>> Narrator: From Nice, France, it's theCUBE covering .NEXT Conference 2017 Europe, brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is SiliconANGLE Media's Production of theCUBE live broadcast from Nutanix .NEXT in Nice, France. To help me wrap up for today's coverage, I'm happy to have Jens Soldner, who is a consultant, does media, writes for some organizations, someone I've gotten to know at some industry events over the last couple of years. So Jens, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks to you. Thanks for inviting me, and happy to be here at Nutanix .NEXT Conference. Awesome event and I think the vendor has a bright future in front of him. >> You know, we're a year after Nutanix IPOed. The attendance at this show doubled absolutely. You know, every Nutanix show, and I've been at all five of them, you know, customers are usually, they're enthusiastic. It's self-selecting, right? You go to a VMworld, you come to a Nutanix show, Veritas, some of these, there's VEEMs show, usually the customers, it's a good measure of how the company's doing and barometer is customers are happy, they like what they're doing. One thing I like about Nutanix customers is they aren't just oh, we love everything and we believe everything that Nutanix says. It was like hey, calm, I talked to a couple customers that use it and they're like it's great. But everybody else is like yeah, I'm waiting to get my hands on it and really beat it up and we'll see if it does what it is because Nutanix has proven themselves and needs to continually prove themselves time and again. Really I think something that reminds me of the Cloud Era because if I'm buying from public cloud and I'm buying from a consumption basis, if I don't like something, I'll move, I'll stop paying. What's been catching your ear and eye at the show so far, what have you liked, what are you still questioning and want to learn more about? >> I think there's a lot of good things coming actually, like the new version 5.5 which will be out end of this year also we hear, so that's like brings some good incremental innovation, nothing overly massive, but some good stuff in there. But I of course like the future looking stuff, calm, sigh and so on and so that looks pretty promising, but as you said it's not available right now and we want to get my hands dirty, that's the thing. >> What you like is if you talk to the customers that are deeply involved, they've probably been beta testing a lot of the stuff in 5.5, some of the features get out in the community edition. In the keynote, they talked about MVME was one that had been tested, anything in particular that you've been hearing, customers that chomping at the bit, interested, 5.5 oh great, finally we have that? >> I think the generic compute platform is a good thing so in order to enable new use cases like SAP stuff, HANA, maybe you need for Oracle licensing, this kind of stuff for anything. >> Are you talking about I think they call it AC2? >> Yeah. >> Which that's not in 5.5 I don't believe, no? I think that's a future one. >> Oh then I got the wrong impression, okay. >> To be honest, that's one of the critiques sometimes, if you go look at this and you get the keynote and it's a deluge of so much stuff, you need the cheat sheet so I look through, Nutanix, they did a press release, there's like four blog posts, it takes a little while for those of us that look at this to sort through and be like oh wait, which of this, as you said, 5.5 oh, does that mean I can do it today well it's coming real soon and if you're a beta person, you can do it, as opposed to the object storage and AC2 type pieces, if I remember right and I'm sure Nutanix will watch and tell us if we got it wrong though, was a coming future, we'll let you know when we have a date. Little bit different now as a public company too, a lot of these, they don't pin down on certain quarters or dates because then that impacts financial reporting. Talk to us about you were obviously at the keynote, what else have you been doing, what sessions have you been going to or what's been happening? >> We had a lot of background talks with the Nutanix executive leadership like Sumir Pati, right before our talk here and we talked actually in depth about questions that other journalists and I had about calm, when it will be available, how it will be priced, what can you do, can you move apps from one cloud to the other, not in the near future, maybe in the more distant future. It looks pretty promising and for a cloud management person that is one of my main jobs out there in the normal life, then it looks pretty good actually, but as you said, getting the hands dirty is an essential part and maybe that's coming a little bit too short here to really see what's happening and not just announcements and announcements. >> Absolutely and if you were to place bets on what are the important pieces in the future, calm and Zi, absolutely something Nutanix have been talking a lot, super important that they get it right. You've been tracking calm since the acquisition, any nuances, what do they need to do, what's going to be ready, what do they need to have in the future to really make that work? >> I think actually going to get it right. I think in the grand scheme of things, like delivering it two weeks early or later in five years race with the competition is not making such a huge difference, so rather than delivering a immature and unready product, how do you say, like filing the edges off and making it smooth should take some time, however me as a technical person, I like to get my hands on the stuff and really see it, so that's the downside. >> Getting your hands dirty is something that a lot of customers here like to do, do you get to play with the community edition and the like? >> Not yet, but I have a Nutanix folder trust waiting in our data center, ready for installation and we want to compare it like how it runs with Vsphere and how it runs with AHV so that AHV I think is unlikely work load actually. >> We've been hearing the last couple of shows, AHV has really been front and center, it's an interesting mix for them to balance because even if about a third of customers of Nutanix are running AHV, that means two thirds of customers still are running one of the other hyper visors out there. I put the question to Nutanix and I said, what is victory, what is the ultimate goal and it's not 100% AHV, they're not looking to become a hyper visor company, they want to be a platform, work in the multicloud world, so when you talk to companies, how does that discussion go? Is AHV a central discussion point or is it some of the features that come along with it that help? >> I would say it's rather on the sidelines, I think it makes sense from an economic point of view, not having to pay additional licenses obviously and getting the impression, getting the right kind of experience with the product and even Nutanix, I think they say if the customer wants this and this and this extra, go get Vsphere. We are offering you a standard path, like with 80% of the features that you really really need and those 20 super esoteric stuff, like fault tolerance that nobody is really using, Vsphere they're not bringing it to AHV, they're keeping their product clean, simple, easy. >> You said cloud management, kind of a main focus area of you, what does Nutanix have to do to be a strong player in that market over the next two years? >> I think they are actually on a good vein already with the calm stuff, the thing is we need to see it, if it can compete with the other players out there, Vmware and Red Hat and you name it basically. Then to see if it gets accepted in the market, how the marketplace, the calm marketplace takes off and so on, I think the adoption, if it gains significant adoption, if there is traction in the market, in the blogosphere and so on, I think that's crucial. >> You mentioned Vmware and Red Hat, big companies, gigantic ecosystems. We all know the Vmware ecosystem and Red Hat open source, everybody's there, been at Red Hat summit for many years now. Any others that you'd say who they should be matching up as customers will be? >> I think computer associates has a good valid offering, but we personally see in the German market, most of the time, we realize automation, we've written three books on it, my brothers and I so that's maybe we are opinionated and biased here. In this case, but VMware's doing a good job in this cloud management space and of course they have a tight integration with the other products, like L6 that they have and I think Nutanix is very eager to catch up in these areas where they have gaps. >> One of the underlying, simmering conversations at a Nutanix event is that kind of Vmware, Nutanix relationship and we talked about still, lots of Nutanix deployments are using Vmware, didn't feel that they were bashing Vmware at this event, but what are you seeing when you talk to customers and you use a lot of Vmware, how's that relationship? Are there any challenges there or things that are concerning? >> At the end of the day, it's the customer's decision what they are going for, I think most of the customers might not go all in Nutanix, but only place it in certain use cases and so on. Of course Vmware is not happy, why should they be and they are positioning their VSAM product which is running quite well pretty aggressively but Nutanix has a different storyline, I think it's not only about the IOPS and it's about the simplicity of the whole thing and offering the customer a real, simple path to manage it in a cloud enabled fashion and that's where they're really doing a good job. However, Vmware, they can cover everything and they can figure so many little things and that makes the whole thing huge and complicated and of course you can, any use case can somehow be tailored to but also if you have a vendor who has a real good storyline of simplicity like Nutanix, they have a good chance here. >> Yeah, there was a lot of discussion, it was interesting, we were talking to Nutanix, they were talking about they want to get one click, it's about simplicity, then there's all of this learning from what other customers have done, I've got artificial intelligence starting to help in there. How do you see that trend going as to how, if I'm an administrator, is it reducing the number of clicks or am I going to be able to let go of the reins some and allow some other tooling and knowledge bases really drive some of that decision making? >> I think it's pretty helpful to have these expert knowledge bases built in, there's also a startup that does a similar thing in the Vmware space, Runecast, great guys and so on, so that's good but it's also challenging I would say for partners that they really need to see that with Nutanix of course we are going to sell as a partner, you are going to sell less wrecking and stacking of servers, you as a partner, you really need to refocus, learn the orchestration, learn the automation, get into container stuff in order to offer to your customers a valuable offering, a value proposition. Everybody needs to learn and I think Nutanix makes your life easier in these mundane, day to day activities, so that's I would say a good benefit of getting such an environment. >> Again, we're about at the halfway mark of the event, any other key takeaways, customer conversations that you'd want to share? >> I talked to a couple of partners, friends of mine from the Vmware instructor community and they say we are going all in Nutanix, so that was pretty impressive here and it's also what I heard not only from those who are actually doing it but of course from the Nutanix management, easy to understand why they say this, so I think there is a huge traction, some partners seem to have got the message and seem to say yeah, we are going all in. That was one of the things and of course I'll go a little bit more technical tomorrow so today was really packed with the official schedule, tomorrow is a little bit more free, so I'll have a couple more conversations with actual customers from a large Swiss bank, where we'll be doing the Vmware's implementation soon but they are also into Nutanix, so they are both a Vmware and a Nutanix partner so we'll meet up later on and yeah, that's pretty much the schedule. >> All right I never do this, but you got any questions for me for the wrap? >> What I would like to know is what's your take on the microsegmentation part of Nutanix, can it compete with the other offerings and I have not really looked at it so far. It looked pretty impressive to me in the keynote. >> Look, I'll say two pieces, one is, it's one of the top items that I've heard from users that they are super excited about. There was a bank I just interviewed earlier today, I think financial services and service providers were really excited for the microsegmentation. That being said, I've also talked to a bunch of the partner community and of course it's the typical, well how much is Nutanix doing versus what the department, oh we've had this and ours is much more future rich and the like, so it's good to see Nutanix moving down this line, they need to balance how much they'll do versus what some of their partners that are especially deeper in the networking space can do there. It's definitely one that you talk to customers that are getting into it, digging into it, but yeah it's a good one and definitely when you talk about those features coming out, one that customers have been asking for a bit. Like Vmware has done in the past, there's probably a lot of customers that what's built in is going to be good enough but then if I really need the Cadillac of it, I might need to pull in some best of breed partner to be able to compete it, so cool. >> That could also happen this year for us, if you look at the partner ecosystem, it's also pretty impressive and most of their named guys are here. >> All right well Jens Soldner, a pleasure catching up with you, thanks for helping us here on the Cube. We're wrapping up day one of two days of live coverage on the Cube. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching the Cube. (dramatic music) (acoustic music)