to augment human experts to do the best by assisting them with what computers do really really well. So, in terms of what we've done as examples is Ryan walks in and he's asking me a bunch of questions and few that come to mind immediately, the first few are, hey, you are an Artificial Intelligence expert can you sift through a database of molecules the 15,000 compounds that he described to prioritize a few for next lab experiments? So that's question number one. And he's come back into my office and asked me about hey, there's 30 million publications in PubMag and I don't have the time to read everything can you create an Artificial Intelligence system that once I've picked these few molecules will tell me everything about the molecule or everything about the virus, the unknown virus that shows up, right. Just trying to understand what are some ways in which he can augment his expertise, right. And then the third question, I think he described better than I'm going to was how can technology connect these dots. And typically it's not that the answer to a drug discovery problem sits in one database, right he probably has to think about uniproduct protein he has to think about phytochemical, chemical or informatics properties, data and so forth. Then he talked about the phytochemical interaction that's probably in another database. So when he is trying to answer other question and specifically in the context of an unknown virus that showed up in late last year, the question was, hey, do we know what happened in this particular virus compared to all the previous viruses? Do we know of any substructure that was studied or a different disease that's part of this unknown virus and can I use that information to go mine these databases to find out if these interactions can actually be used as a repurpose saying, hook, say this drug does not interact with this subsequence of a known virus that also seems to be part of this new virus, right? So to be able to connect that dot I think the abstraction that we are learning from working with pharma companies is that this drug discovery process is complex, it's iterative, and it's a sequence of needle in the haystack search problems, right and so one day, Ryan would be like, hey, I need to match genome, I need to match protein sequences between two different viruses. Another day it would be like, you know, I need to sift through a database of potential compounds, identified side effects and whatnot other day it could be, hey, I need to design a new molecule that never existed in the world before I'll figure out how to synthesize it later on, but I need a completely new molecule because of patentability reasons, right so it goes through the entire spectrum. And I think where HP has differentiated multiple times even the recent weeks is that the technology infusion into drug discovery, leads to several aha! Moments. And, aha moments typically happened in the other few seconds, and not the hours, days, months that Ryan has to laboriously work through. And what we've learned is pharma researchers love their aha moments and it leads to a sound valid, well founded hypothesis. Isn't that true Ryan? >> Absolutely. Absolutely. >> Yeah, at some point I would like to have a look at your, peak the list of your aha moments, yeah perhaps there's something quite interesting in there for other industries too, but we'll do it at another time. Chris, you know, with your regular work with pharmaceutical companies especially the big pharmas, right, do you see botanicals, coming, being talked about more and more there? >> Yeah, we do, right. Looking at kind of biosimilars and drugs that are already really in existence is kind of an important point and Dr. Yates and Rangan, with your work with databases this is something important to bring up and much of the drug discovery in today's world, isn't from going out and finding a brand new molecule per se. It's really looking at all the different databases, right all the different compounds that already exist and sifting through those, right of course data is mind, and it is gold essentially, right so a lot of companies don't want to share their data. A lot of those botanicals data sets are actually open to the public to use in many cases and people are wanting to have more collaborative efforts around those databases so that's really interesting to kind of see that being picked up more and more. >> Mm, well and Ryan that's where NCNPR hosts much of those datasets, yeah right and it's interesting to me, right you know, you were describing the traditional way of drug discovery where you have a target and a compound, right that can affect that target, very very specific. But from a botanical point of view, you really say for example, I have an extract from a plant that has combination of chemicals and somehow you know, it affects this disease but then you have to reverse engineer what those chemicals are and what the active ones are. Is that very much the issue, the work that has to be put in for botanicals in this area? >> Yes Doctor Goh, you hit it exactly. >> Now I can understand why a highly iterative intensive and data intensive, and perhaps that's why Rangan, you're highly valuable here, right. So tell us about the challenge, right the many to many intersection to try and find what the targets are, right given these botanicals that seem to affect the disease here what methods do you use, right in AI, to help with this? >> Fantastic question, I'm going to go a little bit deeper and speak like Ryan in terminology, but here we go. So with going back to about starting of our conversation right, so let's say we have a database of molecules on one side, and then we've got the database of potential targets in a particular, could be a virus, could be bacteria, could be whatever, a disease target that you've identified, right >> Oh this process so, for example, on a virus, you can have a number of targets on the virus itself some have the spike protein, some have the other proteins on the surface so there are about three different targets and others on a virus itself, yeah so a lot of people focus on the spike protein, right but there are other targets too on that virus, correct? >> That is exactly right. So for example, so the work that we did with Ryan we realized that, you know, COVID-19 protein sequence has an overlap, a significant overlap with previous SARS-CoV-1 virus, not only that, but it overlap with MERS, that's overlapped with some bad coronavirus that was studied before and so forth, right so knowing that and it's actually broken down into multiple and Ryan I'm going to steal your words, non-structural proteins, envelope proteins, S proteins, there's a whole substructure that you can associate an amino acid sequence with, right so on the one hand, you have different targets and again, since we did the work it's 160 different targets even on the COVID-19 mark, right and so you find a match, that we say around 36, 37 million molecules that are potentially synthesizable and try to figure it out which one of those or which few of those is actually going to be mapping to which one of these targets and actually have a mechanism of action that Ryan's looking for, that'll inhibit the symptoms on a human body, right so that's the challenge there. And so I think the techniques that we can unrule go back to how much do we know about the target and how much do we know about the molecule, alright. And if you start off a problem with I don't know anything about the molecule and I don't know anything about the target, you go with the traditional approaches of docking and molecular dynamics simulations and whatnot, right. But then, you've done so much docking before on the same database for different targets, you'll learn some new things about the ligands, the molecules that Ryan's talking about that can predict potential targets. So can you use that information of previous protein interactions or previous binding to known existing targets with some of the structures and so forth to build a model that will capture that essence of what we have learnt from the docking before? And so that's the second level of how do we infuse Artificial Intelligence. The third level, is to say okay, I can do this for a database of molecules, but then what if the protein-protein interactions are all over the literature study for millions of other viruses? How do I connect the dots across different mechanisms of actions too? Right and so this is where the knowledge graph component that Ryan was talking about comes in. So we've put together a database of about 150 billion medical facts from literature that Ryan is able to connect the dots and say okay, I'm starting with this molecule, what interactions do I know about the molecule? Is there a pretty intruding interaction that affects the mechanism of pathway for the symptoms that a disease is causing? And then he can go and figure out which protein and protein in the virus could potentially be working with this drug so that inhibiting certain activities would stop that progression of the disease from happening, right so like I said, your method of options, the options you've got is going to be, how much do you know about the target? How much do you know the drug database that you have and how much information can you leverage from previous research as you go down this pipeline, right so in that sense, I think we mix and match different methods and we've actually found that, you know mixing and matching different methods produces better synergies for people like Ryan. So. >> Well, the synergies I think is really important concept, Rangan, in additivities, synergistic, however you want to catch that. Right. But it goes back to your initial question Dr. Goh, which is this idea of polypharmacology and historically what we've done with traditional medicines there's more than one active, more than one network that's impacted, okay. You remember how I sort of put you on both ends of the spectrum which is the traditional sort of approach where we really don't know much about target ligand interaction to the completely interpretal side of it, right where now we are all, we're focused on is, in a single molecule interacting with a target. And so where I'm going with this is interesting enough, pharma has sort of migrate, started to migrate back toward the middle and what I mean by that, right, is we had these in a concept of polypharmacology, we had this idea, a regulatory pathway of so-called, fixed drug combinations. Okay, so now you start to see over the last 20 years pharmaceutical companies taking known, approved drugs and putting them in different combinations to impact different diseases. Okay. And so I think there's a really unique opportunity here for Artificial Intelligence or as Rangan has taught me, Augmented Intelligence, right to give you insight into how to combine those approved drugs to come up with unique indications. So is that patentability right, getting back to right how is it that it becomes commercially viable for entities like pharmaceutical companies but I think at the end of the day what's most interesting to me is sort of that, almost movement back toward that complex mixture of fixed drug combination as opposed to single drug entity, single target approach. I think that opens up some really neat avenues for us. As far as the expansion, the applicability of Artificial Intelligence is I'd like to talk to, briefly about one other aspect, right so what Rang and I have talked about is how do we take this concept of an active phytochemical and work backwards. In other words, let's say you identify a phytochemical from an in silico screening process, right, which was done for COVID-19 one of the first publications out of a group, Dr. Jeremy Smith's group at Oak Ridge National Lab, right, identified a natural product as one of the interesting actives, right and so it raises the question to our botanical guy, says, okay, where in nature do we find that phytochemical? What plants do I go after to try and source botanical drugs to achieve that particular end point right? And so, what Rangan's system allows us to do is to say, okay, let's take this phytochemical in this case, a phytochemical flavanone called eriodictyol and say, where else in nature is this found, right that's a trivial question for an Artificial Intelligence system. But for a guy like me left to my own devices without AI, I spend weeks combing the literature. >> Wow. So, this is brilliant I've learned something here today, right, If you find a chemical that actually, you know, affects and addresses a disease, right you can actually try and go the reverse way to figure out what botanicals can give you those chemicals as opposed to trying to synthesize them. >> Well, there's that and there's the other, I'm going to steal Rangan's thunder here, right he always teach me, Ryan, don't forget everything we talk about has properties, plants have properties, chemicals have properties, et cetera it's really understanding those properties and using those properties to make those connections, those edges, those sort of interfaces, right. And so, yes, we can take something like an eriodictyol right, that example I gave before and say, okay, now, based upon the properties of eriodictyol, tell me other phytochemicals, other flavonoid in this case, such as that phytochemical class of eriodictyols part right, now tell me how, what other phytochemicals match that profile, have the same properties. It might be more economically viable, right in other words, this particular phytochemical is found in a unique Himalayan plant that I've never been able to source, but can we find something similar or same thing growing in, you know a bush found all throughout the Southeast for example, like. >> Wow. So, Chris, on the pharmaceutical companies, right are they looking at this approach of getting, building drugs yeah, developing drugs? >> Yeah, absolutely Dr. Goh, really what Dr. Yates is talking about, right it doesn't help us if we find a plant and that plant lives on one mountain only on the North side in the Himalayas, we're never going to be able to create enough of a drug to manufacture and to provide to the masses, right assuming that the disease is widespread or affects a large enough portion of the population, right so understanding, you know, not only where is that botanical or that compound but understanding the chemical nature of the chemical interaction and the physics of it as well where which aspect affects the binding site, which aspect of the compound actually does the work, if you will and then being able to make that at scale, right. If you go to these pharmaceutical companies today, many of them look like breweries to be honest with you, it's large scale, it's large back everybody's clean room and it's, they're making the microbes do the work for them or they have these, you know, unique processes, right. So. >> So they're not brewing beer okay, but drugs instead. (Christopher laughs) >> Not quite, although there are pharmaceutical companies out there that have had a foray into the brewery business and vice versa, so. >> We should, we should visit one of those, yeah (chuckles) Right, so what's next, right? So you've described to us the process and how you develop your relationship with Dr. Yates Ryan over the years right, five years, was it? And culminating in today's, the many to many fast screening methods, yeah what would you think would be the next exciting things you would do other than letting me peek at your aha moments, right what would you say are the next exciting steps you're hoping to take? >> Thinking long term, again this is where Ryan and I are working on this long-term project about, we don't know enough about botanicals as much as we know about the synthetic molecules, right and so this is a story that's inspired from Simon Sinek's "Infinite Game" book, trying to figure it out if human population has to survive for a long time which we've done so far with natural products we are going to need natural products, right. So what can we do to help organizations like NCNPR to stage genomes of natural products to stage and understand the evolution as we go to understand the evolution to map the drugs and so forth. So the vision is huge, right so it's not something that we want to do on a one off project and go away but in the process, just like you are learning today, Dr. Goh I'm going to be learning quite a bit, having fun with life. So, Ryan what do you think? >> Ryan, we're learning from you. >> So my paternal grandfather lived to be 104 years of age. I've got a few years to get there, but back to "The Infinite Game" concept that Rang had mentioned he and I discussed that quite frequently, I'd like to throw out a vision for you that's well beyond that sort of time horizon that we have as humans, right and that's this right, is our current strategy and it's understandable is really treatment centric. In other words, we have a disease we develop a treatment for that disease. But we all recognize, whether you're a healthcare practitioner, whether you're a scientist, whether you're a business person, right or whatever occupation you realize that prevention, right the old ounce, prevention worth a pound of cure, right is how can we use something like Artificial Intelligence to develop preventive sorts of strategies that we are able to predict with time, right that's why we don't have preventive treatment approach right, we can't do a traditional clinical trial and say, did we prevent type two diabetes in an 18 year old? Well, we can't do that on a timescale that is reasonable, okay. And then the other part of that is why focus on botanicals? Is because, for the most part and there are exceptions I want to be very clear, I don't want to paint the picture that botanicals are all safe, you should just take botanicals dietary supplements and you'll be safe, right there are exceptions, but for the most part botanicals, natural products are in fact safe and have undergone testing, human testing for thousands of years, right. So how do we connect those dots? A preventive strategy with existing extent botanicals to really develop a healthcare system that becomes preventive centric as opposed to treatment centric. If I could wave a magic wand, that's the vision that I would figure out how we could achieve, right and I do think with guys like Rangan and Chris and folks like yourself, Eng Lim, that that's possible. Maybe it's in my lifetime I got 50 years to go to get to my grandfather's age, but you never know, right? >> You bring really, up two really good points there Ryan, it's really a systems approach, right understanding that things aren't just linear, right? And as you go through it, there's no impact to anything else, right taking that systems approach to understand every aspect of how things are being impacted. And then number two was really kind of the downstream, really we've been discussing the drug discovery process a lot and kind of the kind of preclinical in vitro studies and in vivo models, but once you get to the clinical trial there are many drugs that just fail, just fail miserably and the botanicals, right known to be safe, right, in many instances you can have a much higher success rate and that would be really interesting to see, you know, more of at least growing in the market. >> Well, these are very visionary statements from each of you, especially Dr. Yates, right, prevention better than cure, right, being proactive better than being reactive. Reactive is important, but we also need to focus on being proactive. Yes. Well, thank you very much, right this has been a brilliant panel with brilliant panelists, Dr. Ryan Yates, Dr. Rangan Sukumar and Chris Davidson. Thank you very much for joining us on this panel and highly illuminating conversation. Yeah. All for the future of drug discovery, that includes botanicals. Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Nutants. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broadening, enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Nutant forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of the Global .NEXT digital experience. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT global digital experience. We've been at the Nutanix shows since the first time they ever happened, way back at the Fontainebleau, in Miami, of course. Nutanix is now a public company. A lot of news, a lot going on, and the first time they've done, first, a global event and digital event because this was the convergence of the events that they were originally going to have both in North America as well as Europe. So happy to welcome back to the program. To help kick it off, first of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nutanix. And also joining us is Virginia Gambale, she is a Managing Partner at Azimuth Partners LLC and also a board member of Nutanix. Virginia, Monica, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> So the event here, of course, the line we've used at many of those shows is, how do we bring people together even while we're apart? Good energy, great speakers, everything from Dr. Condoleezza Rice and Simon Sinek, in the opening, in Trevor Noah for some entertainment in day two, and lots of announcements with partners, customers, of course, speaking, and lots of the Newtons. So, Monica, maybe I start with you. You've had a very a close role in helping to shape a lot of what's going on here. I kind of teed up. Give us, from your standpoint, really, kind of the goals, give us a little bit of insight into putting this together for an online audience versus the kind of party that we have for the users when they come together in-person. >> Yeah, thank you so much, Stu. And I'm so excited to have Virginia here with us as well. You know, obviously, the world is so different now. And one of the biggest things that we've been doing for the last six, seven months is figuring out how do we stay connected with our customers, with our partners, with our own employees, and society at large? So, along the same lines, .NEXT has evolved to, of course, also being a virtual event, but at the same time, the biggest design factor for .NEXT is really the connection with customers, partners, our own employees, and influencers, and society at large. So you'll see a lot of our agenda is designed around future of work and what does it mean to be a leader and a technology leader, a technology provider in this world while we are living through the pandemic. We're also talking about future of education, future of healthcare, future financial services, all the things that matter to us as human beings, and then what's the role that technology is going to play in that, and, of course, how can Nutanix as a technology vendor help our customers navigate these uncertain times. So that's how most of our content is on day-one. And then day-two is really all about the latest and greatest cool tech. And you're going to hear a lot about and you've heard a lot about cloud technology and cloud being that constant enabler of innovation for businesses and for IT. So all of our hybrid cloud, multicloud, our core hyperconverged infrastructure, and how that's evolving to hybrid cloud infrastructure, it's about platform as a service, DevOps, I mean, database solutions, and these are competing solutions, you name it. So that's going to be at day-two. And then day-three is a partner exchange. So, obviously, partners are really important to us. That's the village, the ecosystem. And we have a whole day dedicated to our partners in helping understand how can we together bring the best solutions to market. >> Virginia, I'd love to get your experience so far with the event that you've attended. >> Well, I always find that .NEXT experiences a very broad and enriching experience. I tell people who have never heard of cloud, who are well in the cloud, who are wanting to just learn about it, just sort of standing at the precipice of embarking on this journey, to watch or participate or go to the .NEXT for Nutanix, because it is so rich with content and speakers that are so intelligent about an experience about what they are doing and embarking on. And then in addition to that, there's always a hint and a lookout at the future and where we are going and where we need to think about where we are going. So I am very excited. The first part of this virtual .NEXT, I didn't know what to expect, but I am extremely pleased. >> Well, yeah, Virginia, you bring up a really good point. It's not just the cool technology, and there's lots of that, but what, personally, how do I enrich myself, how do I reach my career, how do enrich my community, that heart that Nutanix talks a lot about. Monica, obviously cloud has been a very important piece of the discussion. I noticed a little bit of shift in marketing. For a couple of years, the enterprise cloud was the discussion. Dheeraj's teams is out, he said, "Okay, we're going to change HCI from hyperconverged infrastructure to hybrid cloud infrastructure." You and I had had a conversation when the announcement of Nutanix Clusters with AWS, and at the show, Scott Guthrie, of course, wearing the signature red polo, and deeper partnership with Microsoft for Azure. Definitely, lots of excitement around that because Microsoft is a company that most people partner with and work with and use their technologies. And things like Azure Arc have the real promise to help us live in this hybrid and multicloud world. So we'd love to just briefly touch on the cloud pieces, what you're seeing in the news from Nutanix's standpoint? >> Absolutely. So one of the big pieces of news that's come out of .NEXT is a partnership with Azure, and we are super-excited for that partnership. Not only is Nutanix Clusters going to be available on Azure and we are jointly developing that solution to bring hybrid cloud solution to customers, you rightfully mentioned Azure Arc, we are also working to integrate Azure Arc across on-premises and Azure cloud. So, ultimately, for us, it's really about technology being a means to an end. The end is business outcomes for our customers, the end is a better customer experience, better employee experience, growth for the company in terms of revenue and profitability. And ultimately, that's what technology is doing, is really simplifying the use of cloud technology and build that hybrid cloud fabric that customers can deploy very quickly, very easily, seamlessly, and then manage it very easily, oh, and by the way, also be able to move their apps and data and license across the on-premises and, in this case, Azure environment. So very excited. By the way, we don't just stop there. When you say cloud, and when we say hybrid cloud and multicloud, it's, of course, on-premises, it's, of course, the hyperscaler clouds, but then there are service provider clouds. Because in region, and then, by the way, I don't know if you heard Khaled Soudani, he's the CTO at SocGen, he joined us as well in one of the keynotes, and obviously, they are building hybrid clouds. And when we talk about hybrid cloud to customers, it's also service provider cloud, which could be for data locality, data residency regions. It's also Nutanix's own cloud, the Nutanix cloud. So that's definitely one of the big pieces of news coming out of .NEXT, is this morphing or I would say evolution of hyperconverged infrastructure to becoming the hybrid cloud infrastructure. >> Virginia, of course, the big discussion this year has been the impact of COVID and what that's meant to IT priorities, CIO priorities. In a lot of the conversations we've been having on theCUBE this year, there's been a real acceleration on a lot of those cloud initiatives that Monica was talking about. So what are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are some of those imperatives that are either accelerating or, and are there some things that people are saying, "Hey, we might want to put this on ice for a few months?" >> Well, I can tell you, from my work with clients, the many public boards that I sit on, which span from financial services, to pure tech, all the way through to consumer-facing businesses, I really see the spectrum. And three years ago, when I was on theCUBE, we were talking about standing at the precipice and jumping in. Now, we are full on, we are in it. And Monica talked about all these different public clouds and the various providers who are leading their own way. But what I love and I think it's really important is that we need an independent company that actually begins to step back and help all the leaders that are running technology and operations and customer-facing functions, to be able to help them do their job. So here we are today, talking to various CEOs and C-suite executives. And the big issues are, "Okay, this stuff isn't so scary, we are in it, we need it for being able to function in the COVID world, and we also need it because our customers need us to need this, to have it." So, when we look at our portfolio of how businesses are investing in technology and other areas going forward, innovation, cost management, and also cyber seemed to be sort of the three very important themes of the day. And I believe that, today, as we sit through the next few days with .NEXT, we are really going to find stories, experiences, and visions about how we can actually address all three of those. >> Yeah, I think the point, Virginia, you're making is so fantastic, that this is the age of innovation while organizations also have to focus on cost intelligence. And that's the number one thing we're hearing from our customers. I mean, like when you were talking, it just reminded me, in the old days and maybe even up to five years ago, and the CIOs were all about knowing technology knowhow and managing costs, and like it was a cost center. But now you look at IT, IT is at the forefront of driving innovation. IT is at the forefront of adopting cloud. But at the same time, IT is also tasked with being smart about cost optimization. So you're right, that's exactly what we're also going to discuss the .NEXT, is how can technology help our customers innovate and, at the same time, be intelligent about cost optimization and which cloud to use for which workloads, for example. >> Yes, and also having the flexibility and the optionality to be able to put these things together. >> Well, yeah, Monica, simplicity was always at the core of what Nutanix did. And talking about the hybrid cloud solutions, it's very important you talk about the fact that it's the same operational model wherever things lived. The one piece that you didn't cover yet, that Virginia teed up, cyber security. So, absolutely, we would need innovation, we need to look at costs, but security is something that went from, it was already at the top of the list, to, oh, my gosh, in 2020, it feels like it's even higher there. So how does Nutanix make sure that, Nutanix along with your partners are making sure that companies, their data, their employees are all secure as possible? >> Absolutely. You mentioned that simplicity is a design principle for Nutanix from day-one, add to that security, security has been a guiding light from day-one, and security is built into our platform. It's not an afterthought, it's something we designed our products to incorporate right from the beginning. And there's a reason for that. The reason is we have over 17,000 customers, and a lot of them are running big, huge enterprise business critical workloads on Nutanix, including public sector, including state and local governments. And we have to ensure that they are able to make the environment secure using Nutanix technology. So whether it's our core technology platform, where we have things built in like data encryption, audit capabilities, or whether it's some of our new portfolio products. Last time, I think, Stu, we talked about how Nutanix offers now this complete cloud platform. 10 years ago, we started with a core foundation, which is hyperconverged infrastructure. But in the last few years, we've added on data center services, like other storage, different types of storage, consolidation, ability for customers, networking options, DR, we've added DevOps and database services, we've added desktop services. If you combine all of those three together with our digital infrastructure services, that's a complete cloud platform that has to be secure for our customers to run enterprise apps on databases, analytics workloads, and also build cloud native applications and run on it, and be able to run the same stack in a public cloud or private on-premises cloud. That has to be secure, so that's the number one design principle for Nutanix. >> Virginia, if Dave Alante was here, he would probably throw out the line that security has really become a board-level discussion. Well, you sit on a few boards, so I'd love to hear a little bit of your insights there as to the security that Monica talked about. Is this something that comes up at every board meeting? What kind of concerns are there out there today? >> Well, Stu, there is no question, it historically has come up at every board meeting. And one of the issues with that has always been the cost growth and escalation that takes place, and can we keep throwing more dollars at securing our environment. Fast-forward, look where we are today. We are highly dispersed workforce. So our attack surface has increased exponentially. And when we think about all the products that we're using, from virtual desktop and functioning from wherever we are in this world, how can that not help, but in the mind of a board director who doesn't know too much about technology, it would frighten them even more. However, the thing that I constantly always underscore is the sooner we move to these more modernized infrastructures, the better our ability will be to secure our environment at a very cost-efficient model. Because these technologies, particularly like Nutanix, have security built into them. And instead of having to add constantly to our cyber workforce, who's going to be looking at and parsing through information, we are able to have these embedded sensors and our ability to have the infrastructure talk to us about where our vulnerabilities are, as opposed to us having to go in and try to figure that out either post event or at some point pre any type of event. So it's very exciting time. I really encourage people to just get off our legacy environments as fast as we can and go to these modernized technology infrastructures and to the vendors who make this invisible to us. And I think the board members start to then say, "Okay, I can begin to understand that." I often give an example of if you're building a smart house versus you buy an old house and you're trying to put cameras on the side and sensors in the windows and in the doors, you can't possibly be as effective in your security as if you built it from the ground up to be secure. >> Yeah, definitely, it is challenging to retrofit that. Modernization is definitely a drum beat we've seen. Monica, a question for you on that theme is, in many ways, the current economic situation is a challenge, but it's also a forcing function. If I can need to keep up, if I need my employees to stay productive, I often need to rapidly adapt some modern solutions like Virginia was saying. Any words on that from what you're hearing from your customers and how Nutanix is helping? >> Absolutely. As I said earlier, I think the more IT leaders we talk to, it's become clear to us that there's three major mandates for IT that they are supporting. It's business growth, it's customer experience, and it's employee experience. So, in terms of modernization, absolutely, we find that IT stakeholders are very keen to go on a journey, which kind of looks like this, and again, it may not be the same for everybody, but starting with data center modernization or what we call infrastructure modernization. So really standardizing and consolidating all the key workloads so they can most efficiently use the data center assets. But then the next step very quickly becomes automation. And I think that's what Virginia was alluding to earlier, is we can no longer throw more and more people at things like security and provisioning and patching and updating and expect us to deliver the service-level agreements we have with business. So automation becomes really key. And, of course, with AI and machine learning, there's a lot of solutions out there around automation, and Nutanix is obviously big in terms of automating. Our one-click upgrades are legendary. That's even before people talked about AI and machine learning, we've been offering them. But then the next step becomes, very quickly, is, okay, great, I've automated everything, IT has become a service, my stakeholders are, I'm able to deliver the service-level agreements, well, what's next? How do I get the flexibility to on-demand spin up environments? And I think that's where the linkage with public cloud comes in, that's where customers are starting to build hybrid cloud. And then the ultimate nirvana that we're hearing from many customers is, they want to be able to use the right cloud for the right workload. A lot of our customers don't want to be stuck, and I'm using the word stuck kind of loosely, but just not with one public cloud. Just like our customers use a lot of different hardware providers in some cases, they also want to have the optionality of using an Azure for one workload, maybe an AWS for something else, maybe it's on-premises for something else, maybe it's a service provider for something else, and that's the ultimate nirvana for IT. So that would be the ultimate modernization, is where you have this kind of like an infinite computing solution, where you can go tap into any resource you need at the point in time that you need it for and be able to pay the right price for that and have a single management across everything. So you don't have to worry about the complexity of managing for environments, it's all done through one single plane, and that's where Nutanix comes in. Really, that's what we are doing, is making it really easy for our customers to reach from this infrastructure modernization, all the way to this hybrid multicloud world, with a single, unified management plan, the ability to move data, applications, and license around as they choose to, and have a cost-optimized solution. >> And let me add to that because I love what Monica is saying. You know, as a corporate fiduciary, I want my partners to do what they do best. So having each cloud provider really continue down the path of the areas that they are best in class in as opposed to wasting their time competing with each other on the same stuff, which doesn't help me evolve as a consumer, and it doesn't help them grow their business. And so, by enabling this kind of hybrid world, we are allowing each of these cloud providers to be able to do what they do best, which helps us invest in our future as consumers. >> All right, so Virginia, talking about fiduciary duties, as a board member, there's a topic that was talked a little bit at the show, but we'd love your feedback. And Monica, I want to hear the company's superior parent. Of course, I'm talking about the founder and CEO, Dheeraj Pandey is, there's a transition, there's a look, looking for the new CEO. If I have the line right, he's he said he will be a Newton forever even though his role will become a little bit more invisible, of course, what Nutanix has been trying to do with infrastructure and clouds before. So, Virginia, what does this mean for today and for the direction of the company? And then Monica, I would love kind of the internal look from an employee standpoint. >> Well, Stu, thank you for asking the question. I actually did a significant post on LinkedIn a couple of days ago because I really wanted to express to the world how blown away I am by our founder, Dheeraj. I've been working with him now over the last three years. And as I have gotten to know him, and I have worked with a lot of founders in my life, and I've worked with a lot of CEOs who were founders and some that were not founders, they were just CEOs and they came in after the fact, and it is rare that you find an individual that is just so focused on driving the mission forward in a very selfless way. And from the very beginning, people who ended up talking to with our CEO over their life's journey with Nutanix over the last 10, 11 years, will say the same exact same thing, which is, his single focus was about the mission and how Nutanix can support and grow the mission of the organization and what the world needs today. And it is rare that an individual will say, at a certain point in time, "I have taken this thing that I have created to a certain point, and now, it is yet at another inflection point, and it needs to continue on in a significant way. So being concerned about every facet, from do I have the right talent, do I have the right offering, do I have the right capital position, do I have the right board, do I have the right person at the helm? And I have spent a lot of time talking with Dheeraj, which is a gift and a pleasure in life, and to be able to have a candid conversation about where is Nutanix going next and how best to get there. And for a CEO to be able to sit down and talk to their board about that, it is really unique. And to have someone who cares so much about the future of the company, I was really blown away. So I'm very excited about our prospects going forward. Otherwise, I would not have joined this board. We all have, our lives are challenged, and life is short, and we want to spend the time doing the things that we believe in and we love and support. So I am very excited for the next chapter. We have built an incredible base. And now we're poised for very significant growth. And I think to underscore that, you saw the performance of the company was extremely good, the partnerships that are coming out, this is exactly the time when you want to, again, self-effacing, disrupting yourself, looking at where we need to go next. The time to do that is not at the point where you are there and you've arrived at that next step, but just as you're about to take off on a launch. And I think we're here. And I'm very excited. >> Yeah, I'll add to that. So, first of all, Virginia, we are so thrilled that you're on the board. As far as Dheeraj goes, I believe he's a force of nature. I think that's what Virginia said. And look, I'm a parent, and for those of you who are parents out there, this will probably resonate. When a child is born, you nurture your child and you take care of them. At some point, they leave for college. And for me, it was a hard one coming from a different culture, but I almost seem this is akin to that. Dheeraj is the founding father of Nutanix. He has really nurtured the company, he's built it up, he's given us all the right culture principles, and now, he's sending us off to call it saying, "Okay, this is the next phase of your life, go do the best you can and take Nutanix to the next level." And I'm really, really proud to be part of this company, I've been here for a year-and-a-half, we have amazing talent, people are important, we have amazing innovations. And, by the way, this new year, we started a fiscal year in August, it's going to be full of amazing innovations. I mean, this is only the beginning, what you've heard in the last two or three weeks, a lot more is coming down. And then there are some process that we've put in place so people process technology, process to actually scale as a larger company. So I think what Dheeraj has done is really set us up for the next phase of our life, and he's always going to be there for us as an advisor just like a parent is there for the child when they're off to college and off to doing other things in life. That's what I believe. >> Well, Monica and Virginia, thank you so much for sharing the updates. theCUBE really appreciates being able to be part of the Nutanix .NEXT event, and great to catch up with both of you. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you for continuing to work with us. Thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more from Nutanix .NEXT digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering LiveWorx 18. Brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody, to the LiveWorx show, hashtag LiveWorx with an "x" at the end. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live-tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host Stu Miniman. Mario Armstrong is here. He's a two-time Emmy winner, contributor to NBC today. He's the creator of the "Never Settle Show". He's an NPR contributor. >> Yep. >> And the host of LiveWorx. >> Yeah! >> Thanks so much coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's a pleasure to see both of you. Good to see you too, Stu. Thanks for having me on the show. >> So yeah, this morning, a lot of action-- >> Yes. >> First of all, I tweeted out, that was like an Olympic opening, I mean-- >> That open was phenomenal. I mean, an LED-lit troop, full LED uniforms on, being acrobatic, what you can't see behind the scenes, by the way, 'cause you think it's kind of like Cirque du Soleil type of thing, with like, tech, but what you don't see are, like, these three other people that are way in the back behind the scenes, going up, scaling up and down like this truss that's like dropping them or raising them. It's just, the performance was phenomenal. >> Yeah, it was really great. And you kicked it off... 6,000 plus people here. >> Yes. >> You said the largest digital transformation conference on the planet, which of course, we were joking. Everybody says their digital-- >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But this really is digital transformation, isn't it? >> It's a lot that's taking place. I mean when you think about manufacturing, smart manufacturing, when you think about how you're trying to accelerate processes and you start looking at where things were like 20 or 30 years ago and how physical things had to be and how you actually had to, like, maybe even work on a thing then leave it, go to another place, report on it, come back to it, tweak it, and so now when you start seeing the merging of AI, VR, and so you're taking the physical and the human, and you're putting these... and the virtual, and you're putting these things together, you're seeing things like what PTC is showing us today. I mean, some of the demonstrations that I saw were absolutely mind blowing in terms of the acceleration of the process that you can actually get things done with how they're merging the different technologies and integrating them together. >> Yes, Stu and I, we're talking earlier, it's hard to get your head around this whole IOT, industrial IOT, there's just so many segments, it's so fragment that, and it's-- >> Yeah. >> It's enormous, it's almost impossible to size, I mean it's trillion dollars, this whole economy of its own. What are your takeaways on just that whole space? >> You know, a lot of what I focus on, too, when I'm doing everything from NBC or NPR and stuff like that is on the consumer impact. So I'm looking at the consumer side but I'm also an entrepreneur, so I'm thinking about what's happening on the business side. And when I see on both ends, you're absolutely right. The field is enormous when you really think about it. Whether you want to look at how we can replace old school manufacturing and how this is going to transfer... That's a whole sector just in it of itself. We haven't even now talked about, you know, AI for children or for (incoherent) or for the health and wellness sector, whole other sector that's looking at IOT and the power of that. I mean, being able to look at.. I was just in one of the other, in the deluxe lounge and I was checking out one of our fun games. It's called Sphero. It's a consumer game, but its a small ball that you control through VR and AR on your phone, but you can actually use the phone to program things in real time to make it respond in real time. So all of these things together, to me, start to paint this large ecosystem because now you have kids that are growing up using devices and using technologies that we're just starting to get our hands on but this is how they're solving problems and thinking about things already. So when this economy and this ecosystem starts to mature, you're going to have a ready-made audience that's already been exposed to 90% of this. >> Well, and Stu I wonder if you could chime into it, it makes me think that these worlds, even though consumer and industrial are so seemingly different, it seems like parts of them, anyway, adjacencies are coming together. >> Absolutely. And there's always going to be that... There's always going to be... Look, when I talk about innovation and whether you look at Dr. Hill, who's speaking here today, Dr. Linda Hill from Harvard and others, when I look at it, she calls it creative abrasion, like the difference between brainstorming and actually utilizing new ideas to create new concepts. I call it hybrid design. Normally, it's taking something that you know exists and then taking two things that don't seem to go together-- that's normally where you find creation. I don't like to say disruption, I like to say creation. >> Yeah, actually there's a good friend of mine that I work with and I worked at EMC, he called it venn diagram innovation. >> Oh, that's it! That's it! >> I take a few things and I put it together and we were talking about the consumer side-- >> Yeah! >> We've looked so many technologies, you get the scale usually from the consumer. When we look at things like flash in all of our devices-- >> That's right. >> Really enabled the enterprise to do things. The VR and AR is something that we've actually got some folks on the team that are heavy gamers that they're the ones that I go to when I want to learn, "Okay, what's the cutting-edge--" >> 'Cause they've already been in it. That's right. >> They're on their Steam, they're doing everything. >> That's right. >> They sort everything out. You leverage a lot of technology in how you really get your message out there. Talk a little about how you think of media these days. >> Oh, it's completely different. I mean, when we're looking at how media is even utilized in these new technologies, you know, our talk show is a talk show that we shoot in Nasdaq Studios, so it's shot in New York City, it's called the "Never Settle Show", it's a weekly one-hour live stream talk show, so we get and appreciate what you have to go through. These guys are pros by the way. (Dave and Stu laugh) Yeah, they're pros 'cause this is not easy to do. >> It's a minor miracle, right? Every time. >> (laughs) It's not easy to do at all. And so a lot of kudos to you and the team behind the scenes that make that happen. >> Thank you. >> With that being said, it's a great time if you have an expertise or if you have content to share especially in a live scenario because now you can start to really utilize other technologies within that. For example, we kind of claim ourselves to be one of the most interactive talk shows out there. What we do in our show is we're using other technologies, bringing them together to create real time conversations. So how that practically plays out is I'll have a guest on the show, we'll be talking, I'll put up a screen of three options and people can vote right then and there while they're watching in stream and you'll see which of what they want me to do next. I'll say something like, "Which thing is most appealing... Which topic do you want us to talk about next?" And they'll actually vote in real time and then the control room in everyone doesn't know what the answer's going to be, but we're all waiting for the answer and then when the popular vote comes out, few seconds later, we scramble and adjust to that. That's real time television, giving viewers what they really want in real time, using different technologies. So that's this hybrid approach. We can be a standard show and just do... talk and have that format, or we could really be looking at things that we could integrate in other technologies that would enhance the viewing experience and make it much more productive. >> Well you're actually affecting the, you call it "creation" as supposed to "disruption" of this new media industry, I mean, you've seen... I saw a stat the other day that cost the New York Times 200 million dollars to run a news desk. (Mario laughs) You're seeing, you know, billionaires buy up, you know, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post-- >> Yes, that's right. >> The industry is transforming in a huge way. You're seeing, you know, Facebook backlash with fake news. What's your senses as to what's going on in the media business? Obviously you're "creating", "disrupting", whatever you like to call it, sure. What do you see is the future of the media business? >> Well, I mean I think it's going to become something where the end reader, the end viewer has more control. Ultimately, that's... the problem with most systems and most structures is when people want to hold the control and not share because whether that's ego, whether they're worried about intellectual property loss, or whether they really think that the market's going to swallow them up.... Now I'm not saying, obviously you give away all your secret sauce, but what I am saying is when you start thinking from that small limiting position, you've already lost the game. And so what I think is going to happen, yes, you have big people buying a lot of media and there's a lot of discussion in politics about whether or not, you know, billionaires buying media are problems and what that's going to mean in terms of the message that's going to be reported to people, that's going to always be an issue, but I think even with that, that's why it's even more empowering that the individuals are taking more control over their own narrative. And that's why I think you've seen social media, Instagram video, Instagram talking about going to sixty minutes in it's video, not just a minute, for publishers, I think the power's now more in the person's hand to really pick and choose and so they vote with their eyeballs, they vote with their engagement, they vote with their interactivity. And so I think no matter what happens on the big end, people are going to be able to create and get the stories that they want to be able to get. >> Well we're big believers of that, Stu, and we're decentralized media and we really believe that there's got to be an incentive system to put the power back in the hands of the users to control their data. >> This is how it works. >> Right? I mean... >> Yeah. And, Mario, so we've talked about the tech and your show "Never Settle" actually won an Emmy for the interactivity nature of it? >> Yeah. It did. >> But talk to the people and passion, how that fits into "Never Settle". >> Yeah, so it's a blending. So what we try to do on our show is blend how you can leverage technology to move forward on your passion. But you can't use technology to move forward on your passion if you don't know what your passion is. So a lot of our discussions really work more around, "how do we get you to think differently"? How do we, you know... our vision for our company is to motivate people across the globe to never settle. How we do that through our mission is that we inspire the humans spirit, we want to teach lessons that matter and we want to uncover new perspectives. What that means, tangibly, is that when you watch our show, you should be having notes. You should be, like... our show is meant for you to want to take notes so that you actually know the process. What people are missing for the most part today is they see how to maybe start something or they see how someone else did and how they succeeded or how they failed, but they don't get the in between, the recipe. And so the more we can be sharing about the process about someone's success or, even better, someone's failure, 'cause that's where you learn more and you get more uncomfortable, makes you more comfortable, it's a blending of those two things of getting your mental position and getting you stronger mentally and building up your resilience so that you can actually go find your purpose, be happier in your life, but then use technology to accelerate. Like, that's the, as Jim put, like, you know, put gasoline and make it fast or make it go quicker. And so I think the blending of the two, again, a hybrid... Even how we approach our content is that. So we'll have everyone from tech luminaries on the show but also we'll just have everyday folks that have really proven success, like these people deserve attention but they're not maybe, quote on quote, big-names. >> And this idea of combinatorial innovation, you certainly heard Jim Heppelmann talking about that today with machines that are powerful and computers that are fast and can do things repetitively and then humans, which are creative. I like that theme. >> You can't do it any other way, I mean, this is why, you know, it's determination and direction. Your team needs to be determined but also have the direction. You need to have what I call the three P's. You need to have your passion in place. Like, what are you ultimately passionate about as a team? As an organization? What are you driving towards? What's your "why"? And then once you have that, then you can start to really push through on the perseverance. You're going to bump your head. You're going to fail fast. A great tech term, I love flipping that tech term because we learn in programming to fail to quick so that we can find the bugs fast and correct our course really quick. So that persistence happens. And then, the hardest part is you got to have some patience. Because then you have to kind of sit back. Let the market also play. Let the universe come around. Sometimes we're ahead. Sometimes we're behind. But we need to have a little bit of that patience to have some reflection to see where we are, so I think, you know, now is really just a great time for a lot of people that are looking to really figure out where they can make their moves... the opportunities that keep creating themselves in IOT are endless. I don't care if you're talking from someone that's a graphic designer all the way up to an engineer or a coder, to marketing and sales, like there's so many different facets of this ecosystem and opportunity now. >> I love that, Mario. Patient, passion, persistence, patience-- >> Yes. >> The three P's kind of start with why, the old-- >> Yeah. Simon Sinek. That's right. >> People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. >> That's right. >> Break stuff. >> (laughs) Love that. Break stuff. >> And don't give up. Don't give up. (Mario laughs) >> No, it's, you know... it's because what we're trying to do, if you really wanted to have action, you want to take complex things and you want to pull them together in a hybrid scenario and start to bang upon them. As opposed to the other idea of planning, planning, planning, planning, you actually want to practice, practice, practice, practice. That's what's going to get you there fast. So I just think that with a lot of the technologies it can be overwhelming to people 'cause they start to hear so much so that's why I say it comes back to, "What's your purpose?" If you can stay focused on why you're doing what it is you're doing, you'll know which technologies to pay more attention to. You'll know where your curiosity should veer more into. You'll study the things that you need to really study. And then you'll accelerate faster because you've identified your niche. It's like having a, you know, an Italian restaurant. You're not just, you know... somebody's going to come by and present to you... Some sales rep is going to come by and present to you, like, beer that's not a fit for like Italian restaurant, you know, like, I know that's not for me instantly. As opposed to being pulled in so many directions, which is what the danger of all this technology can do, is it can overwhelm us and pull us into so many directions that we want to go and pursue the hottest new trend or the hot thing. If we come back to our "why", we're always going to be secure. >> That's a great point, I mean there are an infinite opportunities of purposes in this world. >> Yes. >> It's sometimes hard to get a grasp on things and really focus. But you're seeing some of this successful projects really do start with a main spring and a focus and a purpose. >> Yeah. >> And a mission. >> It does. I mean, that's where it all becomes. I mean, it has to start there in order to get other people on board with your dream, whether you're the leader of the organization or the leader of a project. And, you know, I just feel that for many people, they are at an age where they have been in this business for quite some time. They've seen a lot of things evolve. Accepting change and, like Jim had said today, preparing to change is one of the best keys of information that you can take away because we all have the skill, the talent, the ability, it's just a matter or not, are we willing to adjust or are we... do we want to do status quo. >> Awesome. Hey, you're a clear thinker, articulate, you look great. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> (laughs) Aw man, Dave and Stu, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on theCUBE. >> Our pleasure. >> This has been awesome. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy, we'll be back from LiveWorx with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.

New Orleans Louisiana it that you covering dot next conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix welcome back to the cubes coverage here of Nutanix next 2018 here in New Orleans Louisiana the brass bands are going talking to lots of customers been a great event so far and for Keith Townsend and I'm Stu minimun we always love to be able to talk to customers each one of them has a different story different analysis different challenges they're facing happened to welcome Alex Walker who's the senior vice president of IT at IBC Bank out of Texas thanks so much for joining us thank you alright so you've actually been going to all the shows just like I have at this Keys first one who's been getting getting the inaugural visit here but first of all tell us about yourself a little bit of background what you run at the bank and just give us quick sketch of the bank oh let's start with the bank you know we're in our 51st year we are based in Laredo Texas and it's a community bank mostly and commercial right you know where we are 19th according to Forbes magazine best banks in the country so we went up from 46 to 19 this year Congrats and so great accomplishments for the bank itself it's a great operation we're in 88 cities in the in Texas and Oklahoma and about 13 billion in assets great and what's under your purview as the SPID okay so you an all IT for the bank I'm not this not the development side of it you know without the operations infrastructure yes okay 51 year old company finance going through a lot of changes before we get in to the tech just give us one or two some of those the stresses and strains that you're feeling is business well regulation is one right over the last several years the increasing regulation has caused a tremendous growth in our auditing Keith Kountz rates at Department and a lot of cost to the bank I started about three and a half years ago and the bank was looking at how do we prepare for a change right potentially hoping for some change in them in the regulatory climate and so forth but we needed to prepare for that and prepare for growth so we we need to take a look at our infrastructure of everything across the board yeah maybe could organizationally where does that pension for change come from what kind of air cover do you get from from News exercise what's of the staff underneath you know how do they take change well initially there was a lot of reluctance right people were in the status quo they're comfortable with what they had not necessarily happy with it but taking on change is it's difficult right so we looked at operational costs some of the basic things we had two data centers at the time literally a hundred and fifty yards apart from each other so we said we can do we can do more right the bank's motto is we do more and so we said how do we do more for the bank for their customers improve the quality of the services the uptime and so and and reduce its cost so it's your bank so change in a bank a lot of times means going from one store to reef vendor to another storage or a vendor and that's a big deal big set of conversations you know your your your you know it we are sitting at the 19th best bank and then the fourteenth you don't get there by turning over the table part called the table you your get you get there by being steady what made you guys actually consider something as revolutionary as HCI when it came to change well when we looked at the infrastructure that we had and you know it goes back to simon Sinek start with quiet right why are we doing this I asked I asked the my department when I first started who are our competitors and they gave us the names of all the local banks and so forth and the usual suspects the large banks and I said no they're not that's the bank's customers our competitors are AWS Rackspace Microsoft is your Google Cloud it's the these are the hosting companies we host applications for our customers we're shared services for our bank once we understand who we are then we have to take a different approach because now if we're competing with them it's no wonder that the bank is starting to branch out and do their own thing right some unit I'm getting contracts with the cloud providers or with other service providers because we're too far behind we're not cost-effective we're not competitive so it doesn't mean that we want to build massive data centers everywhere but we need to have the same level of services that they provide so from a validation perspective it you start to look at the cost of hyper-converged in general I'm sorry how long you guys have been a new tennis customer three years okay so from a cost perspective as you start to look at hyper-converged how did you even begin to compare it to your existing environment well I looked I looked at the the studies that are out there particular there was an IDC study done member on 2015 that said that customers of like size all different types of customers we're getting these these benefits I said wow if I could get those that'd be really cool right so I went to the board I went to my boss the CIO and I said I think we could get this this would be a really good but then again people said we never heard of mechanics what is this our applications aren't certified with Nutanix you know so let's talk about procurements and I said well let's just do a PLC and that's bringing this in and and we'll run VMware on it which is what we were certified at the time our applications and I said let's let's look at this infrastructure this we brought in the PLC but what we did is we took Nutanix and had them talk directly to my accounting the bank's accounting department right we all know we all work for accountants eventually and so we said if we can get them to agree that if we can get these then they're gonna be behind us from the are white and TCO models right so we went through and said what are we paying for this what are we paying for that what's the hyung going rates for this let's get some samples of if we ordered this and replace it we had eleven storage frames from seven different vendors or we couldn't move data around from one storage frame to another because we had over time acquired a lot of different frames and like most places never retired them right and so all that layer of complexity what we did is we said this on this PLC let's test this out okay cut to the chase we we got the we got the numbers we were then three or two 5% of everything that came out in that study and so we bought that that that equipment immediately placed our first order which was 12 notes still want to keep it constrained so one of food in the water but I said this is a technology I'm betting on five years we'll write it off in five years we can get rid of it and move on to the next thing what happened was we were getting so such good wins we actually completed in our five-year model we completed that in roughly around two years because the acceleration based upon the benefits that we got some of the requirements that we had for change within the organization replace all equipment and so forth we were able to to accelerate that not only that we just finished upgrading our D our site which was not part of that five-year plan and just completed that and so within three years we've now are our 97% on Nutanix and we just took delivery of 24 of the Robo nodes which we're going to put out in our branch operations that'll leave us with five servers that are not Nutanix other than our for AIX system yeah Alex can you tell us what what were the key metrics that you were looking at to measure success and you did some TCO studies you actually presented here at the conference what do you recommend to your peers as to how they should be able to evaluate rolling out something like this well for one and a big one was licensing right it's far more efficient what we got for example we got we were able to take our Fibre Channel switches running about quarter of a million plus each and and get rid of those would we when we look at it the bandwidth that that's taken on the servers it's writing data to storage going through this storage controller going into this the sand and coming back that delay was substantial so much so that when we moved all of our databases into Nutanix and eliminated that infrastructure we're running 66% faster than we did on current technology on a conventional architecture did what was the business response on this did it change anything in the business what did the users say well when they'd users Jobs ran far faster than they did before when we went back and said I don't need as many Microsoft sequel licenses as they did before for consolidation fewer cores the tremendous benefits our sequel developed our sequel management team for example it takes far less time to stand up servers do migrations things like that so what's the Delta between the prediction debrief their predicted ROI and the realized our ROI you guys realize your savings much quicker wolves worldwide little surprises well the surprises were we were conservative we didn't include any soft costs those are difficult to we missed it me Steve Kaplan are all are all I got a TCO guy for Nutanix go back and forth on the soft cost don't show weak soft cost show me where I can give the money back to my accountants who we all have to report to correct right yeah so what we found is the fact that we were conservative we were getting much better benefits so again when we look at the servers we bought too many cores right so now I this good problem now I can migrate more systems I did anticipate based upon that spin so the time the technology to the financial benefits the reduction and latency allows you to stop spending money on more cores that you didn't need less latency equals better performance better performance tools more dense newness Lourdes units means less money spent so we we actually shut down one of the data centers and migrated into a single data center and it's we're running somewhere around up third a little bit more than a third of that data center so the electrical expend is down in aggregate roughly around 40% so that's real money okay you mentioned that you're also using Nutanix for disaster recovery tell us what led to that that's a newer solution from Nutanix how that experience go we're using the note annex replication for that and when we our legacy was that some of them were taped and some of it was you know migrating data you know a typical older dr type of situation we're in our testing now and that's a little bit complex because we have to protect that dr site from production but we're mirroring the the systems exactly as they are in production so when you spin it up its life right so we have to build a barrier between those systems so if we take that even then taking that into account we can get it up in hours rather than and when we say hours like a couple of hours rather than the 22 12 to 24 hours that we were before and it's 10 systems not 4 systems so roughly about a hundred servers or so minimally all right Alex look forward a little bit tell us what's on your roadmap what kind of things you're doing and if there's intersections with titanic's there we're looking at VDI for example something that we now that we've reengineering our network as well that we're looking at doing that for branch operations and security right but looking forward into AI and and blockchain and which is going to be very disruptive for financial institutions okay you mentioned blockchain so definitely need to get get your take as to what can you share either personally or from the Bakke standpoint cryptocurrency of course will I and I do pay taxes on it but realistically I'm mining with you know for video carts it's it's not it's really understand from as a chief technologist I'm I really need to understand these things you don't make appendix fluster off on the side I did ask her I could have the old data center and the when we're doing I'm doing that really effectively to better understand that but I think what we're looking at it blockchain is tremendous opportunities for many improvements in security and loss prevention and other types of things within the financial side I'm seeing a lot of big financial institutions that are getting filing for patents on block chains and they're they're bringing it up in their ten cases potentially very disruptive and very expensive and some of them are saying specifically cryptocurrency and blockchain and some of them are saying new you know new competition in the market right so we take that to kind of mean that they're they're thinking about the same things we are so keep a eye on to the future especially when it comes to something like blockchain this relatively inefficient at processing transactions how does that impact your data center strategy you guys just went down from you know huge space reduced electrical power by 40% any considerations around kind of the blood blockchain at a commercial level of use within the bank and how it might impact your strategy we're a conservative bank so would we we're having discussions about what what does that mean right what it were do we think that's might come in and it's very early for us right we've been busy you know the datacenter moves and other types of things too so we're starting to look at that and have some a few conversations about what do we think it it is we're talking to some of our our business partners and say how might we cooperate with you guys to do excuse me to use some of this blockchain technology it's a it's a different way of doing it you know when in the past we might use relational databases like sequel server or something to do something some of this work where distributed ledger might be a far easier better way to do that so it's another tool I like to say that you know video didn't kill the radiostar right yeah there's more type of radio out there than there ever was so this is another tool that we have to look and say well how does this how do we utilize this what with the right technology for the right job and we're being very cautious about that all right well Alex Walker really appreciate you sharing all the updates on IBC Bank pleasure to catch up with you and look forward to seeing you more than ten echoes in the future for Keith Townsend Thomas do minimun more coverage here at Nutanix duck necks New Orleans thanks for watching the queue [Music]

(soft techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas It's The Cube covering Service Now, Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by Service Now. (soft techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's live coverage of Service Now, Knowledge '18. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We are The Cube, we are the leader in live tech coverage. We are joined now by Alan Marks, he is the Chief Communications Cfficer of Service Now. So thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So the new brand identity of Service Now is we make the world of work, work better for people. >> That's right >> That's your baby, you came up with it so tell us a little bit about your creative process and coming up with that idea and why it works for Service Now. >> Well, it's been a team effort and we think of that identity as our purpose as a company. And as John talked about in his keynote today, purpose is really the center of who you are as a company and what you believe in and what you aspire to do, and I think it's so important in your own life to have a sense of purpose and meaning and I think that's true for companies as well, companies are just collections of people, right? And so as we thought about the next phase of growth for Service Now and how do we build the company awareness and build the brand, we started with, who are we, and why do we exist? And so we did a process where we met with a leadership team we did employee focus groups around the world we met with about a dozen customers to just talk about how do you think about Service Now, what does Service Now mean to you, and that's what lead to our purpose statement of "we make the world of work, work better for people" and really emphasizing people, cause that's something we believe deeply in, that technology should enable people. And what we do is really trying to help people have more meaningful work. Take some of the routine task out of your job so you can focus on things that matter more to you and create more meaningful work for you and create more productivity for your company and your enterprise. >> Dave: I'm always, oh go ahead please. >> Well so, we started with our purpose and then that lead to the brand identity we have a new tagline; Works For You. So, Service Now Works For You, is kind of our version of a Just Do It kind of tagline. >> Dave: (laughs) >> And so we've got our purpose statement we've got a new brand identity, what you see here at Knowledge and we've got a new tagline called, Works For You and you'll see us rolling that out now more. This was the launch of it. We spent the first quarter rolling it out to our employees we did a global tour in eight locations around the world rolling out our purpose to our employees and now this is the first public launch of the new brand. >> I was fascinated by that process. I love that you guys start with wide, big fan of Simon Sinek Google him if you don't know him, his Ted Talk is fantastic and we heard John Donahoe this morning talking about he started with why, so okay, so you do all this research but somehow you have to put that into a creative package the idea of putting the person in the center of the logo and whether it's color scheme or, you know little snippets. How do you come up with that, is that just in your DNA is that really by committee, I mean how does that all work? >> Well we put together a creative team, this is the fun part once you've landed the purpose, this is take out the crayons and let's start decorating something, right? And so when we landed our purpose, and we said well if we're really focused on technology enabling people the former logo of the company was the power button so that was more purely about technology and so we started playing, we had a creative team we put together, we had our in-house creative team we also were using some outside creative support and we started playing with well, how can you change the power button to more reflect people and that's what morphed into the logo today of really using the yellow in the word Now to symbolize people, to symbolize the "you" in "Works For You" instead of the power button as a symbol for the company. >> So you, the last Knowledge, Knowledge '17 you had just started. >> Just started, first week. >> First week on the job, trial by fire here. So tell us a little bit about your first year, reflect on some of the things that might have surprised you during the year, some of your challenges, what would you say? >> Oh it's been wonderful. I say to Pat Waters our Chief Human Resources Officer, every new employee should start the week of Knowledge. It was just such a wonderful way to start, I literally did sign the papers and got on a plane and came to Knowledge '17. And so, to come into the company being able to experience this, and meet our customers and really understand the culture of the company was an extraordinary way to get grounded in the company and understand the, you know, Service Now has just a deep commitment to customers, and listening to our customers, and then responding to their needs. So, given the brand work I've done over the past year that I couldn't think of a better way to start. And then after Knowledge '17, a week or two after that I went down to San Diego and spent an afternoon with Fred Luddy, our founder. And I just said "Fred, tell me your story.", and two hours later Fred was still talking, such a wonderful person, and what struck me in that conversation with Fred is we were spending, really two hours talking about the history of the company and why he founded it, and I realized he was talking mostly about people he wasn't talking about technology and Fred's a product guy. And so it just started to hit me from day one just how focused we are on helping people and helping companies succeed and our customers succeed and that's really what lead to where we are today, and the branding, and so it's an amazing company, amazing culture, and what we're trying to do with this brand the product is well known, we've got deep customer loyalty but the company is not that well known and so as we think about growing the company and reaching other state coders, as we think about expanding our business with existing customers and engaging new customers at the C-suite level, we felt we needed to really elevate the company and that's what this is about. How do we continue to have a strong product brand but elevate the company brand both to drive greater awareness of the company but then also the talent brand piece is important as well and how do we use our brand identity and our purpose to engage the right talent worldwide as we continue to grow and recruit from around the world. >> And that's a big part of why John Donahoe was brought in. I remember I was talking to Frank Slootman, I'm like Frank is so young, he goes look, we found the right guy to take this to the new level. He's been kind of working at it for a while so the timing was perfect. As you do all this research as you talk to customers about their future of work. I mean they're telling you what they need maybe what some of their challenges are, but you guys still have to figure out how to get there. It's almost like Steve Jobs inventing this smart phone, nobody told him no customer told him, this is what we need. >> Alan: Right. >> So you're minds have to put that together, I know it's only a year in, but what are you seeing in terms of your ability to shape the future of work? >> Well I think it starts with the Service Now platform and to me that's the secret sauce. A lot of people have focus, cause people know the ITSM product suite and how the company, the flagship product of the company and a lot of people think of the company in that way but its really the platform itself that can cut across the enterprise and connect different work flows and different work streams particularly work streams are cross-functional areas and the ability to understand that and leverage that with our product suite that really is unlocking the potential of how we can partner with a customer and really drive transformation in the way enterprises operate and drive transformation in how work gets done in a company. >> So with your consumer background, did you like, when you first heard about Service Now say, "really, IT service management?", or did you say "hey, why should the consumer guys have all the fun I want to bring this to the enterprise". >> Exactly, well part of it, this is my first job in the B2B world my background is in consumer, but as John has talked about we really do see the things that we've enjoyed as consumers coming into the workplace. So I really do see a lot of B2C type creative thinking and ideas coming into the workplace to drive this transformation and that's so exciting to take the best of traditional B2B marketing and branding and bring in B2C to help reflect this new wave of technology and how it's changing the way we work and the way we think about work. >> As you're now embarking on this strategy to get Service Now to have wider recognition in the market and you're background in consumer, particularly at Nike, what do you think makes a great brand and what really makes it sort of take hold of customer's imagination. >> That's a great question and I would go back to purpose. I can't say enough about purpose, a company that is clear about who it is and why it exists and what it aspires to achieve in the world, and the impact it aspires to achieve in the world, that's what connects people emotionally, right? You can connect people intellectually but really connect heart and mind, that's the secret sauce. And you said consumer brands, obviously that's what they do right, that's what you have to do. In the B2B world, you see a broader spectrum but that ability to say, how do we take this technology and the more intellectual aspects of our business and really connect it to how you help people and how you enable people and connect it more emotionally. I think that's the (inaudible) NOC, and today, you look at millennial employees today they really do care about what is the purpose, what's the higher value of working for this company vs. that company, and what kind of impact are we going to try to have in the world, and it really does matter. I see it today where you're talking to potential employees and they're asking that question. About if I'm going to join this company, what are the values tell me about the culture of the company. And I think at the end of the day, culture and talent really is what differentiates a company. And strategy is obviously important, but companies that have strong purpose, strong brand, strong identity and that get expressed through strong culture that gets expressed through the kind of people they attract to the company, the kind of talent they have in the company. I think that's what creates great, enduring companies over time. >> So thinking about transparency, I go back to Fred. The self deprecating humor, always, if there's a wart in the software, he talks about it, he's not shy about that. Frank continued that tradition certainly with Wall Street and I'm sure employees, and Mike Scarpelli, very much transparent, John is continuing that tradition. It's obviously worked for Wall Street, you've built trust with investors. How do you take that brand and build trust beyond the investor community, it's a challenge. What are you trying to accomplish there? >> You'll see us marketing more and that's part of what you see here, expressing the brand in a bigger way, you'll start to see us do more marketing at the company level in addition to what we already do at the product level. You'll see us do more marketing directed to talent and being a great place to work. You'll see us expressing this in a variety of ways the kind of culture we create, what we do in the community, the broader impact we have in the world and so I think it's all of those things together and communicating but ultimately you've got to walk the talk, right, it's not just the marketing, you've got to be authentic in what you're doing and have people experience you in an authentic way to really create that sense of trust and engagement over time. And you see we've got that today in our customers. The loyalty we have with our customers the renewal rate the company has with our customers and now we're just trying to continue to build on that and engage other stakeholders as we grow as a company. >> So making work better, okay that's good. The new sort of focus, expanded focus, but what do you want people to say about you, how do you want them to describe you, what are the adjectives you'd like them to use? >> Human, we're "work for people" right, "make work better for people". I think we're a human company, we're an authentic company we're a company that cares, we're a company that really understands technology should help you, it shouldn't be technology for technology's sake, that the end result should be making your life better and we're trying to do that in a work context and I hope that people look at our brand and our identity and how we show up in the world and think that's a copmany I want to be associated with as an employee, as a customer, as an investor, as a partner, as a stakeholder because that's a company that really cares about people and really understand how to apply technology and innovative technology to help people have better lives and in this context, have a better life at work. >> We've been talking a little bit about how you're company is working to attract the best talent, and it's really at a time when the skill sets are changing and we were talking about Fred not being an IT guy, he's a product guy, but you really need the sort of confluence of the two together, you need people who are thinking about the technology but also about the human idea. How hard is it to find the right people or do you just say "we can train them", what's your approach? >> It's always hard to find great talent all over the world it's very competitive, and particularly in technology but I think it gets back again to purpose and culture really being clear about who you are so a potential employee can say "is that a place that I want to work at, when I see the purpose of Service Now, does the resonate for me?". If I'm an engineer, do I want to create product that really is focused on helping people have better work lives and again it really, purpose is the essence of it and I think that really is the center of everything and if you can connect people with your purpose then you will attract the right talent and it'll build on itself through word of mouth and reputation that that's company that I feel attached to and that I want to a part of, and I want to work at.

okay we're back this is Dave Volante with Jeff Kelly we're with Ricky bond on organ this is the cubes silicon angles flagship product we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we bring you the tech athletes who are really changing the industry and we have one here today christiane sabo is the CEO the leader the spiritual leader of of this conference and of Tablo Kristin welcome to the cube thanks for having me yeah it's our pleasure great keynote the other day I just got back from Italy so I'm full of superlatives right it really was magnificent I was inspired I think the whole audience was inspired by your enthusiasm and what struck me is I'm a big fan of simon Sinek who says that people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it and your whole speech was about why you're here everybody can talk about their you know differentiators they can talk about what they sell you talked about why you're here was awesome so congratulations I appreciate that yeah so um so why did you start then you and your colleagues tableau well it's how below really started with a series of breakthrough research innovations that was this seed there are three co-founders of tableau myself dr. crystal T and professor Pat Hanrahan and those two are brilliant inventors and designers and researchers and the real hero of the tableau story and the company formed when they met on entrepreneur and a customer I had spent several years as a data analyst when I first came out of college and I understood the problems making sense of data and so when I encountered the research advancements they had made I saw a vision of the future a much better world that could bring the power of data to a vastly larger number of people yeah and it's really that simple isn't it and and so you gave some fantastic examples them in the way in which penicillin you know was discovered you know happenstance and many many others so those things inspire you to to create this innovation or was it the other way around you've created this innovation and said let's look around and see what others have done well I think the thing that we're really excited about is simply put as making databases and spreadsheets easy for people to use I can talk to someone who knows nothing about business intelligence technology or databases or anything but if I say hey do you have any spreadsheets or data files or databases you you just feel like it could it could get in there and answer some questions and put it all together and see the big picture and maybe find a thing or two everyone not everyone has been in that situation if nothing else with the spreadsheet full of stuff like your readership or the linkage the look the the traffic flow on on the cube website everyone can relate to that idea of geez why can't I just have a google for databases and that's what tableau is doing right right so you've kind of got this it's really not a war it's just two front two vectors you know sometimes I did I did tweet out they have a two-front war yeah what'd you call it the traditional BI business I love how you slow down your kids and you do that and then Excel but the point I made on Twitter in 140 characters was you it will be longer here I'm a little long-winded sometimes on the cube but you've got really entrenched you know bi usage and you've got Excel which is ubiquitous so it sounds easy to compete with those it's not it's really not you have to have a 10x plus value problem solutely talked about that a little bit well I think the most important thing we're doing is we're bringing the power of data and analytics to a much broader population of people so the reason the answer that way is that if you look at these traditional solutions that you described they have names like and these are the product brand names forget who owns them but the product brand names people are used to hearing when it comes to enterprise bi technology our names like Business Objects and Cognos and MicroStrategy and Oracle Oh bi and big heavy complicated develop intensive platforms and surprise surprise they're not in the hands of very many people they're just too complicated and development heavy to use so when we go into the worlds even the world's biggest companies this was a shocker for us even when we go into the world's most sophisticated fortune 500 companies and the most cutting-edge industries with the top-notch people most of the people in their organization aren't using those platforms because of theirs their complication and expense and development pull and so usually what we end up doing is just bringing the power of easy analytics and dashboards and visualization and easy QA with data to people who have nothing other than maybe a spreadsheet on their desk so in that sense it's actually a little easier than it sounds well you know I have to tell you I just have a cio consultancy and back in the day and we used to go in and do application portfolio analysis and we would look at the applications and we always advise the CIOs that the value of an application is a function of its use how much is being adopted and the impact of that use you know productivity of the users right and you'd always find that this is the dss system the decision support system like you said there were maybe 3 to 15 users yeah and an organization of tens of thousands of people yeah if they were very productive so imagine if you can you can permeate the other you know hundreds of thousands of users that are out there do you see that kind of impact that productivity impact as the potential for your marketplace absolutely I you know the person who I think said it best was the CEO of Cisco John Chambers and I'll paraphrase him here but he has this great thing he said which is he said you know if I can get each of the people on my team consulting data say oh I don't know twice per day before making a decision and they do the same thing with their people and their people and so you know that's a million decisions a month you did the math better made than my competition I don't want people waiting around for top top management to consult some data before making a decision I want all of our people all the time Consulting data before making a decision and that's the real the real spirit of this new age of BI for too long it's been in the hands of a high priesthood of people who know how to operate these complicated convoluted enterprise bi systems and the revolution is here people are fed up with it they're taking power into their hands and they're driving their organizations forward with the power of data thanks to the magic of an easy-to-use suite like tableau well it's a perfect storm right because everybody wants to be a data-driven organization absolutely data-driven if you don't have the tools to be able to visualize the data absolutely so Jeff if you want to jump in well Christian so in your keynote you talked for the majority of the keynote about human intuition and the human element talk a little bit about that because when we hear about in the press these days about big data it's oh well the the volume of data will tell you what the answer is you don't need much of the human element talk about why you think the human element is so important to data-driven decision-making and how you incorporate that into your design philosophy when you're building the product and you're you know adding new features how does the human element play in that scenario yeah I mean it's funny dated the data driven moniker is coming these days and we're tableaus a big big believer in the power of data we use our tools internally but of course no one really wants to be data driven if you drive your company completely based on data say hello to the cliff wall you will drive it off a cliff you really want people intelligent domain experts using a combination of act and intuition and instinct to make data informed decisions to make great decisions along the way so although pure mining has some role in the scheme of analytics frankly it's a minor role what we really need to do is make analytic software that as I said yesterday is like a bicycle for our minds this was the great Steve Jobs quote about computers that their best are like bicycles for our mind effortless machines that just make us go so much faster than any other species with no more effort expended right that's the spirit of computers when they're at our best Google Google is effortless to use and makes my brain a thousand times smarter than it is right unfortunately over an analytic software we've never seen software that does tap in business intelligence software there's so much development weight and complexity and expense and slow rollout schedules that were never able to get that augmentation of the brain that can help lead to better decisions so at tableau in terms of design we value our product requirements documents say things like intuition and feel and design and instinct and user experience they're focused on the journey of working with data not just some magic algorithm that's gonna spit out some answer that tells you what to do yeah I mean I've often wondered where that bi business would be that traditional decision support business if it weren't for sarbanes-oxley I mean it gave it a new life right because you had to have a single version of the truth that was mandated by by the government here we had Bruce Boston on yesterday who works over eight for a company that shall not be named but anyway he was talking about okay Bruce in case you're watching we're sticking to our promise but he was talking about intent desire and satisfaction things those are three things intent desire and satisfaction that machines can't do like the point being you just you know it was the old bromide you can't take the humans in the last mile yeah I guess yeah do you see that ever changing no I mean I think you know I I went to a friend a friend of mine I just haven't seen in a while a friend of mine once said he was an he was an artificial intelligence expert had Emilie's PhD in a professorship in AI and once I naively asked him I said so do we have artificial intelligence do we have it or not and we've been talking about for decades like is it here and he said you're asking the wrong question the question is how smart our computers right so I just think we're analytics is going is we want to make our computers smarter and smarter and smarter there'll be no one day we're sudden when we flip a switch over and the computer now makes the decision so in that sense the answer to your question is I keep I see things going is there is it going now but underneath the covers of human human based decision making it are going to be fantastic advancements and the technology to support good decision making to help people do things like feel and and and chase findings and shift perspectives on a problem and actually be creative using data I think there's I think it's gonna be a great decade ahead ahead of us so I think part of the challenge Christian in doing that and making that that that evolution is we've you know in the way I come the economy and and a lot of jobs work over the last century is you know you're you're a cog in a wheel your this is how you do your job you go you do it the same way every day and it's more of that kind of almost assembly line type of thinking and now we're you know we're shifting now we're really the to get ahead in your career you've got to be as good but at an artist you've got to create B you've got to make a difference is the challenge do you see a challenge there in terms of getting people to embrace this new kind of creativity and again how do you as a company and as a you know provider of data visualization technology help change some of those attitudes and make people kind of help people make that shift to more of less of a you know a cog in a larger organization to a creative force inside that organ well mostly I feel like we support what people natively want to do so there are there are some challenges but I mostly see opportunity there in category after category of human activity we're seeing people go from consumers to makers look at publishing from 20 years ago to now self-publishing come a few blogs and Twitter's Network exactly I mean we've gone from consumers to makers everyone's now a maker and we have an ecosystem of ideas that's so positive people naturally want to go that way I mean people's best days on the job are when they feel they're creating something and have that sense of achievement of having had an idea and seeing some progress their hands made on that idea so in a sense we're just fueling the natural human desire to have more participation with data to id8 with data to be more involved with data then they've been able to in the past and again like other industries what we're seeing in this category of technology which is the one I know we're going from this very waterfall cog in a wheel type process is something that's much more agile and collaborative and real-time and so it's hard to be creative and inspired when you're just a cog stuck in a long waterfall development process so it's mostly just opportunity and really we're just fueling the fire that I think is already there yeah you talked about that yesterday in your talk you gave a great FAA example the Mayan writing system example was fantastic so I just really loved that story you in your talk yesterday basically told the audience first of all you have very you know you have clarity of vision you seem to have certainty in your vision of passion for your vision but the same time you said you know sometimes data can be confusing and you're not really certain where it's going don't worry about that it's no it's okay you know I was like all will be answered eventually what but what about uncertainty you know in your minds as the you know chief executive of this organization as a leader in a new industry what things are uncertain to you what are the what are the potential blind spots for you that you worry about do you mean for tableau as a company for people working with data general resource for tableau as a company oh I see well I think there's always you know I got a trip through the spirit of the question but we're growing a company we're going a disruptive technology company and we want to embrace all the tall the technologies that exist around us right we want to help to foster day to day data-driven decision-making in all of its places in forms and it seems to me that virtually every breakthrough technology company has gone through one or two major Journal technology transformations or technology shocks to the industry that they never anticipated when they founded the company okay probably the most recent example is Facebook and mobile I mean even though even though mobile the mobile revolution was well in play when when Facebook was founded it really hadn't taken off and that was a blind Facebook was found in oh seven right and look what happened to them right after and here's that here's new was the company you can get it was founded in oh seven yeah right so most companies I mean look how many companies were sort of shocked by the internet or shocked by the iPod or shocked by the emergence of a tablet right or shocked by the social graph you know I think for us in tableaus journey if this was the spirit of the thought of the question we will have our own shocks happen the first was the tablet I mean when we founded tableau like the rest of the world we never would have anticipated that that a brilliant company would finally come along and crack the tablet opportunity wide open and before in a blink of an eye hundreds of millions of people are walking around with powerful multi-touch graphic devices in their I mean who would have guessed people wouldn't have guessed it no six let alone oh three know what and so luckily that's what that's I mean so this is the good kind of uncertainty we've been able to really rally around that there are our developers love to work on this area and today we have probably the most innovative mobile analytics offering on the market but it's one we never could have anticipated so I think the biggest things in terms of big categories of uncertainty that we'll see going forward are similar shocks like that and our success will be determined by how well we're able to adapt to those so why is it and how is it that you're able to respond so quickly as an organization to some of those tectonic shifts well I think the most important thing is having a really fleet-footed R&D team we have just an exceptional group of developers who we have largely not hired from business technology companies we have something very distributed going a tableau yeah one of the amazing things about R&D key our R&D team is when we decided to build just this amazing high-wattage cutting-edge R&D team and focus them on analytics and data we decided not to hire from other business intelligence companies because we didn't think those companies made great products so we've actually been hiring from places like Google and Facebook and Stanford and MIT and computer gaming companies if you look at the R&D engineers who work on gaming companies in terms of the graphic displays and the response times and the high dimensional data there are actually hundreds of times more sophisticated in their thinking and their engineering then some engineer who was working for an enterprise bi reporting company so this incredible horsepower this unique team of inspired zealots and high wattage engineers we have in our R&D team like Apple that's the key to being able to respond to these disruptive shocks every once in a while and rule and really sees them as an opportunity well they're fun to I mean think of something on the stage yesterday and yeah we're in fucky hats and very comfortable there's never been an R&D team like ours assembled in analytics it's been done in other industries right Google and Facebook famously but in analytics there's never been such an amazing team of engineers and Christian what struck me one of the things that struck me yesterday during your keynote or the second half of the keynote was bringing up the developers and talking about the specific features and functions you're gonna add to the product and hearing the crowd kind of erupt at different different announcements different features that you're adding and it's clear that you're very customer focused at this at tableau of you I mean you're responding to the the needs and the requests of your customers and I that's clearly evident again in the in the passion that these customers have for your for your product for your company how do you know first I'm happy how do you maintain that or how do you get get to that point in the first place where you're so customer focused and as you go forward being a public company now you're gonna get pressure from Wall Street and quarter results and all that that you know that comes with that kind of comes with the territory how do you remain that focused on the customer kind of as your you know you're going to be under a lot of pressure to grow and and you know drive revenue yeah I keep that focus well there's two things we do it's a it's always a challenge to stay really connected to your customers as you get big but it's what we pride ourselves on doing and there's two specific things we do to foster it the first is that we really try to focus the company and we try to make a positive aspect of the culture the idea of impact what is the impact of the work we're having and in fact a great example of how we foster that is we bring our entire support and R&D team to this conference no matter where it is we take we fly I mean in this case we literally flew the entire R&D team and product management team and whatnot across country and the time they get here face to face face to face with customers and hearing the customer stories and the victories and actually seeing the feedback you just described really inspires them it gives them specific ideas literally to go back and start working on but it also just gives them a sense of who comes first in a way that if you don't leave the office and you don't focus on that really doesn't materialize and the way you want it the second thing we do is we are we are big followers of I guess what's called the dog food philosophy of eat your own dog so drink your own champagne and so one of our core company values that tableau is we use our products facility a stated value of the company we use our products and into an every group at tableau in tests in bug regressions in development in sales and marketing and planning and finance and HR every sip marketing marketing is so much data these these every group uses tableau to run our own business and make decisions and what happens Matt what's really nice about a company because you know we're getting close to a thousand people now and so it's keeping the spirit you just described alive is really important it becomes quite challenging vectors leagues for it because when that's one of your values and that's the way the culture has been built every single person in the company is a customer everyone understands the customer's situation and the frustrations and the feature requests and knows how to support them when they meet them and can empathize with them when they're on the phone and is a tester automatically by virtue of using the product so we just try to focus on a few very authentic things to keep our connection with the customer as close as possible I'll say christen your company is a rising star we've been talking all this week of the similarities that we were talking off about the similarities with with ServiceNow just in terms of the passion within the customer base we're tracking companies like workday you know great companies that are that are that are being built new emerging disruptive companies we put you in that in that category and we're very excited for different reasons you know different different business altogether but but there are some similar dynamics that we're watching so as observers it's independent observers what kinds of things do you want us to be focused on watching you over the next 12 18 24 months what should we be paying attention to well I think the most important thing is tableau ultimately is a product company and we view ourselves very early in our product development lifecycle I think people who don't really understand tableau think it's a visualization company or a visualization tool I don't I don't really understand that when you talk about the vision a lot but okay sure we can visualization but there's just something much bigger I mean you asked about people watching the company I think what's important to watch is that as I spoke about makino yesterday tableau believes what is called the business intelligence industry what's called the business analytics technology stack needs to be completely rewritten from scratch that's what we believe to do over it's a do-over it's based on technology from a prior hair prior era of computing there's been very little innovation the R&D investment ratios which you can look up online of the companies in this space are pathetically low and have been for decades and this industry needs a Google it needs an apple it's a Facebook an RD machine that is passionate and driven and is leveraging the most recent advances in computing to deliver products that people actually love using so that people start to enjoy doing analytics and have fun with it and make data-driven driven decision in a very in a very in a way that's just woven into their into their into their enjoyment and work style every every single day so the big series of product releases you're going to see from us over the next five years that's the thing to watch and we unveiled a few of them yesterday but trust me there's a lot more that's you a lot of applause christina is awesome you can see you know the passion that you're putting forth your great vision so congratulations in the progress you've made I know I know you're not done we'll be watching it thanks very much for coming to me I'm really a pleasure thank you all right keep right there everybody we're going wall to wall we got a break coming up next and then we'll be back this afternoon and this is Dave Volante with Jeff Kelly this is the cube we'll be right back